Local enclaves put the world's cultures just an L ride away

In "Globe trotting, Chicago-style," the Chicago Sun-Times describes various ethnic neighborhoods in the city. It's a lesson in outmigration, inmigration, and neighborhood stability. It's interesting to eavesdrop on people--once a Capitol Hill resident was discussing going to Little Italy in Baltimore and lamenting how DC doesn't have ethnic neighborhoods.

It did. But with outmigration and the relatively high cost of property and rents in the city, most new immigrants moved straight to the suburbs, which is why there is a huge Asian community in Fairfax County, and more Latinos in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs than in DC.

There was an interesting bit in The Express about how someone visiting the city wrote in his blog that he saw no Chinese people in Chinatown DC. Well, that's true too, for the same reasons.

Only by reading fiction such as by George Pelecanos do you get a sense of the old neighborhood and ethnic boundaries in the city. E.g., on H Street, you had Greeks--running the restaurants--and Jews (a synagogue was at 8th and I Streets NE and a kosher restaurant not too far away down H Street). But that's not acknowledged too much in terms of the current "history" of the neighborhood.

Photo of DC Chinatown Starbucks by Racing Squirrel.