What the City Repairs, It Reveals

A September 11 Walk Through Washington, Hidden Disability, Memory, and the Life Between the Buildings

By HH Prince DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar

On September 11, I stepped outside near my friend Beverly’s place in Washington, D.C., and started walking. There was no assignment attached to the day and no particular destination that needed to become a story. I wanted to be outside, take photographs, move through the neighborhood, and allow the streets to decide what deserved my attention.

Yet September 11 is not an ordinary date for me in Washington.

One year earlier, Beverly and I had spent part of September 11 in observance, listening as names were read and lives lost in the attacks were remembered. There was something powerful in simply standing there and listening, thinking about New York, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, the first responders, workers, passengers, families, and ordinary people whose lives became permanently connected to that date.

Last year had asked me to stand still and listen.

This year I was walking.

That contrast stayed quietly underneath the entire day.

One September 11 had asked me to remember by standing still. This one seemed to ask me to remember by paying attention.

There is something about walking that allows a city to speak differently. In a car, much of what sits between destinations becomes scenery. On foot, you notice where the sidewalk changes, where an old business survives beneath new construction, where something has been torn from a wall but not completely removed, where flowers have been planted, where a door has been locked, where a ramp begins, and where an elevator that is supposed to provide access simply does not work.

That was one of the first things I encountered.

Near the Metropolitan Branch Trail stood an elevator with posted operating hours from 7:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. Another notice directed people toward an alternate ramp at M Street. The information looked clear enough. The infrastructure was there. The sign told me that access existed.

The elevator was not functioning.

For many people, that might register as an inconvenience. Walk farther. Find the ramp. Take another way. Add a few minutes to the journey.

But disability changes the meaning of distance.

For someone using a wheelchair or walker, someone with limited mobility, or someone managing pain, stiffness, fatigue, or another disability that cannot immediately be seen, a few additional blocks are not necessarily a minor inconvenience. The existence of another route does not erase the failure of the route immediately in front of you.

I live with spondyloarthritis and a hidden disability, so these details do not remain theoretical for me. I understand what it means to look capable while your body is quietly calculating how much farther you can go, how much energy you need to reserve, whether there will be somewhere to sit, and what today’s activity may ask of you tomorrow. Someone watching you walk may never see any of that.

That is part of what hidden disability means.

It also means accessibility cannot be measured only by what has been installed. An elevator on an architectural plan is not the same thing as an elevator working when someone arrives and actually needs it. A sign pointing toward accessibility does not make the inaccessible accessible.

Standing there in the nation’s capital, that contradiction was difficult to overlook. We often speak about accessibility as though construction itself completes the responsibility. Build the elevator. Install the ramp. Put up the sign. The requirement has been addressed.

But people do not experience requirements on paper.

They experience whether the door opens.

Whether the elevator moves.

Whether the ramp can actually be reached.

Whether the public space that claims to belong to everyone can, in practice, be entered by everyone.

I kept walking.

The streets gradually carried me toward Union Market, and the neighborhood began changing around me. Older commercial buildings sat beside newer residential development. Delivery trucks moved between people walking, cycling, eating, working, and photographing the area. Nothing felt frozen in a single period. The neighborhood seemed to be holding several versions of itself at once.

That interested me.

Cities rarely replace themselves cleanly. They accumulate. A new apartment building rises while an older grocery remains. A polished storefront appears beside a business whose sign has been fading for years. Something new arrives before what came before it has completely disappeared.

And sometimes what has disappeared still looks strangely present.

That is what I saw at Lunas de Buenos Aires.

The bright turquoise exterior caught my attention before I completely understood what I was looking at. Advertisements remained. Food imagery remained. Colors still suggested activity and hospitality. Everything about the exterior seemed to be inviting somebody inside.

But the business was shuttered.

There was no business operating behind those bright invitations.

I do not know what circumstances caused it to close, and I would not manufacture a story about its ending simply because I stood in front of the building. What I could see was the strange visual contradiction left behind. The outside still seemed to be saying, come in, while the silence behind it said something entirely different.

It did not look carefully retired.

It looked interrupted.

There was something almost unsettling about how alive the advertisements still appeared. It was as though the business had ended before the building itself had been given time to understand that it was over.

That stayed with me because we celebrate beginnings so loudly.

New restaurant.

Grand opening.

New development.

Ribbon cutting.

Investment.

Expansion.

Coming soon.

Endings are different.

A business closes, and eventually the neighborhood keeps moving. The workers stop arriving. The customer who had a regular order finds another place. An owner’s plans become part of a story most people passing the building will never know. The signs remain for a little while longer.

Then those disappear too.

Cities advertise their beginnings loudly. Their endings are often much quieter.

