Washington, D.C., 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, but at the same time I am also a child of flyover land. I was born in the Midwest and lived for more than 40 years in various cities along the banks of the Mississippi River. I cannot not claim that living in Missouri, Illinois, and Minnesota gives me any special insight into the lives of those who live in Washington. But growing up on the Midwestern prairie literally gave me a point of view, a way of looking at the Midwestern landscape -- its towns, farmland, and forests -- that I was not conscious of until I tried to photograph the streets of this East Coast city. Eventually that flatlander's point of view led me to a panoramic technique for photographing those 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 couple of blocks farther 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 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 homes in the surrounding neighborhood were also being built.

The photograph above, the first of the whole project, was shot 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 the time those addresses housed respectively a tattoo parlor and a thrift shop. 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 changes over the The photographs in this series document the changes that I've seen over the past twenty years.

The project area consists of three sections of Rhode Island Ave, each two blocks long. Clicking on any of the links below will take you a page where you can view that stretch during four time periods over 20 years

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