I was scooped! East Bethesda, Maryland, is one of the most wonderful neighborhoods in all of America. Really.
We have lovely tree-lined streets, mostly small brick houses built before the second world war to house the anticipated influx of government workers. And, still government workers live here. On my right is a lawyer at justice and on my left two bureaucrats (guys I mean that in a good way) for the censes department.Some of my neighbors have lived here their entire lives; and raised their now college-aged children on this street in these small houses. Many have moved here in the last eight years and have young children: at least 25 kids under 10 on our street alone. In five years, we'll have a regular teen gang. One single mother moved here just to send her son to Bethesda Chevy Chase High School two streets over.
One family is from Poland and an other from Germany. There are couple of rental houses. But even the noisy kids who are renting Mohammid's house attended the block party in September. A couple of guys put out their grills; everyone brought something. With the street blocked off, the kids road their bikes and hoolahooped in the middle of the pavement.
It is a wonderful block. Mark Oppenheimer's writes wonderfully about his block and his research is fantastic. He asked experts to discuss why his block works: not much traffic, wide side walks, front porches, all of the stuff urban planners have been talking about since I took urban affairs courses in college in the '70s.
But my street works even though we don't have porches or a sidewalk; and we do have traffic. I don't think we're quite as knitted together. But we're walking distance from the Betheda Metro, NIH and the growing Naval Hospital. We're on the edge of huge vibrant downtown, with hundreds of restaurants. CNNMoney.com named Bethesda the 5th best place to live.
Stay tuned, I'm going to up a slide show of our recent block party.
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