The Wharf

Author's Comments

The Wharf is unambiguously a human construction, and it does not pretend otherwise. Glass and steel, curated lighting, a marina full of boats that look recently polished. I used to resist places like this. I have come around, partially. What changed my thinking was blue hour in May, standing at the far end of the southernmost pier facing west over the Washington Channel. The sky does something specific here that I have not seen it do anywhere else along the Anacostia corridor. The gradient comes down in layers, and the water catches all of it at once. The boats become shapes. The city lights begin to assert themselves along the far bank. For about twenty minutes the whole scene is neither day nor night and the line between the engineered and the elemental blurs in a way that is genuinely interesting. Come back later, after nine, when the reflections are fully committed. Long exposures smooth the water into something almost lacquered, and the boat lights streak and double. It is not a subtle photograph. It is a vivid one, and sometimes that is what a place calls for. The crowds are real and constant in summer. I go on weekday evenings in September when the heat has broken and the dinner rush has not yet arrived. The piers thin out. The light does its thing without an audience. The Wharf is not a place I would call hidden or contemplative, but it is a place where, if you time it right, the city looks like it is trying to be beautiful, and mostly succeeding.

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