Proposal: The 14-Up District

[porcupine]

What's wrong with "Mid City", anyway? wasn't there an old Mid City Diner (or cafe or something) at 14th and Rhode Island?

[RWBooneJr]

What's wrong with "Mid City", anyway? wasn't there an old Mid City Diner (or cafe or something) at 14th and Rhode Island?

The area around 18th and M is already known as Midtown.

[porcupine]

My point is that there's historical precedent. Or, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[Pat]

I say leave well enough alone. U Street Corridor works. People know that it means the areas around there.

[DaveO]

All of which brings to mind my favorite description of an area of DC going back to the early to mid 1980's. Sort of downtown 14th street....now all offices.

I relished the description of it back in that half decade when some called the area where the well heeled met the high heeled and the porn shop sites became office buildings.

[The Hersch]

This is not actually literally true. You could drive east on E Street from the expressway to 15th Street, but it went all wobbly from there to the other side of "Freedom Plaza" (a place and name I have detested since it was foisted upon us in the 80s--one of the worst public squares in Washington or perhaps the world), with Pennsylvania Avenue and E Street being sort of hashed back and forth. I don't think you could drive to Chinatown without being on Pennsylvania Avenue and one numbered street. Before they built Pershing Park and Freedom Plaza, I can't remember exactly how those streets ran, but that was long before the 1990s.

The other day, I stumbled on a wonderful website with lots of historical photographs of Washington. One such photograph I reproduce here:

We're looking west; Pennsylvania Avenue runs from the lower left to the upper right. National Theater is on the right, the Pulaski statue is at the bottom, the then-District Building is at the far left. Sweeping down from the upper left, making a broad curve across Pennsylvania, and continuing to the lower right is E Street NW, so you could indeed drive on E Street from the Expressway to Chinatown. This photograph is dated April 1, 1958, well before the E Street Expressway was slashed through Foggy Bottom, but I believe this was the configuration of these streets until they built the awful Freedom Plaza, starting in 1979 (well, except for the streetcars).