“Cities , like cats, reveal themselves at night.” ~ Rupert Brook
One of the basic strategies of New Urbanist downtown revitalization is the creation of the “18- hour place.” The intent of such an approach is to activate a place at all times of the day, early morning through late night, so that the core of a neighborhood center, or a downtown, is actively used by a variety of different people, for different purposes, for the fullness of a day. The goal is to achieve places that are safe, memorable, enjoyable, and financially viable. This assumes an intimate, fine-grained mix of uses, including residential, shopping, entertainment, office and commercial, perhaps even some small-scale artisanal/ craft manufacturing. But what goes on when almost everyone is asleep, during those other 6 hours? What experiences and insights, spiritual and urbanistic, can be revealed to us on the streets at 3:30 in the morning? As Christopher Butler reminds us, the urban wanderer known as the flaneur seeks to discover the eternal by exploring and observing the transitory.
I spent most of my youth on a beach on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a somewhat isolated neighborhood of small summer vacation cottages, surrounded by salt marshes on three sides. The only social spot was a fishing pier which included a bar with burgers and fries, where I learned to play pool and pinball while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd on an old jukebox. I spent lots of time wandering around the beach and marshes by myself, particularly at night when mom thought I was asleep in bed. Beautiful shells, strange and stinky seaweed, rocks, tangled driftwood, and the occasional wooden shipwreck figure prominently in my memories. My friends and I would build bonfires on the beach and stay out until sunrise appeared over the Bay. Sitting on a sand dune late at night, surrounded by reeds and bayberry, watching the moon behind the waves all night, was a transforming experience. Although I often complained of being bored, as teenagers so often do, it was in retrospect a damned good childhood.
I’ve never seen a reason to stop this sort of late- night wandering and exploration. City or salt marsh, town, forest, or beach, it all provokes in me a sort of curious and detached wonder. I was inspired this summer, as a result of enduring a very long walk home after a late night social event, to make this an intentional adventure; to choose locations that intrigue me, experience them at a time when no one else would think to, say between the hours of 3:00 and 4:00 am, and share whatever appears.
Dyke Marsh and Crystal City, July 27
For several reasons, I chose to begin these adventures not in the city itself, but a park just outside the Beltway, along the Potomac River in Virginia. For a full urban experience, the complete Transect should be involved, not just downtown. So, a little bit of preserved nature set the tone. The location is also near the first boundary stone which gave Washington DC its shape, which seemed apt as a beginning point. Finally, my Tree is located there. I have formed a pretty close connection with one particular Linden tree; I read, write, and meditate under its branches, and it acts as a calming and centering influence, a doorway for my spiritual explorations, so to speak.
And what better time to begin of course, than under a full moon.
The full moon of July is known as the Hungry Ghost Moon in the Chinese tradition. I consider us all hungry ghosts in our essence, spirits temporarily embodied as human. When the hunger to grow and experience becomes overwhelming, we become incarnate, and like vampires, seek out what we need to feed, grow, and experience.
Vampires did appear that night in a sense, in the form of mosquitoes. More than I could bear… so much for meditating quietly with my Tree to ask Spirit for support and insight. Other than their buzzing though, what became apparent quickly was silence. At 2:30 am, the usual sounds of traffic along the GW Parkway, playing children, even the quacking of ducks, had stilled. The only activity I found came from unexpected encounters with wildlife. I had a staring contest with a beautiful red fox, and a race on my bike with a startled baby rabbit. I lost both times.
I began this nocturnal flaneury a good 8 miles from home, and I was on my bike. To get away from the buzzing vampires and eventually home, I decided to continue the night by riding back along Route 1, from Alexandria to Arlington. This took me through Crystal City and past the Pentagon. I quickly remembered that even with very light traffic at this time of night, 3 am, suburban streets are far more frightening than busier traffic on more urban ones. Suburbia as a design model is completely focused on cars and predictability, and so is averse to anything unusual or unexpected, such as a bicyclist.
Crystal City is an essentially linear corridor of 1960’s-era office buildings running parallel to the Potomac River near National Airport. Large defense contractors such as Northrup Grumman and Boeing dominate the area, though it has been trying to reposition itself as something more than a soul-less office canyon. Its defining feature when built was its underground corridors, lined with shops, connecting many of the buildings along a multi- block area. This of course killed most pedestrian street activity. It is slowly perking up though, with residential and entertainment uses, but for the most part it still feels strained; street– level commercial activity in what felt like every third building consists of enormous gym clubs, each with large windows along the sidewalk displaying weight lifting equipment and dozens of stationary bike machines. I noted the irony and rode on.
