14th Street revitalization. The Tweed Ride in Adams Morgan. Thievery Corporation selling out the 930 Club. The Funk Parade on U Street. Halloween block parties in front of our first house in Petworth. The former skate park in Shaw. Bikes everywhere, including the new Capital Bikeshare system.
I was born and raised in and around Washington DC. Looking back, the middle of Obama’s first term, around 2010 or so, has to be considered a candidate for ‘peak DC’ vibe of the last few decades. Of course that’s a loaded concept, as self-proclaimed Chocolate City was and is a long-time bastion of proud black culture, even when the crack-era streets were at their most dangerous. But by 2010 many formerly derelict areas were blooming — as I liked to say, all the places where you used to be afraid to walk you now couldn’t afford to live in — and a buttoned-down government town was entering a phase of new personality and dynamism.
Washington DC, the city where people live away from the monuments and power corridors, is mainly liberal but it’s often the first city that feels the cultural shifts that come with the politics of a new administration. A previous low point in the ‘vibes’ was Bush’s second inaugural. DC was dismal, sullen, on edge as the rhinestone cowboys paraded through town.
By contrast, during the first Obama term the spirit on the street was unmatched. Not just the wildly exultant election-night celebrations at 14th and U Street, which had burned during the 1968 riots after MLK was shot. There was just a sustained mix of joy and relief, a relaxed air, a feeling of moving in a positive direction. Even some of DC’s jarring divisions by race and class began to soften. Gentrification swept the city, creating its own set of problems, but it felt like the city was coming into its own diversity.
Going through my photo archives recently, I came across a number of photos I took around that time. Many of these were outtakes I never used for anything before, or they were made for a magazine assignment and put away. A few of the black and whites are from my personal Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines project that documented the central neighborhoods that were changing fast.
Looking at these images now as period pieces, DC seems a whole other world of pre-COVID, pre-Trvmp spirit and energy. A lost era of optimism.
I’m writing this from Nairobi, Kenya, where I’ve been living for the last year and a half. So I don’t know what DC is like at the moment, though I can imagine. To be honest, even before we left in 2023 I had soured somewhat on the city, my own optimism was waning. Even as it began to come out of the COVID doldrums that suffocated many cities, it already seemed like it had become a more soulless casualty of its own growth. I couldn’t feel the city I loved anymore.
While they feel like only yesterday, I realize now that these photos represent a slice of time, a transition moment of culture that is passed. Which I guess is what moments do.
But rather than just being somewhat bittersweet reminders of what was, I hope they can be an inspiration for what can be.
We will have to defend urban culture in these perilous days. DC may even lose home rule.
More broadly, I would argue culture is where we make our stand, while other battles are being waged. They are coming for culture. How we carry ourselves and move through space together can define the very landscape. Are you willing to walk around your own town feeling like the ether around you has been hijacked? That you have to watch what you say and do — or how you dress, wouldn’t want to look too different now — in deference to MAGA sensibilities, even in a blue area?
Culture only thrums and thrives in the US because of its diversity, a diversity that will be increasingly under attack. Defend one, you defend the other. ‘Culture wars’ are about to take on new meaning. Let’s be creative and tough in how we meet the moment.
These are challenging times indeed but sometimes at the barricades is where you find out what you’re made of. We might even rediscover ourselves. Not so we can go back but so we can go forward.
