since I moved to Washington. Time now to think back a little.

I came to work at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and I moved to 800 4th Street SW. It was about a ten minute walk between the two.

Southwest Washington was built up in the 19th century, after the Civil War, but there is nothing of that time that remains. It was all bulldozed in the 1950s or maybe early 60s and redeveloped. I am sure there was a lot of trauma associated with that and I am not going to discuss the merits here, but in the late 1960s and for at least a decade after that, SW became a mecca for young professionals moving to DC.

But there was something I didn’t know. My grandfather’s brother, Moshe Reuben Yoelson, who had died when I was very young and whom you may know as Al Jolson’s father, was a Jewish religious leader (exact title unclear), whose Orthodox congregation, Talmud Torah, was located exactly (on 4 1/2 Street) where I was living. It may have ceased operations some years before and had merged with another congregation to become Ohev Shalom Talmud Torah, now located on upper 16th Street NW.

At any event , 800 4th Street, a large building now I think a condominium, was part of an even larger development, Capitol Park, which included four high-rises and a number of town homes. I was very comfortable moving in, as I had three high school friends (all of them good friends) already living in Capitol Park.

Looking back, it seems that everyone in Capitol Park was between 23 and 35 years old. And I met a lot of them, especially during the two summers I lived there around the always busy swimming pool (this was before we discovered that the sun was bad for you).

And the SW urban renewal area went beyond Capitol Park. There were other developments in SW. I knew people in most of them.

Some of these people (you know who you are) I still see. Some, including a young woman I dated for much of this time, are no longer with us. Some, I remember distinctly, some vaguely. Some by name, some by face only. Some not at all.

For two or three years, my entire life revolved around Southwest. I did know a few people my age who lived on Capitol Hill, not far away. And I worked with people who lived further afield, mainly I think in Virginia. I thought those in Virginia had made a terrible mistake when they signed their leases. I still think that.

I did have a car – a 1968 yellow Pontiac Firebird with a black top (that’s another story), and I did use it now and then. I also had my bicycle which I used more often. Short trips to the National Mall and Smithsonians, and to Ft. McNair at Buzzard Point (then open to the public) and longer weekend excursions to Mt. Vernon in Virginia or Great Falls in Maryland.

But mainly I stuck to Southwest, although it was a difficult place to spend your money. There were no restaurants or stores or theaters in my neighborhood.

Well, almost none. There was a Safeway a few blocks away that I almost never went into. Why was that? Not sure, except for a vague notion that I didn’t belong there. You see, next to Capitol Park, they built public housing (it’s still there) and although I thought that was progressive and just fine, the two populations didn’t mix and I thought the Safeway belonged to them, not us. So my recollection is that when I needed a grocery, I would get in my Firebird and wind up at an A & P in Arlington.

But most of the time I bought my food (I didn’t really cook anything) at the small grocery in the basement of 800 4th Street. The couple that ran the store were pretty unfriendly but I ignored that until one day I could do that no longer. On that day, I was buying my cans of tuna, or whatever, and a young woman whom I casually knew came in the store holding a Pyrex baking dish. She went to the counter and told the owner that she bought the dish the day before, had just opened it and saw it had a crack and wanted to exchange it for another. The owner looked at her and accused her of falsely accusing him of selling damaged goods, something “I would never ever do”. She was very polite and soft-spoken and explained her situation again, making sure she wasn’t accusing him of anything nefarious. He doubled down on his position.

i stood there in disbelief. She broke down in tears and said “My father owns a store just like this in Brooklyn and he would never treat a customer this way.” He simply looked at her and said ” Then I think you should take this back to your father.”

She ran out, crying. I told the owner that I would never shop in his store again. And I didn’t.

I hardly ever went into Northwest Washington when I lived us Southwest. Really terra incognita. Occasionally to go to a film, always at the Biograph or at a theater in Georgetown (neither there any longer), and I don’t remember the name of the Georgetown theater. Yes, I do. The Key, I think.

Restaurants? We came quite a bit to the Astor on M Street downtown. That was quite an excursion for us but the food was good and cheap (Greek food) and did they really have a belly dancer on the third floor? Chinese food was more of an excursion – a small strip shopping center place on Lee Highway in Arlington. I don’t remember how I adopted that as a go-to place.

I left HUD in 1972 and went to work for a law firm on Connecticut and L NW. This was all pre-Metro, you know, so the commute from Southwest seemed like it would be unpleasant. Luckily, a friend from my Army Reserve unit was moving back to New Orleans and I was able to take over his Foggy Bottom apartment. The walk to work wasn’t ten minutes, but was well under twenty.

My Southwest life was over. But maybe I will say a little more about it later.