In various urban parks, Arlington County has seen fit to begin placing wooden bars across the seats of benches, to discourage the homeless from sleeping rough in public spaces. Perhaps this was the cause of the homeless camp I stumbled upon in a side corner of parking lot at Target. So many of our municipal management and land use decisions end up not really solving a problem so much as merely shifting it elsewhere. Not unlike much of our psychic lives I suppose; putting a patch over a problem doesn’t make it go away, it just pops up again elsewhere in some other form. Perhaps homelessness should be thought of not as a problem in itself, but a symptom of some larger failing.
Aside from mosquitoes and some homeless brethren, the most common sign of life at 3 am comes in the form of 
maintenance workers. The late night silence was broken only by my pedaling, until a jackhammer shook me out of the calm. Sewer and street repairs have to take place sometime, and a crew of workmen were hard at the task of repairing a broken pipe. We rely so much on this hidden infrastructure and rarely give it a moments consideration. So too are our we reliant on our unconscious, the unseen, foundational infrastructure of our lives. Aren’t our dreams like those workmen, appearing at night to repair and maintain our psychic being?
14th Street, Shaw, and Blagden Alley, August 14
While the evocative sensual experience of the first adventure was silence, on this occasion it was the cool temperature and soft breeze. It’s definitely NOT what is expected of an August night in Washington DC. On a bike at 3 am in shorts and T-shirt, it was almost too cool. It helped wake me up though, and somehow gave a sense of timelessness to the night.
The quiet, deserted streets of DC in the pre-dawn hours are still much more active than expected, certainly compared with Crystal City, with quite a few bikes on the street, mostly restaurant workers heading home. Even a pedicab was still cruising for paying passengers, with more hope than success. The lights inside the iconic Bens Chili Bowl revealed a few people still hungry enough to risk heartburn.
Away from the shuttered bars and restaurants of 14th and U Streets, on 9th, things calmed down even more. Traffic was thin enough so that I felt 
like I owned the streets, riding down the center without a care. The homeless and late night locals want to know what I was up to… if I’m not out to score drugs, what the hell am I doing here now?! One tries to give me the usual patter, his practiced line about needing money since by the grace of God he just arrived from Carolina. He figures me out quickly enough to drop that and we chat about life a bit before moving on. Turning up an alley, I must veer to avoid a couple of what I thought were old paint cans, only to discover they were the booted feet of a homeless man sleeping in a doorway.
The alleys of the Shaw neighborhood no longer have the amount of trash or graffiti I remember from my semi-punk days in the 1980’s, but still enough to make it clear that it isn’t completely gentrified, still has something of a scrappy edge. Completely different worlds can occupy the same space for very different purposes. The juxtaposition of hipster renovations and the long-time working class give a sense of adjacent secret intimacies, with neither culture truly knowing the other, yet influencing each other in ways they may not even recognize.
Blagden Alley (bounded by 9th, 10th, M, and N Streets NW) and the nearby Naylor Court, strike me as excellent examples of this. The near-downtown neighborhoods of DC were at on
e time criss-crossed with service alleys, home to horse stables, warehouses, workshops, and barely-habitable housing for the underclass. The alleys that remain today went through a long period of decline, eventually dissolving into almost complete abandonment. For about the past ten years though, Blagden Alley has been dramatically and creatively redeveloped, and is now the home of upscale restaurants and residences, craft cocktail lounges, coffee bars, the ever-present yoga studios, and creative class 
consulting outfits. Its defining feature is the public artwork adorning various walls and garage doors. To really get a feel of what the place has been over time requires a late night visit, when the current life does not dominate, and the energy of history can be more easily felt. Blagden Alley lies at the confluence of three worlds; the downtown professional crowd, uptown creatives, and long-time working class African Americans. These edges where various cultural ecosystems meet, are much like natural points of transition; ocean and beach, field and forest, jungle and savannah, day and night. It is at such places that different species, and different cultures, intermingle and make unexpected magic happen. The trick is to not unbalance the fine line of intermingling, which I think has been the challenge of urbanism and civilization, from the beginning.
The process of revitalizing a city has focused on increasing efficiency and sustainability, all very laudable and rational. Humans though are essentially irrational creatures, and story-tellers at heart. Aren’t cities therefore basically irrational efforts as well? For all their practical reason for existing, cities are really about telling stories. Whatever insights can be found on deserted night-time streets are available to us during daylight hours, but there are other things to focus on then, complicating our ability to take it all in. Spending time on the streets at the late hours before dawn is a bit of a waking dream; the unconscious of the city rises more easily to awareness. A city is all about the gathering of people to tell each other stories, but really making sense of both a place and its inhabitants, for me, comes by observing the place in their absence.
~ To be continued …
TheUrbanEvolutionary 
Love your writing and insights, Will.
LikeLike