Rich Mintz historical site: 21st and P NW, Washington
July 22nd, 2011 at 2:30 pm ET
Behind the basement doorway at left you’ll find my very first Washington apartment, from 1994. My friend TJ, when he moved to DC, lived in the basement apartment two doors down 15 years later; I’m glad to know the “English” (i.e., stoop-ceilinged, dim) basement apartment is still serving new arrivals to DC in the traditional fashion.
Mine was a narrow, nasty, dark little apartment, whose back room was somehow divided into two even narrower bedrooms, and we were moving from a sunny duplex apartment with two terraces in a (cheaply built, but what did I care in my 20s?) stucco building in West Hollywood, so it really was like moving underground. But it was DC, a big and important but pretty and livable city, at the center of the universe, and I was 10 minutes’ walk from the White House and the cherry blossoms were out and it was warm and comfortable even into the evening and bla bla bla.
I arrived in the early fall, as part of a corporate move (15 people) from California. My boyfriend wasn’t coming for a couple of months, so I had the run of the city. The movers dropped off all our stuff, which I somehow crammed into the place, along with my bike, and I spent the fall riding around town, learning my way around, meeting people, and generally having the kind of fun that you have when you’re exploring a new place. To this day, I still look forward to fall, not because it reminds me of the new school year, but because it reminds me of that September and October in DC, when I was biking around Dupont Circle in the warm evenings getting into trouble.
In retrospect, it was kind of a crappy time. The sewer backed up shortly after I moved in, and the landlord came in, draped everything I owned in plastic, and dug out the front room for three weeks; I had to step over a construction site to get to the bedroom. But did I care? No. I just got on my bike and went somewhere.
I have no idea what happened to that bike. I don’t even remember what kind it was. (Did I wear a helmet? I can’t remember.) But now, when I’m on a bikeshare bike in DC, biking down P Street, I’ll have a momentary flash of memory of biking along this very block 17 years ago in the early evening with a dark orange glow behind the trees.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
