Field Work
The joy and necessity of just being somewhere
The other week there was a happy hour in Rockville, Maryland hosted by one of the region’s urbanism/housing-advocacy organizations. I like to go to these, but the ones in Maryland or D.C. are a bit of a hike, especially if I were to leave in the afternoon to arrive on time.
So what I often do instead is get up early, drive to the area near where the event is, and just spend the day there. I might do work for a few hours in a coffee shop, take a random drive and see what I notice, eat at an interesting local restaurant, walk into some interesting stores, photograph some old buildings. Well, I do all of those things, usually.
This particular time, I invited a friend who does live in Maryland, and met her in Rockville, where we did some of this stuff together before the happy hour. At the happy hour, I told a couple of people I was from Herndon, which is at the far edge of Fairfax County, which surprised them a little. They were even more surprised that I had been in Rockville all day. I suppose I understand that reaction. Part of what I do is tell stories about things that don’t outwardly look that interesting, and a lot of people don’t think of any given place as “interesting.”
At times I’m also afraid I might look like one of those desperate people who shows up at every event because they have nothing else to do. But I go to them all because I want to be passingly familiar with the whole region’s broad urbanist coalition, and because I get to hear from other people, bounce ideas I’m working on off them, turn informal discussions into articles.
And as I chatted with other folks, I noticed that some of the same things my friend and I had been observing came up—maybe organically, maybe because I was thinking about them—and it felt like this seemingly random assemblage of activities really cohered into something.
In essence, this is field work.
I am not a journalist or reporter, strictly speaking, but a lot of what I do includes elements of that work. Just as every interview or every discussion with a source doesn’t pan out into a story or turn out to be useful, not every road trip/drive/store visit/chat ends up being useful to me in terms of my writing. But there’s no way to know which is going to be which, or even what those things are going to be, without doing them.
Time spent “in the field” is absolutely necessary to the work I do, and that’s why it’s “worth it” to drive an hour to go to a happy hour or take a picture of a building or try some restaurant that seems unique or interesting or like an unusual throwback1. The whole is worth so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s easy to forget or just not feel that, especially when the price of gas goes up, or it’s cold out, or whatever. But days like this Rockville day remind me.
My friend and I talked a little about the decline of the “food hall” craze—the happy hour was at a food hall which is currently for sale and is expected to close in the near term. We walked around a Fresh Market, a supermarket I’m not familiar with, and noticed some unusual products: alphabet pasta, which she observed isn’t commonly sold anymore; a really old-school-looking pancake mix, in a box that screamed 1950s design; a self-serve candy bar with all sorts of old-fashioned candies that I hadn’t seen in a long time. (This stuff is referred to as “nostalgic” now, which makes me feel old.)
We checked out a new-ish Barnes & Noble with a cheap-feeling, poorly designed interior, and remembered the cozy old big-box bookstores, and looked around a new Wegmans supermarket under an apartment building (it’s interesting to see, spatially/design-wise, how a giant supermarket can be compressed into a much smaller footprint without a big loss in the number of SKUs.)
The Wegmans had this curious drop-ceiling area above the checkouts, which is a really old-fashioned feature I’ve never seen in a new-build supermarket. That made me wonder why supermarkets often used to have a lower ceiling by the front/checkout area, and why this new one did. (Perhaps there’s a subfloor above the drop ceiling, and these are offices/breakrooms?)
We drove by a shopping arcade I wanted to photograph, which is mostly abandoned, and in a building that a planning official at the happy hour told is slated for redevelopment. (No photos here, because I’m going to do a little piece on it separately.)
And for dinner, we had some Taiwanese fried chicken (another trend) from Cheers Cut, a stall in the food hall which a few years ago was a multi-location, multi-city chain, but which appears to have no locations left except this little spot in a food hall which is going to close. The giant fried squid was really good too:
And it appears, or at least some Rockville folks said, the Rockville Town Center—a walkable mixed-use development in a prime location that was once a bustling spot—is now quieting down and emptying out.
We were discussing these questions of why things come and go like this. How contingent it all is—on immigration patterns, on fads, on cultural moments, on real estate and rent prices, on social media play, etc. There are so many stories behind ordinary things. What happened to the alphabet pasta? Did people just stop buying it? Did it cost too much to operate 26 tiny extruders?2 Until my friend mentioned it was hard to find, I’d never thought about it, but I suppose I assumed it would just be there on a shelf if I ever wanted to buy it. I wonder how many other things I think are just out there are not anymore?
It’s weird when you go looking for something and realize its time has just come and gone. But if you dwell too much on the past, you miss what’s new. Your sense that things are always being taken away can harden into an ideology.
Anyway, just being in a place for a day and being observant about things always yields ideas for me, and always gets me thinking. Before I had this insight that this was field work, I was ambivalent about spending the time/gas/miles/money on it, and sometimes it even felt like a chore. But I have a way of explaining the value of it to myself now, which is somehow more convincing than simply seeing the value play out.
Without the actual going-out-and-doing-things element, ideas don’t happen.
Related Reading:
Not-Pennsylvania Amish Country
Road Diary: Driving College Park
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Next Rockville visit, I’m going to try a recently opened place doing old-school Mongolian barbecue—the stir-fry/teppanyaki on a round flattop. Another thing that came and went but occasionally pops up.
Something like that was reportedly behind Ronzoni’s discontinuation of pastina.
I went grocery shopping the other day and I walked up and down all the aisles because I was out of so many things (I hate shopping). Each aisle had its own product. Too many choices. I long for the Fowler’s Market of my youth. It was small but it had everything you needed.
Before shopping my mother would sit down to tea with Mrs. Fowler an catch up with all the news while I would drink orange soda and read comics from the magazine rack.
I have found a small locally owned store but it’s even smaller than Fowler’s Market so sometimes I have to hit the supermarket. Some things were better in the past.
Solid reframe on observational work. The part about not knowing which visits will yeild insights really captures the exploratory inefficiency that's actually necessary for pattern recognition. I've found that alot of what seems like random wandering ends up connecting months later when a specific context makes it relevant. The alphabet pasta detail is a perfect example of how consumer landscapes shift quietly.