Washington, DC, is more than Our Nation's Capital, more than just the office buildings and marble memorials that are clustered around the National Mall. It is also home to more than 700,000 people. While tourists generally don't see this "unofficial" part of Washington unless they get lost, many of those who commute into the city from their homes in Maryland and Virginia see far more of it than they would like. For them, the neighborhoods of D.C. are kind of “flyover” land, even when traffic is gridlocked and they are sitting still. The people who live in those neighborhoods, along with their homes and business, are seen mostly in glimpses out of car windows, through a glass darkly, as the Bible says.

I myself was one of those commuters for 25 years, driving daily from suburban Greenbelt, MD, to Georgetown University on the far side of Washington. But at the same time I am also a child of the national flyover land, that broad swath of cities and towns, farmland and forests and rivers, that lie between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. I was born in the Midwest and lived for more than 40 years in towns along the Mississippi River, from Cape Girardeau to Minneapolis. I would not claim that growing up in Mark Twain's country gives me any special insight into the lives of those who are natives of Washington. But growing up on the Midwestern prairie literally gave me a point of view, a way of looking at the landscape that I was not conscious of until I tried to photograph the streets of this crowded East Coast city. Struggling for a way to accomodate my flatlander's point of view eventually led me to a panoramic technique for photographing these streets.

Before I retired my daily commute from suburban Maryland into DC followed US Route 1, once known as "the nation's Main Street." I would join Route 1 in Hyattsville, Md., where it is named "Baltimore Ave," but just a few  blocks down the street and around a corner, it becomes "Rhode Island Ave," the name that it holds until it reaches Logan Circle in the heart of the city.

I have photographed along this route repeatedly for many years. When I began it was not as a conscious  project. I had no particular subject matter in mind, merely a desire to document what I could see from my car. But I found myself returning to a four-block stretch of Rhode Island Ave, between 20th St and South Dakota Ave NE, in the city's Woodridge neighborhood. This area is lined with small brick storefronts, most of which were built in the 1920's, when the first homes in the surrounding neighborhood were also being built.

The photograph at the top of this page was the first of what has beome my  Rhode Island Ave Project. I shot it on a June night in 2005. It is a composite of three exposures, showing the facades of two adjacent addresses: 2214 and 2216 Rhode Island Ave NE. At that time those addresses housed respectively a tattoo parlor and a thrift shop. More than twenty years on, these two buildings and many, of the others have been renovated and are now occupied by small businesses, as they were a hundred years ago. The area continues to evolve; my project documents its changes over these past twenty-odd years.

The core of this project consists of three sections of Rhode Island Ave, each two blocks long. Clicking on any of the images below (the images, not the text) will take you a page where you can view that stretch during four time periods over twenty years.

You can view photos from the rest of project area by using the navigation bar at the top of the screen to go to:

Here > More of Rhode Island Ave / US 1

where additional drop-down links will lead you along the route from Hyattsville to Logan Circle.

2000 - 2100 blocks Rhode Island Ave NE

North side of the street

2200 - 2300 blocks Rhode Island Ave NE

North side of the street

2100 - 2200 blocks Rhode Island Ave NE

South side of the street