Seeing the world from a new point of view

Every year about this time, I start pining for New York.

When spring warms the air, I yearn to get outside and walk. What better place to walk than the streets of Manhattan, jam-packed with tourists jostling shopping bags, taxis careering into crosswalks, diners spilling out of restaurants onto sidewalk tables, concert-goers heading to the parks, apartment dwellers hanging at their favorite Starbucks, and saxophonists and violinists crooning on the corner?

New York City is always alive, but never moreso than in the spring.

I lived in Manhattan such a short time, but my addiction to urban buzz remained. As a girl coming of age in Upstate New York, I dreamed of one day living in The City. When that day came, it was everything I’d imagined, and more.

It’s hard to justify my decision 30 years ago to move to Washington, D.C., a city I’d never liked. First of all, it was so clean. Second, where were the skyscrapers? Third, where could you shop? Hecht’s, Garfinkel’s and Woodward & Lothrop department stores just didn’t cut it. Fourth, in a city full of bureaucrats, the streets emptied at 5 p.m. Where was the nightlife? Fifth, Washington had no style, and worse, it didn‘t care.

Those were five of my top 10 reasons to hate D.C.

Don’t get me wrong. Life has gone well for me here. Northern Virginia is a wonderful place to raise children. We have terrific friends. But it isn't New York.

Many years ago, in the midst of a got-to-move-back-to-NYC fit, I was contacted by a psychic. Kathy -- who lived in Chelsea -- was the cousin of a close friend and felt prompted to interpret a dream I’d had. She asked my friend to deliver this message: “You won’t move back to New York, at least not right away. But New York will come to you.”

I took some comfort in Kathy’s prediction.

In the years since, New York has come to me in little ways. At first, it was the expansion of the subway (which for years I refused to call “Metro”). A few of my favorite NYC vendors discovered D.C.: Macy’s. Saks. Tiffany’s. Balducci’s. Barnes & Noble. Later I found my job at the Loudoun Times-Mirror with its editorial staff of transplanted New Yorkers. People who spoke the same language.

Meanwhile, 20-story buildings began erupting from a vast woods in the heart of Reston, within walking distance of my house. My view was changing.

Technically, mid-town Manhattan spawned Reston. In 1961, Robert E. Simon, a native New Yorker, took some money from his family’s sale of Carnegie Hall and bought 6,750 acres in western Fairfax County for a new kind of town. The planned pièce de résistance was Reston Town Center, a walkable urban core rising like Venus from a suburban sea.

Within that core today are towering office buildings on top of retail, sidewalk cafés and fine dining establishments, trendy boutiques, outdoor performance venues and high-rise condos with doormen. Traffic has accumulated so that inching along Reston Parkway in the early evening mimicks a bumper-to-bumper crawl down Park Avenue. While many residents decry the “Manhattanization” of Reston, I’m ecstatic. Bring it on!

Saul Steinberg’s 1976 poster, “The New Yorker: The USA as Viewed from 9th Avenue,“ above, hangs over my family room sofa. (Over the fireplace is a painting of One Gramercy Park, from my old neighborhood.) I was looking at that classic poster the other day. I realized it looks an awful lot like Reston.

A few quick changes and the deed is done. Ninth Avenue morphs into Presidents Street and 10th Avenue to Library Avenue. The Hudson becomes Herndon, and Jersey is replaced by Loudoun. The rest of the illustration stays exactly the same, even the westward orientation.

That photo up there, on the right? That's Reston.

It may not be New York, but it might be the next best thing.