Walking. Walking miles around Anacostia and its adjacent neighborhoods. Walking through clusters of historic houses. Walking past small independent businesses on main streets. Walking around schools, past bus stops, by a metro station. Walking around a village. Finding abrupt seams between this historic fabric and large anonymous subsidized apartment buildings. Finding delicate old wood buildings in sad shape. Finding big cheap new buildings towering over cute commercial streets. Finding residents cleaning and visitors littering. Seeing the Frederick Douglass House sitting above all this, a witness to so many harsh realities of life through the last century and a half.
