The Pull of Proximity: Adams Morgan

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During the impressionable, tender years of my early twenties, the era of anything-is-still-possible, I made a home within the vibrant cradle of Adams Morgan. In this endeavor, I was hardly alone. Each spring, the commencements at the universities in Washington, DC signal the migration of newly credentialed young professionals into the city’s complex urban core. Housing is not the only concern: the search is on for jobs, parking spaces, furniture, renter’s insurance, and new social forums. Word-of-mouth, and for a few, first-hand experience, places Adams Morgan on the shortlist of desirable locations to live. It would be hard to find someone who wouldn’t endorse living there. Young men and women flock there for the social scene. Cab drivers approve; their weekend revenues largely derive from this patch of asphalt turf. To the gay community, headquartered a few blocks south in Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan is a less flamboyant sibling, endowed with cheaper rents, serene views and ethnic diversity. Virginia and Maryland commuters, if asked, would say it’s a nice place for an evening away from the suburban doldrums. Newcomers quickly settle into the comfort of not needing to venture very far to satisfy their urban hungers. Finding a comfortable anchor in Adams Morgan, we find little incentive to leave our roosts, even on sultry summer weekends.

Every Saturday in summer – always a big shopping day – there’s an opportunity to escape the city’s bedraggled supermarkets. It starts around 8 A.M. when a white box truck, having navigated through the morning’s summer vacation traffic tangles, pulls up along the busy curb on Columbia Road. The vehicle, its engine now silent, opens up like a spring blossom in fast forward: driver and passenger doors fly wide and dusty workers spill out of the vehicle’s oversize cab like oversized pollen particles. The back track-door flips upward to reveal the stores of summer’s bounty in stacked produce boxes. These workers, from the far-flung fields of Pennsylvania, are here to run the farmers’ market. Such idealistic, hardworking, young men; they wear smudges of dirt on their cheeks and grubby t-shirts, but probably went to Brown, Middlebury, or another selective private college in a recent life. Some have patchy beards that make them look insignificantly older. They shuttle around hurriedly to set up the shade tents, arrange the display tables, and unload the produce. Excited customers appear, impatiently eyeing the boxes of summer peaches – fragrant, fuzzy orbs that look juicy but demand a trained touch to discern the true degree of ripeness. Hard-shelled produce – watermelon, honeydew, and squash – is demoted to the concrete ground surface to save table space for delicate seasonal berries and heirloom tomatoes. The unsanitary ground does not concern the farmhands because they don’t know any better, nor do they realize these items are a hard sell to those familiar with the sidewalk’s recent history of broken glass, vermin and unseemly debris.

The market now set up, customers are given the go-ahead to peruse. The market operates swiftly and without a slip: meandering lines form, the farm boys weigh haphazardly-bagged produce, and buyers exchange money for edible goods (prices are rounded up to the nearest dime). By 1:00 P.M., only bruised apples remain, a few semi-rotten cucumbers, warm melon halves, and squishy, leaking tomatoes. Sullied produce boxes litter the curbside and the late afternoon breeze carries plastic bags into the street to settle under car tires. As soon as the young men finish their quick rounds to collect this rubbish, the white truck closes shut and retreats to Pennsylvania. The busyness of the street corner hollows out, panhandlers reclaim their roosts, and the lingering smell of urine next to the bus stop becomes apparent and impossible to ignore. This state of the farmers’ market embodies Adams Morgan most faithfully. Its layers of both orderliness and disarray effortlessly fall onto one another.

As summer fades into early fall, the Saturday farmers’ market occupies an ever-diminishing portion of the concrete slab at the intersection of 18th and Columbia. Shorter days and cooler weather unlock the neighborhood from the steamy bog that envelops the city from April to August. Our neighborhood gets busy in September. Sidewalk sales abound, although the stuff folks are getting rid of isn’t terribly different at one sale versus another. Up for grabs are items like assorted dishes, outmoded printers, computer monitors, Ikea furniture, wall hangings and endless stacks of good reads going two for $1.00. Today, the motley assortment of scribbled paper signs fastened to streetlight poles advertising competing sidewalk sales are outshined by sharp fluorescent posters that give notice of last weekend’s headliner event, the Adams Morgan Day Festival.

The festival lasts a day and a half over the first weekend in September, drawing residents from DC’s eight districts. Vendors from smaller establishments are the main attractions; they set up booths on the street selling things like kabobs, jerk chicken, Ethiopian injera with oily stews, fried chicken, and burritos. The steaming stews and smoke from open grills create a perfumed haze, intensified by the sunlight that bleaches out the horizon. White canvas tents shade the vendors; the prepared wear brimmed hats and sunscreen; some elders carry parasols or wear visors. Most people, however, meander through the crowds in damp garments, prompted by their sticky discomforts to seek shade underneath a few ginkgo trees growing along 18th Street. This pairing of humidity and heat works together to direct a steady flow of sweat that meanders down your back and tickle your knees, all to the pulsing beat of reggae erupting from the stage at the foot of 18th Street.

To escape the commotion, the curious follow shaded diagonal side streets that shoot off from 18th. The smallest of them, Belmont Avenue, my home for nearly three years, hosts the Art Walk. It’s amazing to see so many diverse talents and tastes converge on this tiny street. One artist with a series of splashy scarlet brushstrokes on stark white canvases attracts well-dressed residents to her booth. Her popularity dwindles when some notice a scruffy sketch artist working intensely with charcoal beneath one of the ginkgos. His rough depictions of nearby apartment and store façades draw people to peruse his works with hopeful expectations of discovering something familiar. Fingering through his matted prints, I discover that the sketch artist has a fondness for Belmont Road. I wonder if he’s had a go at my building? Before I can find it, though, I’m drawn to investigate the fruits of another booth down a little further. With my new purchase in tow – a streaky oil pastel with the ivory minaret of the Islamic Center of Washington peeking out from the tree-topped canopy of Rock Creek Park – I decide to ramble back along 18th Street, curious if passersby notice the recent acquisition I proudly carry under my arm.

Each year the festival is the same, and I wonder, why not change the venue to the other main neighborhood street? Columbia Road is wider, tree-lined and level. But then I consider the logistics – is it a more important arterial than 18th Street? Are there safety issues? Would the businesses on 18th Street object if the festival moved around the corner? As I exit Belmont Road and enter 18th Street, this line of inquiry suddenly seems trivial. In the distance over a sea of people’s heads, I’ve spotted the vendor from last year who sold fabulous samosas, fragrant with cumin and expertly fried into plump pyramid shapes. Despite the fact she runs a nearby restaurant in Dupont Circle, it’s been a full year since I’ve consumed one of these delicious bundles. Working my way toward her, before I know it, I’ve gone past a half-dozen booths, stands, curbsides, corners, and storefronts, each with their own embedded memories and associations that have tightly woven me into the urban fabric beneath my sandaled feet.