A Feeling of Neighborhood

This week I’ve realized how much I love neighborhoods that define themselves. After wandering around the U Street Corridor on Tuesday, I spent several hours yesterday in Takoma Park.

As much as I had heard about Takoma Park, I had never been to that crossroads of Carroll Avenue and East-West Highway that seems to be the center of town. I knew that the residents of this neighborhood were fiercely GREEN and that they prided themselves on having a good farmers’ market. But yesterday I got to taste and see Takoma Park.

We started off in Mark’s Diner, a restaurant reminiscent of the 1960's, where the special of the day was sauteed vegetables over brown rice. But those were no ordinary vegetables. Mark, a slim oriental man, was hurrying around directing the cooking and adding to the ambiance.

As we walked to the bead store, my friend pointed to the small gleaming rooster in the center of the town square. Apparently when she had lived there several years ago, the rooster was still running wild and was the town pet. When he finally died, they created the little memorial to him. It’s that sort of funkiness that defines this neighborhood.

We made bead necklaces, tried on hats and shoes and gloves, and played all the unusual instruments in The House of Musical Traditions. No one seemed to be in too much of a hurry. Everyone talked to us as though we belonged there. It was a neighborhood feeling.

After dropping my friend off in her Capitol Hill neighborhood, which I absolutely love, I went home in rush hour to my Bailey’s Crossroads neighborhood, if you can still call it that. At one point the crossroads of Columbia Pike and Route 7 was the winter home to the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Now that would have defined a neighborhood.

But today that same crossroads is the home to Pollo Campero (the El Salvadoran fried chicken chain), Best Buy, and Petco. It’s a melting pot of cultures, sort of a crossroads of the world. But it has totally lost the feeling of being a neighborhood.

I long for a place where I can walk to shop, where I know the merchants, where I can get a tasty bite to eat and then walk home again. As much as I love being near the woods of Holmes Run, Bailey’s Crossroads is not really a neighborhood that holds the charm of the other places I’ve visited this week.