What If You're the Placeless One?

The joy of getting to know ordinary places deeply

A new hotpot/Korean barbecue restaurant recently announced its opening in Herndon, a small town in Fairfax County near my home. I was trying to find the announcement the other day, which I had seen on Facebook, but I couldn’t.

My wife thought it might have been called K-Pot, so I looked up that name. That wasn’t it, but that was the name of a local chain I guess we sort-of remembered, which also served hotpot and Korean barbecue. So when I searched “K-Pot Herndon,” I got the actual K-Pot in an area known as Seven Corners, about 30 minutes away.

“Huh, I know that building,” I said. Here it is, under a previous tenant. It’s interesting; it looks like it used to be something.

Then my wife said she thought this new place had a location in or near Rockville, Maryland, so I searched “hotpot Rockville.” There are a few hotpot restaurants there, but the one she was thinking of was another K-Pot.

“I know that building too!” I said. (The new place in Herndon is called H-Pot.) Here it is: one of these interesting double-decker strip plazas you see in more densely populated suburbs.

I had just recently passed both of these buildings while out on little road trips (this one and this one). I thought this was kind of cool. Once in awhile I’m reminded that years of exploring these everyday landscapes in the D.C. suburbs have given me a sense of familiarity and a sense of place. It feels granular to me; it’s like putting on sharper and sharper pairs of glasses, seeing the endless suburban sprawl sharpen into lots of specifics. I wrote about this in regard to identifying plants, reflecting on a recent nature walk. The same applies to buildings and places and businesses.

It’s fascinating how the generality of a lack of familiarity—“yeah, those are all…plants”—begins to give way to a sharpness of perception. The minute differences between this or that yellow flower, or this or that vine, start to become apparent. Sameness is in the eye of the beholder.

And I had a similar thought back last year when I gave a friend from Maryland a little tour of Virginia’s D.C. suburbs, and I realized I was now able to give the history of a whole bunch of buildings and places we passed:

My friend wasn’t here to learn the history of every Vienna building I’ve featured in this newsletter—four, I think!—but I found it hard not to point them all out. I told her, I can imagine being profiled in one of those long newspaper articles where a young journalist takes a long drive with an eccentric character. You know, something like this:

As we drive down Vienna’s Maple Avenue—a pretty typical Main Street, by appearances—Del Mastro comes alive. “You see that pool showroom? That used to be a Kinney Shoes. They had a signature sloped roof—you can still see it if you look at the satellite view on Google Maps.” “That bicycle store was a movie theater. Say, up in Maryland, there’s a movie theater that closed in 2001, and the posters are still hanging out front.” “This intersection? The trolley used to run through here. Down in Fairfax, you can still see a little piece of the right of way behind the Texaco station. Well, of course it’s not a Texaco anymore. But they didn’t repaint the porcelain exterior.”

He’s a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge. But does anyone still want an encyclopedia?

(Well, some people do. Thanks for reading!)

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It’s often said that the D.C. area, and particularly Northern Virginia, is “placeless” or “rootless” or, especially, “transient.” That nobody really stays or wants to stay; that there’s no real culture here, no identity which new residents will eventually adopt. I frequently hear this from conservatives, but I gather it’s a pretty widely held view.

It’s not made up out of nothing; it’s largely based on the fact that a lot of military, intelligence, defense, and appointed government staff come in and out constantly. And it is placeless, I suppose, in the way that most of American suburbia is, although I think there’s much more than meets the eye in these suburban landscapes.

But I disagree, really, with that whole characterization. Maybe I’m easily won over, but recognizing those two slightly interesting restaurant buildings, from months, really years, of traversing these suburban communities, I felt a sense of place.

A place is transient if you are transient; a place is rootless if you don’t put down roots. It’s easy to mistake our own perception of or approach to a place as something inherent in the place itself. It’s a rewarding and curious feeling to know a place so well that bits and pieces of it become landmarks. You populate it with your own memories and experiences, and that’s enough to enliven it. If you haven’t lived somewhere long enough to stop using GPS, I don’t think you can pronounce judgment on its worthiness as a “real place.”

I wonder how many people churn through the D.C. suburbs, leaving after a couple of years because, well, you leave after a couple of years. Thinking their detachment from the place is the place’s detachment from them.

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I sometimes write that I’m thankful or grateful to have discovered urbanism, broadly defined. I know others who have this same feeling. What I mean by that is that I think a lot of really deeply human ways of doing things have been lost, and that it’s easy to not really encounter them in daily life, and that urbanism is a way to remember them, encounter them, and once again make them present.

When I say “urbanism,” I mean much more than land use; I really mean creativity, granularity, enterprise, entrepreneurship, human activity at a small scale. Letting people strike out and give something a go. The commerce, society, and land use of a traditional city all arise out of that freedom. In a different form, we see a lot of that in suburbs today. Frankly, much of Washington, D.C. feels less “urbanist,” in my vague meaning, than much of the D.C. suburbs.

A place is a place you can call home and be at home. And here, I do.

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Related Reading:

Nothing Left to Park For

In Praise of Northern Virginia

Northern Virginia Tour

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