The City as Modern Muse

"Once a place gets boring, even the rich people leave," he said. "Do I really want to live in a region where everybody looks and acts like me?"

Take Adams Morgan, which he cited in "The Rise of the Creative Class" as having the sort of multicultural sensibility and street life that creative-class types crave. A recent drive through the neighborhood on a Saturday night changed that view.

"I was in shock. . . . Adams Morgan has become something fundamentally different on the weekend," he said, referring to the throngs of inebriated, pizza-eating twentysomethings filling the streets. "This isn't the place it's going to happen. This is Las Vegas or something."

On U Street, Florida wondered whether revitalization had already extracted a price.

"I can barely see the legacy of Duke Ellington," he said. Authenticity, he mused, had been sacrificed for "success."

All was not lost, however.

On the way out of Busboys and Poets, a cafe-restaurant tucked inside a new condo development, Florida picked up a free literary journal titled "Divided City." In its pages, he appeared to find the sense of "realness" he had found lacking in the streetscape.

"Holy [expletive]. These people need to be in the debate," he said, paging through it intensely.

He stopped on a poem titled "Towards a Forced Migration of Cranes."

"Emu, ostrich, egret, owl, anything but crane," it read. "Any thing but the flock of cranes that has migrated to this city, migrated to this city to breed contempt and feast on the young and old yet tender, once bold people of this city."

"Holy [expletive], this is it. This is it!" he said. "Oh, this is amazing. It's capturing the emotion of how this city is lived."