Newsstand in Paris. Photo by the author.

Lively public spaces are a vital part of a livable city. Although DC has street vendors, unlike Paris, Philadelphia, and New York, we don’t have one element that can help create a vibrant place: the newsstand.

Although innocuous to some, the interaction every morning with vendors that pass out the Washington Examiner and Washington Post Express fosters a connectivity fundamental to urban life.

"I’ve had about three babies named after me. People bring me cards and food,” a Washington Examiner vendor said recently. “People make our day and we make theirs.”

Newspaper boxes are mechanized while newsstands are personalized. “In publishing lingo,” wrote the Post in 1991, “a reader is said to have a ‘relationship’ with a newspaper or magazine when he buys it all the time, feels strongly about its editorial content and absorbs at least some of its advertising messages.”

Food trucks have become popular and ubiquitous in the city, largely because of the feeling of relationship they engender. Wouldn’t newsstands on the streets do the same for us cerebrally?

In DC, to pick up a copy of your favorite magazine or an out-of-town newspaper, you have to step through a door. What if DC had newsstands like other cities and you could grab a magazine on the run?

Newsstands “forcefully demonstrate that New York, unlike cities whose streets have lost their vitality to car culture, still teems with on-the-run pedestrians,” according to the New York Times.

According to the same article, until 2003 newsstand operators owned their stands and paid the city $1,000 for two-year licenses. Then the city enacted Local Law 64, “which required owners to give up their stands but allowed them to operate city-owned structures at no cost.” Not surprisingly, newsstands, the intellective apotheoses of city sidewalks, began to vanish.

The momentary relief newsstands can bring to the daily grind of DC life was wistfully immortalized in 1992’s A Few Good Men. Tom Cruise’s character, Daniel Kaffee, gets up with Luther, who runs a local newsstand, several times throughout the movie to match wits and exchange clichés. One memorable scene:

Kaffee: How’s it goin’, Luther?

Luther: Another day, another dollar, captain.

Kaffee: You gotta play ‘em as they lay, Luther.

Luther: What comes around, goes around, you know what I’m sayin’.

Kaffee: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Luther: Hey, if you got your health, you got everything.

Kaffee: Love makes the world go round. I’ll see you tomorrow, Luther.

As a unique commercial marker paying homage to the past heydays of newspaper boys and the ongoing intellectual gentrification of the city, newsstands could add authenticity by invigorating DC’s public streets.