Lost Highway, Washington City Paper, Eddie Dean, September 27, 1996

Last week’s installment of this series also began with a piece like this, about U.S. Route 1 in Maryland. This article is about the same highway in Virginia, in the stretch south of D.C. This is a whole genre, an article that takes the uniquely American assemblage of pre-war and early post-way roadside junk and sees the best in it, that sees a continuity, a long, sprawling, linear place. The author describes driving home on Route 1:

Those slow, brooding drives during the twilight and midnight hours soon converted me into a die-hard fan of Richmond Highway, a champion of her resilience and a secret admirer of her ugly beauty. We sort of went together for a few years.

Sick of the megamalls and high-rise condos invading Northern Virginia, I took comfort in knowing that the bulldozers hadn’t gobbled up every damn thing. Stuck between Washington’s monuments and the shiny new glass-and-concrete suburbs, U.S. 1 was a contemporary ruin.

There is something unique and almost magical about these old corridors at night, when the old signage lights up and the run-down details of the place are hidden. I struggle to capture what, exactly, that specialness is. This article does as a good a job as any.

Against the Stream: The forgotten pleasures of analog media, The Yale Review, Jason Guriel, January 10, 2022

The constant press of incoming material means you can tear through an entire season of something, sincerely enjoy it, and barely recall an episode a week later. Streamed content, as forceful and ephemeral as wind, demands about as much mental space as it does shelf space.

And:

We were an earlier people attuned to cyclical time: a merry folk revolving around its maypole. There’s great pleasure in repetition and ritual.

Read the whole thing. It really gets at how infinite, amorphous choice, with no effort, can restrict your mind and make it shallow, as well as shorten your attention span. At a deeper level, it suggests that the real crux of why physical/analog formats never quite died and are now seeing a resurgence has little to do with the formats themselves, with their aesthetics or nostalgia or nerd-cred, but rather with the necessity of a little friction and effort built into making use of them. (I’ve been meaning to write up a full-length post on this theme as well, so stay tuned!)

To Travel D.C.’s Beltway Is to Sample the Flavors of the World, Bon Appetit, Amiel Stanek, January 5, 2022

This 64-mile stretch of asphalt does have one very special thing going for it: a whole network of suburban communities in Maryland and Virginia that are as diverse as they are delicious to explore.

I just wrote about one of these places, a heavily Vietnamese strip plaza in Virginia called Eden Center (here for Strong Towns, and yesterday in this newsletter.) The food gets a lot of the attention in this kind of coverage, and it’s great. But what interests me even more is that these very standard, often aging suburban locales have evolved into such diverse and lively places, and almost always without any kind of large-scale planning. Anyone who lives in the D.C. region is probably aware of this phenomenon, but many from outside of it are surprised at the cultural and culinary weight of our suburbs. I love it.

The American Room, The Message, Paul Ford, July 30, 2014

This is one of those pieces that’s at once sort of much ado about nothing, and a fascinating dive into a whole unseen world. I’m not sure what, exactly, the point is, or even if there is one. But it’s in this list, so give it a read.

Related Reading:

New and Old #3

New and Old #4

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