Let there be light.

If you've been reading for a while, you may have the feeling that you've seen this place somewhere before.

Well, There's One Solution

As I'm pulling shots from my archives to fill the time during my semi-hiatus, I'm still going through the dozens of shots from my nearly 2 weeks in the Chevy Chase neighborhood. This one is taken from Connecticut Ave., which is a heavily trafficked thoroughfare in DC. Instead of spending the budget on crosswalks, Chevy Chase had the ingenious idea to just use flags instead. It seemed like the perfect solution. You don't have to pay for and maintain crosswalk lights. The bright orange flags decrease the risk of accidents involving pedestrians, because, apparently, speeding motorists are more likely to stop for orange flags than the giant white, "zebra crossing," as you Brits call them. However, there are still a few kinks. By around noon or so, all the flags from the far side of the street, near the residential area, end up stuck on the near-side, where the shops, restaurants, and bus terminal are located. And there they stay for most of the day.

Practically Bucolic

Mark Twain once quipped that you couldn't throw a stone in Quebec without hitting a stained glass window. To my knowledge, he never visited Chevy Chase. On a single roundabout--Chevy Chase Circle--there are three churches. I'm used to those numbers. I'm from the south, and, even in DC, I pass 4 churches on my 3 block walk to the metro. Really. But nothing in Shaw comes close to resembling the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church. With it's stone edifice and sculpted gardens, it reminds me of those old English manor houses that have their own adjoining church. This would be a great place to sit and read, but the picture looks deceptively warm. I took this on Sunday, after the morning snow had thawed.

The Chevy Chase Arcade

The Chevy Chase Arcade, like many of the buildings in the town center, is from the mid-1920s. It was one of several arcades that were built around DC, but most, if not all, of the others have since been demolished. The arcades were part of a trend to make DC more European, particularly more Parisian, since arcades were constructed all over Paris throughout the nineteenth century. These passages became the subject of Walter Benjamin's ambitious The Arcades Project, which was never completed due to his death. The remnants and fragments make up an enormous tome that theorizes the roles of arcades in the life of the flaneur, one of the most significant, yet elusive, figures of Modernism.

Untapped Paris has, among its other beautiful, waste-your-day-wistfully-longing features, a few pictures of one of my favorite arcades, the Passage du Grand Cerf. But, please, admire the charming modesty of little Chevy Chase before inevitably and absolutely blanching it with comparison.

And here's the Passage from the other, even more whimsical, entrance.

Maggie the Cat

This morning as I was walking past American City Diner, I noticed the parking lot for the first time. The cars face a wall covered in a mural of classic American entertainers sitting at a lunch counter; and, really, they don't get more classic than Elizabeth Taylor, at least not this week.

The Picture Show.

The Avalon Theatre has been showing movies in the Chevy Chase neighborhood since the 1920s. A few years ago, the previous owners declared bankruptcy, and the cinema closed for a few years. The neighborhood rallied around the landmark, and it reopened as a not-for-profit movie house. There are only two screens, with one playing a recent release and the other a foreign, classic, or independent film. Right now they're screening Adjustment Bureau and Poetry, which looks particularly depressing. But if you need to perk yourself up for either of these films, the Avalon Theatre Cafe serves a variety of wines and beers, pastries, and local favorites like Swing's coffee and Moorenko's ice cream.