The closed storefront made me look differently at everything surrounding it. A city street can function like an archive without ever calling itself one. A torn political poster, an old business sign, plywood over a window, graffiti partly covered by something newer, a handwritten menu, an advertisement for something you can no longer buy, each contains evidence of a moment already beginning to pass.

We normally imagine archives as places where somebody intentionally preserves the past.

The street preserves things accidentally.

At least for a while.

From there, I found myself inside Byrdland Records, surrounded by vinyl, album covers, books, turntables, and the physical act of searching. In a world where algorithms increasingly decide what appears next, there is something almost intimate about flipping through records and discovering something because it happens to be sitting beside something else.

Music carries its own kind of memory. Songs become attached to generations, neighborhoods, relationships, nightlife, protest, heartbreak, migration, identity, and moments in our own lives that can suddenly return because a familiar sound begins playing.

Standing in that store, another thought began following me through the neighborhood. We measure development largely by what gets added: apartments, restaurants, offices, investment, construction. But communities also have to be measured by what survives.

Who stays?

What remains recognizable?

Which businesses continue giving a neighborhood its character?

Who can still afford to participate in what the neighborhood is becoming?

Those questions rarely appear on the announcement for the next new development, but they belong in the conversation.

Later, the visual language of the walk changed again.

Color took over.

A large mural moved across brick in pink, yellow, blue, green, red, white, and black. My friend stood against it in a bright red shirt and almost became part of the composition. We stopped, took photographs, laughed, and spent time with a wall we might otherwise have passed without thinking very much about it.

I had walked into NoMa in Color, NoMa’s annual mural festival, almost by accident. The 2026 festival runs September 11 through 18, meaning my walk had brought me into the neighborhood on its opening day. The NoMa BID describes the festival as transforming the neighborhood into a living canvas and notes that more than 200 murals have been created in NoMa over the past decade.

I had not scheduled my afternoon around a mural festival.

I simply encountered one.

That may be part of what made it meaningful.

There is something democratic about public art. There is no ticket between the person and the work. No membership. No museum door. No expectation that someone understand the language of art before being permitted to experience it.

The neighborhood resident sees it. A child sees it. A delivery driver sees it. Someone coming home from work sees it. A visitor sees it. Someone who may never make plans to enter a gallery sees it.

The city becomes part of the exhibition.

And the artwork accomplishes something easy to underestimate.

It gets people to stop.

Stopping matters.

The longer I walked, the more I realized how much of this day was about stopping long enough to see what speed usually hides.

That became even clearer when I reached Alethia Tanner Park.

At first, I saw what most people probably see: greenery, native plants, a boardwalk, open space, places where people could gather, exercise, walk their dogs, sit, or simply move through the neighborhood.

Then I read the signs.

The landscape changed once I understood what I was looking at.

The meadow was not simply decorative. Alethia Tanner Park includes a bioremediation meadow and connections to the Metropolitan Branch Trail, and the landscape was intentionally designed to address the environmental history of the site through ecological systems rather than merely hiding that history beneath something new.

Plants were doing more than making the landscape beautiful. Some were supporting pollinators, contributing to stormwater management, stabilizing soil, or participating in environmental processes that help restore the land.

I stood there thinking about the difference between something looking healed and something actually participating in healing.

The land was being asked to heal.

That thought brought me back to the broken elevator.

A city can make something look new without necessarily repairing what is underneath. It can install accessibility infrastructure without maintaining access. It can redevelop land without fully acknowledging what happened to that land. It can build new businesses around the memory of old ones without asking what disappeared.

New is not necessarily healed.

Repair asks more from us.

It requires acknowledging what happened before and what still remains.

Then there was the name.

Alethia Tanner was born enslaved in Maryland in the 1780s. She purchased her freedom in 1810, helped secure freedom for members of her family, became an entrepreneur, and supported educational opportunities for Black Washingtonians. More than 2,100 people participated in the community process that ultimately selected her name for the park.

Today, her name occupies public space in the nation’s capital.

There is something profound in that transformation.

A Black woman who entered life under a system that legally denied her freedom is now part of the civic map of Washington.

People walk through a park carrying her name whether they know her history or not.

Children play there.

Neighbors meet there.

Someone exercises.

Someone sits quietly under a tree.

Someone else passes through on the way to somewhere entirely different.

History does not always remain behind glass.

Sometimes it enters ordinary life.

On September 11, that idea carried particular weight for me. We often think about remembrance through ceremonies, names read aloud, monuments, and designated places of memorial. Those things matter deeply. But memory also lives through the names we continue saying, the spaces we preserve, the histories we refuse to erase, and the ordinary places where people who came before us remain present.

By late afternoon, I thought the neighborhood had already given me more than I expected from a walk.

