Slumming in Southwest

Today I went on an ultimately futile adventure to the post office (it was closed) which took me a few blocks from my apartment.  Normally, this wouldn't be of much note, but one of the interesting qualities about DC is that, as a friend put it, it goes from pretty to shitty in no time at all, and often back to pretty again if you keep walking.  Case in point: if you follow M St. east from my apartment, you start in pretty (where the new grocery store and office buildings are), and two blocks later you're in an are composed primarily of grungy, run-down old bungalows.  Approach Capitol St. (the divider between the Southwest and Southeast quadrants) and the little Catholic church there (which I haven't been to because its only Sunday Mass is at 8 in the blinking morning) looks rather forlorn, surrounded by an ocean of concrete, quasi-freeway, and unpretty city.  But continue on just another block and you see brand-new buildings in front of you - office towers, condos and, a bit farther on, the new headquarters for the US Department of Transportation.  On the right (south of M St.) is the new Nationals Baseball Stadium, where I saw the opera last weekend, which is quite nice.  Pretty to shitty to pretty again in the space of ten minutes.  Appropriate for the nation's capital, perhaps?

Anyway, if you were to stop in the not-so-nice bit because, say, you had to go to the post office, you would see dwellings like this.

Now, it's perfectly fine, really.  This isn't the ghetto (though I tease), but I feel compelled to note that the chain link fence makes it distinctly less pleasant.  They're humble dwellings, really, though with people loitering about outside, I was very careful not to be seen taking pictures.  Someone might have asked why, and I'd rather not explain.

Perhaps I'm an elitist snob, or perhaps these picture don't quite convey what this bit of Southwest is like.  They look fairly clean and well-kept, with few if any negative qualities aside from their smallness and plainness.  But what you can't see here is how much it feels like a warp, to go from the sleek 1960s (and brand-new development) to the...not so sleek 1960s.  This is what I mean:

There now, I'm not such an elitist pig, am I?   Is that not awful?  Now, add sidewalks in desperate need of repair, chain link fence, litter every now and then, and the sun burning down on the top of your head as you trudge along.  Not quite so pretty.

The reasons for this are multiple.  In the 1950s, and earlier, all of Southwest was slum, and had been so for a long time.  It was ethnically divided, and not pretty at all.  In the 1960s, it was decided to raze the entire neighborhood and build it anew.  North of the freeway (the "north quadrant" of the Southwest quadrant, if you will) the government built offices for its new departments (Housing and Urban Development, for example), and today the area is all office building.  The "southern quadrant" - south of me - is Fort Lesley J. McNair.  In the west, along the waterfront - where I live - noted architects like I.M. Pei designed sleek residential towers in definitive Brutalist style which, in my opinion, has aged well (other buildings in this neighborhood have not).  But in the eastern quadrant, between my neighborhood and Capitol Ave, which divides Southwest from Southeast, apparently the decision was made to construct large numbers of small bungalows and low-rise apartment buildings for low-income inhabitants.  They remain today, and they have not aged well.  If the development going on just to my north is successful (I'll provide photos at some point), these bungalows may begin to fall to the wrecking ball, since space is at a premium in the District, and a single city block could be converted into mid-rise housing for ten times more people than live there now.  For the time being, however, the bungalows remain, and the odd, run-down and semi-uninhabited feeling persists.  It is not an area I intend to frequent; perhaps its inhabitants feel the same way.