In 2014 I came back to the Forest Hills neighborhood of Washington to open Bread Furst. It wasn’t the first time I had spent my days (and nights) here.

The first was in 1962, when I was new to Washington and living in a townhouse on Wisconsin Avenue, next door to what is now Bistro Lepic. I had just started working as a research assistant for Howard K. Smith, a well-known news commentator who had recently left CBS and joined ABC News. Our office was located inside the WMAL radio station in a shopping center across the street from a plumbing store that is now Bread Furst.

That shopping center was wonderful. It had a People’s Drug Store, Kitchen Bazaar, Giant Supermarket, Scan (the Scandinavian furniture store), and several restaurants. One of them, Carmack’s, served simple but good home cooking. Mr. Smith and I often had lunch there.

I practically lived in the neighborhood during that year — breakfasting at the Hot Shoppe across Connecticut Avenue, working late into the night in our office, eager to prove myself a workaholic.

In early 1963 I left that job for one at the White House, and a few years later, in 1970, I returned to Forest Hills, a newly married man starting a police career. My wife and I bought a faux-Tudor house just behind that same shopping center.

It’s still there.

Each morning I walked up Albemarle Street to Connecticut Avenue to catch the “L” bus downtown to the Police Foundation. At the time I didn’t know anything about architecture, but I later learned that many houses in Forest Hills had been designed by important mid-century architects. The neighborhood had always been a kind of retreat — even Cleveland Park nearby once served as a summer escape from the city’s heat and mosquitos.

I left Washington again in 1972 for Boston, but in 1980 I came back once more — again to Forest Hills. By then my sister had opened Politics and Prose, and she kept nudging me toward a vacant storefront on her block. I wanted to turn my hobby into a food business, and with her encouragement, I opened Marvelous Market.

The neighbors were ecstatic. Many had lived abroad and recognized the breads we made. People came from Cleveland Park, Georgetown, Bethesda, and Chevy Chase. Marvelous Market was a huge success — until I ruined it (a story for another time).

For nearly two decades after that I was out of the neighborhood again, first opening The BreadLine downtown near the White House, and later consulting on bakeries. But in 2013, after my sister’s death, I decided I wanted to open a new bakery. I looked around the city until Andrea Reid, the commercial real estate agent I was working with found the ideal space: exactly across the street from the arcade where I had once worked for Howard K. Smith.

It felt like coming home again. It was coming home again.

By then, though, I had to watch my beloved arcade being demolished. Each day as I visited the construction site of Bread Furst, I also watched the slow dismantling of the place where I had begun my career. I remembered each shop as it disappeared — Carmack’s, our local Chinese restaurant Shanghai Garden, the barber shop, the drug store, the ABC office itself. It wasn’t easy to see it all come down.

I am not certainly not opposed to progress, and I am happy to have an apartment building with all its customers across the street now. There are also two restaurants in that building, one of Fabio Trabocchi, our premier Italian restaurateur, and another of Ashok Bajaj our premier Indian restaurateur. Both of them came here because of my encouragement; and of course, I am pleased to have them in the neighborhood.

I suppose there is a kind of symmetry in it all: the first stop of my career disappearing just as the last one began. And while I am sad witnessing it all change, I was also proud of what I was creating with Bread Furst.

Forest Hills is a homey, beautiful, and friendly neighborhood — more beautiful than any I have lived in. And now, at the end of my career, I am back where I started.

It is, truly, a return to my home.