Casual
BOTTUM, J.
Casual URBAN LIVING His Honor Anthony Williams Mayor Washington, D.C. Dear Mr. Mayor, Please understand that I have always loved city life. I grew up in a city—well, back in South Dakota in...
...Then the little trucks come to haul it away...
...First we tried the Georgetown neighborhood...
...Most of the rest of the time, nothing happens...
...I won't tell you what happened with the natural-gas line the bulldozer gashed open...
...The chemical lawns and the gas barbecues...
...Please, Mr...
...And then we tried Mt...
...I think I thought it would make me feel young again to live near campus...
...I grew up in a city—well, back in South Dakota in those days, we thought of Pierre as a city, though it didn't have quite 10,000 people and sometimes in the winter the wind would sweep the snow off the plains like a broom and pile it against the houses in long, hard drifts that no one could clear away till spring...
...The holes are three feet deep and filled with green rainwater, breeding the angry mosquitoes that swarm up in the evenings...
...For four weeks...
...I'm being driven out—out to the land of the endless conversations about sport-utility vehicles and county assessments...
...Think about that...
...Early this summer, we received a notice that our water would be shut off on a Wednesday to fix the water main...
...A year...
...The wind sweeps the red dust of the local clay against the houses in long, hard drifts that no one can clear away...
...So we did get our water this way...
...The tract homes and the cul-de-sacs...
...Their eyes take on the slightly mad glaze of acolytes at the Temple of ChemLawn as they gather in the office and talk about their cul-de-sacs and their sport-utility vehicles and an intricate commuting dispute I haven't quite mastered involving I-66, light rail, the Dulles Airport access road, toll booths, and the merge onto the 14th Street Bridge...
...Not a suburb, not an artificial, parasitic, pseudolocale, but a real, free-standing entity...
...Then the big trucks come again...
...It's one of the neighborhood streets that have been torn up for a year now...
...The swimming pool cleaning equipment...
...But anyway, it was a complete place that I grew up in...
...They believe in the suburbs...
...But the next Tuesday it was...
...The big trucks come out once a week to dump a load of gravel...
...But my wife and I both went to college in Washington, and we were married here in the city as well, in the chapel at Georgetown after graduation...
...Then they balance on the planks, swaying and laughing and sometimes falling in...
...And then the workmen couldn't get the pipe fixed, but that was okay because for a day or two, we were told, we could get our water from a green plastic hose running up out of the manhole, along the gutter, down the sidewalk, across the yard, into the outside garden-hose faucet, and up—backwards through our pipes—to the kitchen sink...
...You know Park Road, don't you, Mr...
...A genuine location...
...Please finish working on my street...
...The housing developments named after the features of the landscape destroyed to build them: Orchard Estates, Rolling Hills Park, Shady Groves...
...The lawn furniture...
...The children in the neighborhood have a game they play...
...Pleasant, up above Adams-Morgan, between 16th Street and Rock Creek, on a cross-street called Park Road...
...A city...
...And though our suburban friends looked at us with the suddenly strained smiles of people who've just heard their neighbor at the church picnic mention that he's thinking about taking up Satan worship, we held firm in our declaration that we wanted real urban life when we moved back to Washington almost two years ago...
...it would only make you want to move out to the suburbs...
...The swimming pools...
...Sincerely yours, J. BOTTUM...
...Pleasant Street and Park Road has been torn up on all three sides for a year...
...It wasn't...
...The churches constructed at that moment in 1971 when Bauhaus modernism had staged a hostile takeover of cinder-block functional-ism...
...Please save me...
...Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I have friends who don't just live in the suburbs...
...For a year, we've lived on a corner, in a major American metropolis, with dirt roads on both sides...
...Mostly it made me feel old...
...They take the gray wooden planks the workmen left in the park three months ago and lay them across the holes the workmen dug four months ago...
...It's true that last month the workmen did show up to pour some concrete...
...But a week later they took the jackhammers and tore it up again...
...Then the little trucks...
...Does no one complain that the little, triangular park at Mt...
Vol. 5 • September 1999 • No. 1
