![]() The tourist map has also become more dense. eateries by such global food luminaries as Alain Ducasse and Wolfgang Puck. That, in turn, has prompted the opening of D.C. Indeed, a generation of local and international chefs-including Eric Ziebold, Ris Lacoste, Michel Richard, and José Andrés (GQ's 2009 Chef of the Year)-have transformed the city into a top-tier dining town, says D.C. You can't swing a briefing paper without hitting a swank club or bistro that opened in the last five minutes. Walking around town, I see streets once lined with boarded-up buildings and weedy abandoned lots now erupting with new life and energy. Washington in 2010 is almost unrecognizable from the place I began calling home in 1990, when the city was notorious for its ranking as the nation's "murder capital" and for the mayor who got busted smoking crack. As I made my way through the new D.C., it became clear that I had to throw away my old map-and the preconceptions that came with it. In a big, complex city you build a mental map of where it's safe to venture and where you wouldn't want to wander after dark. Around this nucleus orbits Greater Washington, one of the most highly educated, traffic-snarled metropolitan regions in America, whose sprawl stretches from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains and is home to more than five million people. The city is remarkably bright and airy, given its size and importance. an unusually European skyline, one closer to that of Paris than that of Manhattan. The spaciousness of the boulevards and the low profiles of the buildings, enforced by strict zoning laws (in general, no building can be higher than 130 feet), give D.C. ![]() This downtown area has great bones, as architects might put it. ![]() Around it cluster leafy parks lined with gorgeous Victorian row houses. The core remains what George Washington commissioned, the "federal" area dominated by hulking government buildings, later interspersed with monuments and museums. One of its assets, which it shares with other alpha cities, is that there are many Washingtons, nesting within each other like Russian dolls. can now claim its place among the world's great cities. George Washington believed this new federal town, built in the fields, woods, and marshes near the fall line of the Potomac, had the makings of an economic powerhouse. The city's namesake, the first President of the United States, envisioned a great urban area arising on a providential river. It was high time for me, a 20-year resident of D.C., to get out of my own daily circuit and check out this ballyhooed transformation. Often we see changes more quickly in other places than in our own backyards. Recent history has laid some of the groundwork for the change: Terrorism and wars have concentrated authority in the capital, and financial decision-making has shifted dramatically from Wall Street to the White House and the Federal Reserve.Īnd while there aren't scads of fabulously rich people here, battalions of well-heeled lawyers, lobbyists, contractors, and consultants have made metropolitan Washington one of the top five cities for per capita income. The nation's capital has been shedding its reputation as a dozing, one-dimensional city of policy wonks and lawyers with the advent of a new generation of artists, tech barons, and a younger set that hungers for edgier fare than a stroll on the Mall. As always, this combination attracts the brainy, the bold, the conniving, and the glamorous." Washington today is Rome at year zero: the most important place on Earth," says David Von Drehle, who spent many years as a reporter and editor for the Washington Post. From the May 2010 issue of National Geographic Traveler Maybe it's the shift of power from Manhattan, maybe it's a new optimism, but the city inside the Beltway has jettisoned its staid image for a wholesale revival of wide swaths of the cityscape.
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