15. (1999) The Dulles corridor sprouts office towers and morphs into Silicon Valley East! Tech zillionaires party on Seventh Street NW and at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner! Ordinary houses in choice Zip codes in Arlington, Bethesda and the District bust through the $1 million mark! Valet parking, celebrity chefs and outdoor heaters remake Washington’s night life! The explosion of new technologies created a bubble that seemed as if it might never burst. After hitting a modern low of 519,000, the District’s population started to rise again. The District’s streets became a minefield of construction ruts, but who could complain? Crews were laying fiber-optic cable that would make Washington one of the world’s most connected cities, and connection brought the magical riches of the Internet. It seemed as if everything was changing: money (online trading and banking), housing (sell and search from your desk), work (résumés and job listings), love (online match services), sex (free porn), school (would teachers and buildings even be necessary?) and on and on. “Bricks and mortar” became shorthand for old-fashioned and obsolete — but buildings kept rising. Silver Spring would finally get its new downtown, the National Harbor development on the Potomac in Prince George’s County got the green light, and Whole Foods would put its largest store in the region on P Street NW, unleashing a wave of gentrification along the 14th Street corridor, which had sat forlorn for more than three decades after the 1968 riots.
16. (2000) In the ultimate partisan face-off in Washington history, the contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down not to who should win the presidency, but who did, bringing postmodernist deconstructionist battles from academia’s ivory tower into the homes of American voters. Whose facts would count? In the closest presidential election in a century, the power to decide devolved first from the nation’s voters to a few hundred semi-confused elderly voters in Florida and then to the nine justices of the Supreme Court.After the court’s 5-to-4 vote to select Bush and, later, the birthers’ false claim that Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen, neither of the last two presidents has been considered fully legitimate across the nation’s political divide.
17. (2001) Everyone walked through his or her own Ground Zero. We flew flags over highway overpasses. We learned alternative routes out of town. We made escape plans with those we loved. We woke in the small of the night to the vague howl of fighter jets that patrolled the skies over our homes. We joked about duct tape, then bought some more. We sent our armed forces overseas to gain revenge, then, when we looked up a decade later, they were still there and we were still here, wondering why we have to take off our belts and shoes before boarding an airplane. Every day since, in office lobbies, we have signed log books no one will ever look at. Every day since, we have shown ID cards to guards who don’t read them. Every day since, we wait for the next one and wonder who has won.
18. (2002) What sense of security the 9/11 terrorists didn’t steal from us, the snipers did. Whereas the jihadist attacks succeeded in creating a terror that first united and later divided us, the personal vulnerability many Washingtonians felt in the days after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was eventually displaced by debates over foreign policy and two wars. But the two snipers who shot at random people from the trunk of a 1990 Chevy Caprice aimed directly at us, targets chosen solely because we lived here. They killed 10 people. Their 23-day reign of terror focused on our most ordinary activities: pumping gas, going to school, getting a bite to eat. There was no white box truck, but suddenly white box trucks were everywhere, each of them a threat. A decade later, those who were children during those days remember it as the time they learned that their parents could be more afraid than they were.
19. (2004)
The design and completion of the National World War II Memorial on the Mall was done in a hurry, a laudable effort to honor — while some of them were still alive — the 16 million Americans who served in the military during the most ambitious undertaking in the nation’s history. The memorial to a war that cost 400,000 U.S. lives, built in a classical style reminiscent of many European war memorials of an earlier age, was roundly dismissed by critics. The New York Times called it “a shrine to the idea of not knowing or, more precisely, of forgetting. It erases the historical relationship of World War II to ourselves. It puts sentiment in the place where knowledge ought to be.” Other critics compared it to the Soviet Union’s war memorials or even to the fascist style beloved by Hitler and Mussolini. Future generations will decide if the memorial has the lasting power of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Wall, I.M. Pei’s East Wing of the National Gallery of Art or James Freed’s Holocaust Museum, designs that communicate an enduring belief that Americans will always strive for a more perfect union. For the moment, the World War II Memorial is a gathering place for those who already know. The surviving World War II veterans mostly love the place. Tears roll down their cheeks as they walk their younger relatives through the memorial, proudly set at the center of the Mall, in the core of our collective memory.
