Walk on the wild side
James Forsyth
Seven years ago, when I first went to DC — as the locals call it — I left a friend’s house on Capitol Hill one evening and thought I would stroll over to Union Station. Navigating by the Capitol dome and the moon, I managed to get rather lost and found myself in what, to a not particularly streetwise 20-year-old, was definitely the wrong part of town — lots of deserted streets, boarded-up shops and cheap liquor stores. After a while, my confidence in my navigational abilities seemed like hubris and I was sufficiently shaken to call a cab. But the cab operator brusquely told me that they didn’t pick up from that part of town. Minor panic set in. An SUV with blacked-out windows roared past with its passengers leaning out of the window to shout some not particularly goodnatured abuse. By now, I wasn’t quite sure whether it was the humid DC night that was making me sweat or my own fear. Gone was my masculine, drink-induced confidence; in its place, a certain fatalism. A car drove up behind me and screeched to a halt, I feared the worst. But the screech turned out not to be a harbinger of doom but deliverance in the form of a taxi cab.
‘Get in,’ barked the driver. ‘I wouldn’t normally stop here but I couldn’t have a death on my conscience.’ His sympathy extended no further than that. He insisted on payment upfront for my retreat back to the genteel confines of northwest DC. Yet, throughout the whole experience, I had been no more than 15 minutes’ walk from the US Congress: poverty and power in oddly close proximity — a hallmark of DC.
The other week, a friend was driving me through the same neighbourhood on my way to the airport. The streets that had appeared so mean to me then were now dotted with neat gardens and yuppies in Ivy League sweatshirts. DC is visibly booming and areas which would only a few years ago have been regarded as off limits to new arrivals in town are now home to hip bars and smart new apartment buildings.
Every time I’ve been back to DC recently, a good restaurant and a better bar has opened up. But the main attraction of DC is — and always will be — its monuments and seats of power.
The best way to see them is on a long looping walk. Fortify yourself with a good breakfast of pancakes and coffee — the diner at Columbia and 18th serves up helpings so large that even the most dedicated trencherman is unlikely to clean his plate — and then head to Arlington National Cemetery, the least hyped of the area’s attractions.
There is something incredibly moving about Arlington. In this most individualistic of societies, where you can personalise everything from your mobile phone ring to your morning coffee, the row upon row of simple, uniform white headstones testify to how this individual liberty is in service of a cause greater than itself. If you head away from the drive and the Kennedy tomb, you can walk through acres of graves in quiet contemplation. Far from being depressing, it is an inspiring experience. The surnames on the headstones provide a fascinating glimpse of how the ingredients in the American melting pot have changed.
Arlington also speaks to the American tendency to create a more perfect past. It is commonly thought that having America’s national cemetery in the grounds of the estate of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate commander, illustrates how the nation bound up its wounds after the Civil War. But the reality is rather different: the Union actually started burying its dead there in 1864 as a deliberate provocation to Lee who had turned down the command of the Union army.
After Arlington, stroll across one of the bridges that span the Potomac and down to the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial. Jefferson sums up the paradox that America faces when it contemplates its founding: the drafter of the Declaration of Independence kept slaves. The Memorial slightly glosses over this contradiction, with a passage where Jefferson criticised slavery inscribed on one of its walls. Indeed, all the monuments in DC are adorned with large amounts of text, illustrating just how much, to borrow a phrase as Obama has, words matter in this creedal nation. Outside of the cherry blossom season, the Jefferson memorial is almost deserted, allowing you space to sit and drink it in.
If you walk back around the basin and past the White House, you will be struck by its modesty. It looks no more imposing than a decent-sized 18th-century English country house. It says something about the Englishspeaking peoples’ attitude to power that both Number 10 and the White House are not palaces but residences. Inside, the White House is even less grand than it appears from the outside. Those expecting it to be like it is in The West Wing will be sorely disappointed. Even the Oval Office itself is a rather small room, akin to a professor’s study.
No trip to DC is complete without a visit to the Lincoln Memorial. The view from the steps down to the Washington Memorial and beyond to Congress is magnificent. At sunset or on a clear night with a full moon, even the most hardened America-sceptic would feel moved as they look down from the steps where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech with Lincoln at his back and the reflecting pool below. It is, perhaps, the most romantic place in DC and no site anywhere in America more embodies the idea of the Constitution as a colossus striding through history to ensure that its blessings are brought to every citizen.
When the city was founded it was thought healthy that the capital of the Republic was being built on a swamp. The terrible climate, they imagined, would keep the federal government from growing too large. That hope was dashed by the unlikely combination of the world wars, the Great Depression and air-conditioning — until the invention of the latter, the Foreign Office considered DC a hardship posting for British diplomats.
Washington has not had a good press over the years. Derided by JFK as a city of ‘Southern efficiency and Northern charm’ and with, until recently, the highest murder rate in the United States, it was almost as if Peter Charles L’Enfant had designed the capital to drain the idealism out of those young Americans who are drawn to the seat of power. But in recent years, it has transformed itself, finally recovering from the horrendous race riots of 1968 and the white flight that followed. Just don’t try navigating by the Capitol dome and the moonlight.
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