I've also noticed that there seems to have been something of a reversal of the white flight which hit the city so hard in earlier decades. When I was a teenager, because of my involvement in the punk scene I had friends from all over the metropolitan area but I could count on one hand the number of them that had actually grown up in the city. Even when we got to be in our late teens and 20s and moved out of our family homes, we usually rented in places like College Park, Silver Spring or Arlington rather than DC itself. Nowadays everyone's living in Adams Morgan or Mount Pleasant or Shaw (the last of these being a part of town you'd only drive through if necessary, and always with the doors locked and windows up, when I was growing up). And I'm told that most of Capitol Hill is OK now too - that certainly wasn't always the case.
It really is a much nicer city than it used to be.
OTOH, N.Va. is turning into a redneck hole ...
On 8/12/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> DC is a _lot_ more cosmopolitan today than when I grew
> up in the area (N.Va.) thirty years ago; N.Va. was
> still pretty rural and DC was culturally provincial.
> It's still provincial in the way that any important
> self-absorbed town is, New York is about the most
> provincial place I know that way, but these days DC is
> loaded with top flight restaurants of all
> nationalities, lots of good music of all kinds, even
> pretty decent theater, movies that are not all
> blockbuster multiplexes (though some of the better art
> houses have shut down), better bookstores than
> anything south of 85th St. in NY. It lacks a top
> flight opera or many really good musical theater
> venues, but the NSO is really pretty good now and both
> the Official Stage, e.g., the JFK Center, Shady Grove,
> Wolftrap, and the experimental off-B-wayish theater is
> quite good.
>
> Now there are real problems: most of DC outside
> Northwest is a high-crime slum, and my anecdotal
> experience is that crime is a far greater danger to DC
> residents even in NW neighborhoods than to people in
> corresponding areas in NYC, Chicago, or LA; the DC
> schools are a catastrophe, as bad as the Chicago
> Public Schools, if possible; traffic is frightful --
> the Metro's pretty good for an American Metro, though
> -- and you don't want to think about the Beltway; the
> VA burbs are frightful desolate sprawl whether they
> are rich or poor and most of the collar counties in MD
> are not much better, College Park excepted.
>
> But yeah, setting aside all the jokes, DC is getting
> pretty cosmopolitan. It's not efficient, but is NY
> efficient? Chicago? LA? Boston And it has a lot more
> charm than it used to, in some areas, quite a lot.
> Even an urban snob wouldn't mind it. I could see going
> back, something I never thought I'd say. Not to
> Virginia, though. I'm not planning on moving anywhere,
> but in the short list of places that I could see
> myself in theory, DC today is, to my surprise, on the
> list.