Washington City Paper: Contents for Mar. 10

Cover Story

On the Connecticut Avenue of the mind, the car makes a nonstop dive for the city's heart that, in real life, never occurs. The avenue is the oldest established permanent floating traffic jam in Northwest, at its epicenter the eternal snarl of Connecticut and Van Ness Street.

Connecticut and Van Ness is a mesh of contrasts: a white subcity where blacks study by the thousands; a major vehicular thoroughfare thronged with devout pedestrians and mass-transit users; six lanes of roadway sometimes narrowed to two by autosclerosis; a shopping strip along which, in the era of the megacorp, family-owned businesses thrive.

Residential but commercial, conduit and terminus, welcoming yet off-warding, Connecticut Avenue between Tilden and Albemarle Streets inspires the language of geology. It is a province of anomalies, a region of orogenies, a zone of tectonic pressures: the drive to develop, the desire to preserve, the impulse to expand, resistance to change, the dream of sailing in a sea of green lights, the likelihood that at any hour there will be a crush.

Metrobuses, Executive Protection Service units, tow trucks, commuters—everybody comes to Van Mess, whether for an education in UDC's Stalinist buildings, satellite rescue reports at the INTELSAT mirrorama, discount gas at a legendarily energetic station, cheap cheeses and bargain booze at Calvert Woodley Liquors, or a hosing at Van Ness Car Care Centre, one of the longest-lived automatic brushless carwashes in the U.S. and therefore the civilized world.... Continued

Issue of Mar. 10 - 16, 1995

News and Features

Beauty and the Beast
Van Mess
Cover Story By Michael Dolan
Beauty and the Beast
Classical Span
Cover Story By Bradford McKee
Receiver Believer
The District Needs a Receivership More Than a Financial Control Board
The City By David Plotz
Generation X-asperated
Earth to the Washington Post Magazine: Slacker City This Ain't
The City By Pedro E. Ponce
The DPW Dilemma
The District Cuts Essential Services to Protect Parking Enforcement Revenue
The City By Erik Wemple
Your ATM Card or Your Life
A Rash of Bizarre Armed Robberies Unnerves Adams Morgan
The City By Charlotte Hays
The Dear Departed
The Mail By Kimberly McDaniel
A Monumental Crisis
The Mail By Jim McGrath
Undeniable
The Mail By Daniel W. Mattausch
Where's Freddie, Mac?
The Mail By Keith R. Small
Dead Wronged
The Mail By Betsy Domich
Body and Soul
The Mail By Meaghan Mountford
Unheard Music, Unfettered Opinions
The Mail By Karen Mitchell
Another Side of the Story
The Mail By John Spitzer