Route 1 Road Diary

Come drive with me

Recently, I wrote about how I think of my work not exactly as journalism, but somewhat analogous to reporting. In a lot of ways, places are my “sources,” and from time to time I like to just drive an old route and see what I notice: what’s new, what’s changed, what catches my attention. Often I’ll have one or two specific points of interest, and then build a day on the road off of that, because inevitably I’ll get pleasantly sidetracked. Which is kind of the point!

I’ve been in Maryland a lot lately, so this time, I decided to drive the Route 1 corridor in Northern Virginia, from suburban Alexandria (Groveton, Hybla Valley, Mount Vernon) down to Woodbridge. I haven’t done that full drive in a few years, and I wanted to check in on one of my places.

This is, in a general sense, a corridor which exists in every metro area; there are usually several of them. It’s a “stroad,” a pre-Interstate urban access route and long-haul route (this is the U.S. 1 that will take you from Maine to Florida). The sweep of the corridor as it stands now is a great assemblage of eras: shacks and quasi-urban buildings from who knows how long ago, a handful of surviving midcentury motels, early little strip malls and small buildings up against the highway, auto garages and banks and fast food buildings (and sometimes a restaurant in an auto garage, a restaurant in a bank, etc.), larger strip malls with big-box anchors, and now, increasingly, 5-over-1 apartment buildings.

From Google Maps, for an example of an old, kind of out-of-place building:

It’s impossible to stop and photograph most things; you just take it all in as it flows by. I snapped a few photos, in the spirit of the trip, out my window at lights.

I passed two or three demolition sites, the coming and going of this long linear place:

One moment a massive new building is rising; the next you’re looking at scrappy and somewhat distressed buildings, many decades old, hosting random little small shops. In some ways, it’s the utter opposite of a place. In other ways, taken together, it's the definition of a place. Different periods, the artifacts of different periods, different kinds of people, all just sharing a little sliver of space together.

Somewhere along here was an old auto garage, a 1970s-vintage Shell I believe, which housed a small Middle Eastern grocery store. I think it’s been torn down; I can’t find it now. This building, from the 1920s, was recently torn down, having housed a number of basic roadside restaurants over the years. The particulars come and go, but it very much feels like the same overall place. It’s a curious thing.

My point of interest for this trip was a Mexican barbecue restaurant. I wanted to try it, and it happened to be along the route I wanted to drive. It’s an old fast food building, I think, but it has been some kind of local Latin restaurant for as long as Google Maps records imagery. Currently, it’s a small market with a food counter and a little seating area.

It was very good. The tortillas—$5 for 25 of them, homemade, warm, soft, plus this sampling of meats, came to $21. It’s refreshing to leave behind the whole bespoke fussy Instagrammable vibe of a lot of restaurants nowadays and just have a decent, affordable meal.

It reminds me a lot of the old family-owned places in New Jersey, in every old strip mall: breakfast joints, Chinese takeouts, pizzerias with full old-school Italian restaurant menus, etc. None of it was fantastic food, but it was fine, sometimes really good, and pleasant, unpretentious, and not frictional in a bad way to go there.

There was no written menu and the clerk spoke broken English. I’m not sure how many white guys walk into these places; most of the customers appear to be Latino. But that sense I get sometimes that these sorts of places aren’t for me is my own unfamiliarity, not any lack of hospitality on their part.

Immigrants (very likely) wake up early, throw meat on a wood fire in a barrel smoker in the parking lot of some old fast food restaurant building, and share a piece of their culture and make a living.

This photo, to me, is America:

As I recently wrote, I find this all faintly miraculous. It’s about immigration, and cheap commercial space, and entrepreneurship. But it’s also about community. It’s about being fully human by living with each other.

For a lot of people, this commercial strip is just a place to drive through on the way to better places. But there’s so much here. The idea that George Washington looked out at the Potomac River just a stone’s throw away from this messily transforming, somewhat distressed, culturally interesting place is an incredible thing. I think our first president would be proud.

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I came across this story, about a murder at a Hybla Valley bus stop, with a bunch of comments about how this southeast corner of Fairfax County is deteriorating and rundown, and how Fairfax County is soft on crime and has concentrated poverty into this area.