20. (2005) After a 33-year absence so devastating that some Washingtonians lost their sense of place and aligned themselves with a team in Baltimore, baseball overcame its twice-burned bias against the nation’s capital and gave Washington a third chance. The area’s economic boom and persistent position atop any list of the nation’s most affluent metropolises — along with the fact that the Montreal Expos were a flop and baseball had nowhere else to turn — finally led Commissioner Bud Selig and his fellow owners to spurn the fulminations and threats of Orioles owner Peter Angelos and move a franchise to the District. The city’s cause was helped considerably by the D.C. government’s willingness to front the money to build a new stadium — a decision that divided District voters and helped deliver the mayoralty to one of the deal’s leading opponents, then-D.C. Council member Adrian Fenty. Soon, bang-zoom went the fireworks, and curly W’s appeared on red caps from Manassas to Mitchellville.
21. (2007) Egged on by residents who clamored for action after a doubling of Prince William County’s Hispanic population between 2000 and 2005, the county passed the toughest anti-illegal-immigrant law in the nation. Police were authorized to check the immigration status of anyone they stopped on suspicion of committing an infraction. The crackdown led to huge protests by Latinos, about 8,000 of whom later left the county, perhaps because of the new law but in many cases because of the precipitous decline in construction jobs following the economic crash of 2008. The crowds of young men hanging out on street corners seeking the work of day laborers largely dissipated, but the crime rate did not change much. Most residents pronounced themselves pleased with the law’s impact, and studies concluded that Prince William had effectively pushed some Latinos to neighboring jurisdictions.
22. (2007) Everyone wanted D.C. public schools to get better. But which schools and better for whom? Adrian Fenty won the mayoralty by promising he’d improve schools throughout the city, but while his dynamo of a schools chief, Michelle Rhee, blazed a trail of firings, hirings and renovations through every ward, she did so with a brazen disregard for local politics and the sensitivities of race and class. The result was dozens of shuttered schools, stunning new facilities at many D.C. schools, a new generation of teachers, a one-term mayor (whose replacement immediately showed Rhee the door) and a resurgence of black frustration over the city’s changing racial and economic demographics.
23. (2008) The near-collapse of the world’s economy emptied out suburban developments that had been home to working people who had surprised even themselves by their ability to get mortgages their incomes didn’t remotely support. In Prince William and Prince George’s counties, foreclosure signs seemed to dot every block. In the District, the baseball stadium-sparked construction boom froze. In the Dulles corridor, tech companies dissolved, leaving office buildings hungry for tenants. Unemployment throughout the region spiked, and the fact that the rate here was well lower than almost everywhere else in the nation was little solace for those who painfully discovered just what it is to try to survive without means in one of the country’s most expensive markets. The economic free-fall slammed every income level. Fortunes shrank, some dramatically, especially after investment whiz Bernard Madoff turned out to have been a world-class thief. The resulting surge of schadenfreude over the suffering of wealthy individuals and institutions didn’t last long, as local charities suffered from the loss of donations from some of their most stalwart supporters.
24. (2009) After a spontaneous explosion of people onto Washington’s streets on election night, the city played host to the most remarkable inauguration party since John Kennedy’s nearly half a century earlier. Young and old, black and white, Democrats and independents and even some Republicans flooded the Mall and much of the District’s center to celebrate America’s first black president, a cool, young, inexperienced senator whose promise of change spoke deeply to an electorate frustrated by both parties’ failure to engage with the fact that the country had gone seriously off the rails. Would Barack Obama live up to the hype or even to his own soaring rhetoric? Would he challenge the system in real and penetrating ways? Those questions would bedevil the president in the years to come, but for the moment, he was a singular avatar of change, a vessel overflowing with voters’ hunger to believe in the enduring power and promise of the American dream.
25. (2011) Two years after more than a million people massed on the Mall to place their trust in a new leader, Washington had morphed into a target of frustration and wrath from all sides. The tea party on the right, the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left and a besieged middle class in the center were united in the greatest expression of economic anxiety and political distress the nation had seen since the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s. The right blamed big corporations and big government. The left blamed big corporations and big military. The little guy wondered what had happened to the great American promise of class mobility, the idea that if you worked hard, you’d get far. The government teetered on the verge of shutdown, its leaders unable to agree on much of anything. Yet even in this time of sky-high unemployment that now seemed baked into the system, Americans took to the streets and social media in impressive numbers, refusing to let go of the ideals of a country founded in revolt against the elites. “We are the 99 percent,” they said, convinced that it was the people, not the banks or corporations, that were truly too big to fail.
Marc Fisher is a Washington Post staff writer. He can be reached at marcfisher@washpost.com.
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