When you think of DC you think of the federal government and the National Mall. The massive Washington Monument. The Smithsonian. The White House. I could go on and on. During the spring and summer, those areas transform into jam-packed hubs of tourism. But while visitors are gawking at the memorials, the city rolls on virtually undisturbed. DC the city and DC the tourist attraction are vastly different places. I grew up in DC, and I got to experience these parallel realities via the metro.
DC hardly has the biggest metro system. Or the safest, or the best, or the most well-maintained. There are routinely homeless people who like to cause trouble. Trains sometimes derail. Delays are so routine that it is a surprise when the train comes on time. Just the other day, a station had to be evacuated after a train caught on fire, enveloping the station in heavy smoke. Most people drive, thinking the metro is too big of a hassle. But with all of its faults, and believe me it has a lot, it proved to be the single most influential thing in shaping how I look at the city.
I see the metro as the heart of the city, pumping people in and out of downtown. I was one of those people for my 4 years of high school, getting on the packed train every morning to get to my school in the heart of the city. I would walk past the White House every day without even giving it a cursory glance. The thrill of seeing the monuments that DC is so famous gets old after a while. After school, I would take the metro an hour across the city to soccer practice, then 2 hours back to get home. The long commute times gave me opportunities to observe, not just the city, but the people too. You can figure out a lot of things by looking at people. Tourists frequent the blue line, but only as far as the National Mall. It is also the loudest line, because tourists always feel the need to talk as loud as possible. The red line is always packed during rush hour with businessmen, but surprisingly is also the quietest. Everybody minds their own business and moves with some sort of ruthless efficiency, too worried about how important their time is to think of other people. The green line has the most Hispanics, probably going to Columbia Heights. You can always get a seat on the green line, but it also smells the worst for some reason that I could never figure out. And even though I learned all this through my countless trips on the metro, I am hardly an expert on the city. The obvious limitation of this method of exploration is I can only go where the metro can take me. And this shaped how I view the city a lot.
Through the metro, I grew to know and understand a lot of areas in the city. My school’s neighborhood, with George Washington University, the IMF, and World Bank headquarters all in close proximity. I know the area surrounding the combined junctions of Gallery Place and Metro Center like the back of my hand, with Chinatown, the beautiful Portrait Gallery, and Capital One Arena being the key features of the neighborhoods. The soon to be condemned RFK stadium, right next to where I had soccer, is a place of great familiarity to me. The metro took me to those places, gave me the opportunity to experience the beauty of these areas of the city that I would never have been to otherwise. However, places where the metro does not go were out of reach to me, and that shapes my view of the city too. It famously has only a handful of stops East of the Anacostia, the lowest income areas of the city. Hardly a coincidence that the poorest locations have the worst access to transit. Due to these limitations though, I was and still am limited in the scope that I can talk about DC. I am a relative stranger to places that the metro could not take me.
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