That is a bit of an overstatement, but it is definitely the poorest part of the county, and it looks the part. There are still some old motels here, trailer parks, a lot of older, cheaper housing, and a lot of people pass through who aren’t from the area and are probably involved in a lot of crimes that occur near the highway. For whatever reason, this old corridor contains multitudes.

I stopped at a large thrift store in a shopping center with (pictured here, there’s more) a Mexican ice cream shop, an African restaurant, and a Latino market. This is the tail end of the Alexandria penumbra of Route 1, and it’s about the end of this particular commercial strip.

I think of Woodbridge as connected to this, but I’d forgotten how much undeveloped land—including, even, a farm, and an Army base—there was between this southern edge of the suburban Alexandria strip and the beginning of the Woodbridge strip. It’s quite a few miles of nothing, really, at least as visible from Route 1.

The portion of Woodbridge along U.S. 1 (now we’re in Prince William County) is probably even more dismal and distressed looking than the part outside Alexandria. It just has this dusty, windswept, tumbledown look to it. Few of the buildings are of recent construction. Why would anybody want to live here?, I reflexively wonder. On an overcast day, it’s as if the bleakness is thick in the air.

As it happens, someone I met at an event the very same night said his family’s nanny recently moved to Woodbridge, where she could afford a house, and now makes the hellish I-95 commute back up to Alexandria. It was the choice she made, the right balance between budget and commute and space.

He didn’t say this, but I took the point that we shouldn’t view those who are somewhat less off—i.e., not white-collar workers or blue-collar firm owners—as being mere victims. They make choices about what they want and need, and sometimes they can see opportunity where those of us who are a bit snobbish or spoiled cannot.

Maybe she moved to one of these homes, which recently replaced a couple of abandoned, decrepit small shopping centers, and now stand next to an aging but much healthier shopping center, the 1960s-vintage Marumsco Plaza.

I stopped at a thrift store along here, too—I just like thrift stores! It was very, very large. (I’m actually featuring that store/building in an upcoming “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” piece, because I think it’s quite interesting.) In addition to the thrift store, it also houses this whole section of small businesses—larger than flea-market stalls—separated by movable walls. It’s an extremely informal and cheap way to create small commercial space out a big-box shell. Opportunity.

It reminds me of the post-Romans who took apart the old Roman structures and used their pieces to build new things. You can see decline. Or you can see continuity, and you can see building something new, one messy little piece at a time.

Then I took this photo in the parking lot:

I suppose I could focus on the open sky, but instead I see the endless stretch of gray, cracked asphalt, the overgrown landscaping, the highway. It feels lonely and isolating, to be so far from the urban core, separated by distance but more so by traffic; to be dependent on a car or a miserable walk or else to be able to go nowhere, really. There is some new construction and demolition of some aging structures, and a widening of the highway (it probably looked better before, and it’s still traffic-choked). It’s still…a bit ugly.

But perhaps that’s just me being a snob and thinking it’s empathy. Really, there’s a certain push and pull. Crime and blight pull down property values and commercial rents; those decreases bring in enterprise and entrepreneurship and a kind of messy hyperlocal vitality that is missing from places that on paper are doing much better. A lot of places end up in this muddled middle state and achieve a sort of homeostasis. That’s what’s going on in these cases where “the best food is in the worst neighborhoods,” or whatever. (Not that Woodbridge is at all in that category.) Eventually such places may decline much further, or else gentrify. But they can contain multitudes, or a lot of ruin, for a long time.

It’s clear to me that this is not exactly “my” landscape. Everywhere I’ve ever lived or am likely to live is more affluent, of newer construction, greener…nicer. But there’s something unique in these places. I don’t appreciate it as some patronizing observer. I see it and I feel its absence in the places I nonetheless feel more comfortable living in.

What I really take away is that if your judgment of a place is only on the negative side of the ledger, there is a lot you will miss, and deny to yourself.

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Related Reading:

Road Diary: More on Southern Maryland

Road Diary: Culpeper Edition

Road Diary: Driving College Park

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