Then night fell.

And Washington changed again.

Music entered the story.

I found myself at Art All Night: Mambo Raro, presented by Goza and Manplesa at metrobar. The official program featured DJ Melina Polaris, live salsa from Orquesta Manplesa, dancing, food pop-ups, and music stretching from September 11 into the early hours of September 12. It was part of D.C.’s Art All Night celebration, bringing art and performance directly into neighborhood life rather than asking everyone to enter a formal cultural institution.

There were people gathered beneath lights. Music moved through the outdoor space. Strangers watched one another dance, filmed the performances, laughed, moved closer, and joined in. One performer opened enormous illuminated wings that shifted with the light and movement of the night.

The energy was entirely different from the quiet observation of the afternoon.

Yet it belonged to the same story.

I had spent hours thinking about how people move through public space.

Now I was watching people claim it.

There is an important difference between building a place and allowing people to create life inside it. Government can build a park. Developers can construct apartments. Planners can draw sidewalks. Artists can paint walls. Businesses can open their doors.

But people determine whether those places become community.

A DJ can help.

So can a dance floor.

So can a group of strangers deciding, for a few hours, that they will share the same music.

Earlier, the murals had made me think about what happens when art exists without a museum door. That night I saw the same idea expressed through performance. Art did not require everybody to enter a formal institution.

It met people where they already were.

And eventually I stopped simply observing.

I danced.

For someone else, that might be an ordinary detail from a night out.

For me, it carried more meaning.

Living with spondyloarthritis means movement is not something I take entirely for granted. The fact that I can walk through Washington, travel, photograph a neighborhood, and dance at night does not mean disability has disappeared from my body.

That is one of the misunderstandings surrounding hidden disability.

People often want disability to behave predictably.

If you need assistance one day, they expect you to need the same assistance every day. If you can walk, they may question why another day requires a wheelchair, walker, cane, or help. If you can dance at night, they may assume pain, fatigue, stiffness, or physical limitation cannot also be real.

Bodies do not operate according to the comfort of other people’s assumptions.

Some days require rest. Some require assistance. Some require changing the route. Some require deciding that the distance is too far.

And some nights, when the music is right, you dance.

Disability and joy are allowed to exist in the same body.

My dancing did not make the broken elevator less important.

My ability to continue walking did not mean somebody else should have been expected to.

My joy did not cancel the need for accessibility.

And disability did not cancel my joy.

Those truths can live together.

By the end of the night, I realized that the strongest parts of the day had not been individual attractions. They were the contradictions between them.

A city capable of filling the night with art, music, performance, and community still had an elevator that someone with a disability could not use.

A neighborhood capable of restoring environmentally damaged land still carried the history that made restoration necessary.

New development stood beside businesses that had survived earlier changes, while one brightly colored storefront still advertised a life that had already ended behind it.

A park carried the name of a Black woman once denied freedom under law.

Murals turned ordinary walls into public cultural space.

People turned an ordinary evening into community simply by showing up.

None of those truths cancels another.

That may be one of the things we sometimes resist.

We want a place to be either successful or failing, inclusive or inaccessible, improving or losing something, beautiful or broken.

Cities are rarely that simple.

A city can be doing something beautifully on one block and failing someone on the next.

We should be capable of celebrating one without becoming silent about the other.

A year earlier, September 11 had asked me to stand still with Beverly and listen.

This year, I walked.

But walking did not mean I had stopped remembering.

If anything, the day made me think more deeply about the importance of ordinary places. September 11 taught this country how quickly an office, an airplane, a hallway, a building, or a street someone had passed hundreds of times could become part of history.

Maybe that is why I found myself paying such close attention this year.

To the elevator button that did nothing.

To the bright advertisements on a business that was gone.

To records waiting to be discovered.

To paint spreading across brick.

To plants doing work beneath the beauty people first notice.

To the name Alethia Tanner.

To strangers dancing under lights.

To my own body still moving with them.

Washington usually tells visitors to look upward, toward domes, monuments, memorials, and institutions.

On this September 11, I found myself looking much closer to the ground.

By the end of the day, the question I carried with me was not whether Washington is changing. Cities are always changing.

The question was:

Who gets to participate in the city that change creates?

What a community chooses to repair tells us something about what it values.

What remains inaccessible tells us something too.

What survives deserves our attention.

And so does what disappears quietly.

Last year, September 11 reminded me of the importance of standing still long enough to remember.

This year, it reminded me that walking can also be a form of attention.

Somewhere between remembrance and movement, between a broken elevator and a dance floor, between a shuttered storefront and a wall covered in new color, between damaged soil and plants quietly helping to repair it, I understood the city a little differently.

Not through what it announced.

Through what it revealed.