THE ULTIMATE URBAN EXPERIENCE

As I approached my block late yesterday afternoon, I realized it was blocked off.  So was the next street, if not the alley between the two.  Police were all over the place, but the neighborhood itself seemed quieter than usual, even serene.  There were few people walking down the street;  if people were out, they weren't walking or even running  Instead, they were talking quietly in mall group among themselves.  What in the world was going on?

It was the ultimate urban experience; my own micro-neighborhood (i.e., the three vehicular pathways in my neighborhood - Corcoran Street, Que Street and 17th Street) were the subject of a threatened bomb attack, and for this reason the streets had been blocked off.  It seems that some crazed persons had been shouting curse and threats that he had a bomb in his car, which he had apparently abandoned on the 1600 block of 17th Street.  In a nutshell, he threatened to blow up everything that I hold dear.  While I had no fear my home would be going up in flames any time soon - I calculated it was just a little too far away for that to be likely - it certainly did lend a certain piquancy to an otherwise eerily silent hometown scene.

A bombing threat certainly puts matters into a clear, if alarming perspective.  It wasn't that the neighborhood had never before had threats made against it - for good reason, Corcoran Street was commonly known as Stab Alley when i first moved into the area in 1965.  I have seen several gun battles, up close and personal, taking place in real time on or immediately adjacent to my block.  In fact, a bomb went off at the nearby Argentinian Embassy two decades ago, that Embassy being located just across new Hampshire from the alley between Corcoran and Que - known to its inhabitants at Flat Rat Alley. The difference in character between a gunfight and a bombing, especially when one's own immediate neighborhood is the potential scene, is that of anticipation vs. reaction.  

What it does best is to put into sharp outline all the reasons for and against living downtown,  everything that is dear seems dearer, and everything that seems tawdry or tacky becomes tawdry beyond one's ability to bear one minute longer.  Some neighbors seemed either anxious or anticipatory, and the rest seemed somehow frozen in place.  No one seemed willing to accept the concept of a radically-changed neighborhood - and what could produce more change than a bomb?  There were overtones of grandiosity, as people made juicy comparisons with Bomb Threats They Had Known before, or merely imagined.  Possibilities were tossed around like a Soviet Safeway salad, and then subsided.

The talk finally ebbed fully when it became evident that nothing bad was really going to happen. Anticipation had deflated to mere comparison. All they had left for discussion was the results of uniting Diet Coke with Mentos candy, and that paled in comparison, at least it did until the shadows became darker and our Dupont Circle neighborhood retreated to the smartphones, the cell phones, the iPhones, iPads and other momentarily popular means of communications upon which it absolutely depends, to comment ruefully on the passing of one bright shining moment of real fear that had, for once, merely dissolved.