Earlier this month, I saw this story announcing the closure of Captain White Seafood City, an iconic, long-running fish market at the waterfront, known as the Wharf, in Washington, D.C. Apparently it will survive, relocating somewhere else—it’s a barge, and can be floated away and stationed elsewhere—but it’s a shame to see it leaving. With all the changes D.C. has seen over the last 20 years or so, there are fewer and fewer of these types of businesses left, which speak to a “hometown D.C.” rather than “official Washington” history and culture.

My wife and I went to this fish market exactly once, in 2017; even since then, the neighborhood has seen lots of new development. (As has the Union Market area of D.C., which I visited once in 2016 and which is now nearly unrecognizable.) We didn’t have a cooler with us and we lived in Maryland at the time, so we didn’t buy any fish to bring home. But we explored the massive floating market and tried some oysters and clams on the half-shell. Cheap, fresh, and piled high onto some ice in a styrofoam container, they were excellent. I even found a tiny pearl inside one of the oysters! I remember that outing fondly. We never went back.

I was still sad to hear that Captain White is departing. I would have liked to go back some time, on one of the rare days when we actually go to D.C. for a whole day. I guess I liked knowing that it was there. Like a book on the bookshelf, or a trinket in a storage box somewhere, that you never get to exactly because it will always be there.

I also get the argument that modern development and architecture, with its large scale and impersonal sameness, exists in a kind of zero-sum battle with this personalized, small-scale, quirky stuff. There’s a uniqueness, a kind of folk-art feel to something like Captain White, and I think people sense that it isn’t really being made anymore. It is, in a phrase I’ve begun to use, a non-renewable cultural resource.

There’s a concept in endangered species preservation and environmental conservation known as “existence value.” It’s a way of roughly measuring—in dollars—how much it matters to people that a species or an environmentally sensitive piece of land exists, whether or not they ever get to see it or derive any direct benefit from it. In other words, people are willing, either theoretically or actually in the form of fees or taxes, to pay for the value of simply knowing that something they like is being preserved.

I think, at its most innocent, something like this is at work with a certain kind of NIMBYism. I’m not sure NIMBYism is even the right term for it; maybe it’s really just nostalgia. The problem is that a business can’t be preserved the way a piece of land can, because it’s ultimately, well, a business. Except for a very small handful of iconic preservation-worthy enterprises, most profit-making enterprises, and their logos and buildings and associated memories, just come and go as land use and economics change.

The innocent NIMBYism I’m talking about here—and that I felt, to some extent, when I read about Captain White—is this feeling that it would be nice to stabilize or tame that churn, to have some constancy and continuity in our daily surroundings, in our architectural public domain. These things become a part of our mental maps, they’re physical places that spark memories. To look at them only as businesses, or buildings, misses a lot of why people care about them.

I also understand, however, that “But I like that old store that I never really to to anyway” isn’t really a good reason to say no to housing in an area that is rapidly growing. D.C. isn’t even my home. NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard”—far be it from me to expand it to “not in the city closest to me”! But still, I think urbanists and housing advocates need some room for acknowledging the sense of loss from radical changes in the built environment, without allowing those natural feelings to obstruct growth. This is a balancing act that I see some folks not too willing to try to engage in—whether they have no sympathy for this sense of loss, or whether they feel that their own nostalgia should dictate policy.

I come back to this theme a lot, because I genuinely do miss lots of old childhood landmarks and fixtures, but I also don’t see any way to arrest that process of change. I would, however, like to see a devolution of scale in new development, and see a permitting, zoning, regulatory, and financing regime that makes more room for small businesses and small projects. Maybe we can all agree on that?

Photo credit jpellgen/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Related Reading:

A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again

The Highway of Theseus

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