The dude above, in full 1965 black and white, is one Sonny Bono, once married to a woman named Cher, whom you may remember. Back in 1965, Sonny’s hair, clothes, and general assemblage were considered risible among the geriatric set, causing Sonny to protest.
Today, since its selection as a co-site for almighty Amazon, Crystal City, Virginia, bids fair to be the Sonny Bono of cities, ridiculed by such sophisticates as Andrew Sullivan–“a gray, dreary, soul-sapping, concrete maze of boring low-slung office buildings, chain stores, and malls”–and a host of other similarly unoriginal whiners. Since Amazon obviously wasn’t going to set up its new shop in downtown Manhattan, which is probably the only site Mr. Sullivan wouldn’t describe as “a gray, dreary, soul-sapping, concrete maze of boring low-slung office buildings, chain stores, and malls”, there was literally nothing Amazon could do to avoid the sneer.
While CC isn’t replete with soaring architectural masterpieces–and I don’t even live there, being several miles away in trendy Dupont Circle1–I can still put in a few good words for the place. CC is but a single Metro stop from an international airport, something that can be said about very few urban areas indeed. It is three stops from a train station serving the southern U.S. (Alexandria), and seven stops from Union Station in DC, serving the North, including, of course, New York. Alexandria, founded before DC, is pretty charming, with lots of seafood restaurants, etc., and you can take a boat, which is very chic, to “National Harbor”, across the Potomac, in Maryland, which is pretty much Party Central, as I understand it, though I’ve never been there myself.
I confess that I have little personal experience with Crystal City, but about twenty years ago, or maybe twenty-five, I was in one of those underground malls that people like to sneer at, and I found in what I’m pretty sure was a drugstore Stephen Spender’s excellent study of T. S. Eliot (called, simply, T. S. Eliot), which was well worth the reading. So if you’re ever in Crystal City, keep your eyes open.
Afterwords
You can, appropriately enough, buy Sonny Bono apparel on Amazon.
1. I’m pretty sure that Andy is in New York now (because why else would he be writing in New York?) but he used to live in Adams-Morgan in DC, about a mile north of the circle.
