Constantly passing all these historical locations is one of the things that’s odd about living here to this Miami boy. On a regular basis I drive up and down route 28 near Dulles airport and pass signs for civil war battlefields. A short drive south of my office is the location of the first land battle of the war. That feels a little odd, but there’s always history to go see if you’re willing to travel a bit. The truly odd feeling is getting halfway across the street in Clarendon on the way to a burrito and coming across a plaque about the Arlington Line. While I am standing under a streetlight and waiting for the DON’T WALK sign to fade, I am where about a thousand soldiers and forty canon waited for someone to shoot at two hundred and fifty years ago.
Compare that to spending most of your childhood in a house built on land that was swamp when Kennedy was assassinated and learning to drive on roads that weren’t planned yet when Nixon resigned. Comedian Eddie Izzard does a routine mocking Miamians for going on about restoring all the Art Deco to how it looked “over fifty years ago!” In our defense, though, before Henry Flagler took an interest in the Miami area in the 1890s there were less than 1,000 people in the area. Of course we were impressed by buildings half that old. We don’t get signs about what the citizenry were doing in that location two hundred years ago. We didn’t have citizens there two hundred years ago.
I like it up here, where the history comes from.
This post appeared in its original form at DC Metblogs
Well I used to say something in my profile about not quite being a “tinker, tailor, soldier, or spy” but Tom stole that for our about us page, so I guess I’ll have to find another way to express that I am a man of many interests.
Hmm, guess I just did.
My tastes run the gamut from sophomoric to Shakespeare and in my “professional” life I’ve sold things, served beer, written software, and carried heavy objects… sometimes at the same place. It’s that range of loves and activities that makes it so easy for me to love DC – we’ve got it all.
