Amis is among the scores of homeless people who camp at Union Station in Washington, DC. They watch the commuters and tourists come and go and hope to earn a little change.

Amis sits beside his sign every morning with a paper cup, stoked with a dollar bill. A good day will bring in $15 or $20, he says, enough to buy some cigarettes and a drink. Community groups usually bring food. The shelters will send vans at night to pick up those who need a bed. But Amis would rather stay put.

Amis is a journalist. A journalist who has slowly lost the use of his brain because of a vitamin deficiency often brought on by alcoholism. Now he spends his days panhandling in front of Union Station.

-- Debbie Elliott

One of the joys of Knight Training is the opportunity to spend five weeks with a smart, creative, and fun-loving group of NPR colleagues. We paired off to get to know each other even better with the assignment of making audio slideshow "profiles." It was great to learn more about NPR's Debbie Elliott and her family life on the Gulf Coast:

And for her turn, Debbie created this wonderful slideshow where I'm the old codger reminiscing about the days of reel-to-reel tape:

For the past couple of years, my son has been renting a cello from this violin shop in Bethesda, Maryland. There's a wonderfully ramshackle, Old World feel to the place, and when we were given a Knight training assignment to create an audio slide show, Potter's seemed like just the spot. Thanks to proprietor Dalton Potter and his staff for letting me look and listen behind the scenes. (Note: an earlier iteration of this slideshow, sans audio, and with a few different pictures, can be seen here.)

The beautiful building housed more than a dozen businesses: butchers, fishmongers, cheese sellers, and florists. Months after the conflagration, the District of Columbia erected a temporary facility across the street. Many of the vendors moved in.

Now, two years later, reconstruction and restoration of the original Eastern Market is nearly finished. At the end of the month, this centerpiece of the Capitol Hill community will be reopened.

--David Gura

-- Mandalit del Barco NPR News

Which sounds pretty much like what East Falls Church once was. Route 29 crossed the Washington & Old Dominion line. Shops and a movie theater sat across the street from the train station. Most everything was vaporized to make way for the I-66 trench. Railroad buffs rescued the station and moved it to the Shenandoah Valley.

Where the Westlee condominiums stand, local residents used to dump trash, industrial waste and the occasional Model T along the banks of Four Mile Run. An oil-tank farm was there in World War II, and most recently a used-car lot.

-- Peter Overby