The Rough Guide to Washington DC

INTRODUCTION As a nation’s capital, Washington DC – showtown USA and self-professed political arbiter of the Free World – takes some beating. Along its triumphant avenues stand historic buildings that define a world view, while on either side of the central Mall sit the various museum buildings of the planet’s greatest cultural collection, the Smithsonian Institution. For an introduction to the United States or a crash course in politics, portraiture or paleontology look no further than the spacious, well-ordered, Neoclassical sweep that is downtown DC. With a population of less than 600,000 residents it comes way down the list of American cities, and is likewise outnumbered by just about every foreign capital you could think of. But though a small fry in terms of population, it’s not small in scale at all. Everywhere Washington boasts the bold expanses and monumental architecture of a carefully planned capital. Given that it would become the consummate political power center, it seems fitting that DC’s very founding was the result of political wrangle. In the late eighteenth century, Congress acceded to the demands of the Northern states to assume their Revolutionary War debts, but squeezed a key concession for the rather than being sited in one of the big Northern cities, the new federal capital would be built from scratch on the banks of the Potomac River, midway along the eastern seaboard. And while not actually in the Deep South, Washington in the Territory (later District) of Columbia was very definitely of the South. French architect Pierre L’Enfant planned the city on a hundred-square-mile diamond-shaped piece of land donated by the tobacco-rich states of Virginia and Maryland; Virginia later demanded its chunk of land back, which is why there’s a bite out of the diamond shape across the Potomac River. Slave labor drained the floodlands and erected the public buildings, and Virginian high society frequented the townhouses and salons that flourished after the government moved in during 1800. But to paint DC as a Southern city is to miss the point. John F. Kennedy famously pointed out its contradictions in his waspish comment that Washington was “a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.” Even more important than its geographical location was its unique experimental nature – a modern, planned capital built for a disparate collection of states seeking security in unity. As a symbol of union, its finest hour came within a generation of its founding – the city that was built largely by slaves became the frontline headquarters of the fight against slavery, as Abraham Lincoln directed the Union troops from the capital’s halls and offices. After the Civil War, thousands of Southern blacks arrived in search of a sanctuary from racist oppression and, initially, to some extent they found one. Racial segregation was banned in public places and Howard University, the first US institution of higher learning that enrolled black people, was set up in 1867. By the 1870s African-Americans made up over a third of the District’s population, but as poverty and squalor worsened, official segregation was reintroduced in 1920, banning blacks from government buildings and the jobs they had come to find. Since the 1930s, DC has been both a predominantly black city and a federal fortress. Shunned by the white political aristocracy, the city is run as a virtual colony of Congress, where residents have only nonvoting representation and couldn’t even participate in presidential elections until the 1960s. Suffering an endless cycle of boom and bust, the city has one of the country’s highest crime rates and appalling levels of unemployment, illiteracy and drug abuse. Fed rates and appalling levels of unemployment, illiteracy and drug abuse. Federal government money props up the city, pays its administrators and affects virtually every aspect of local commerce and industry. That fact is galling in the extreme to the majority of American citizens, to whom “Washington” is a dirty word, a place inhabited only by self-seeking politicians isolated within the fabled Beltway, the ring road that circles the city and is used as a metaphor for all that’s different about DC. Meanwhile, twenty million visitors come to Washington each year for fun, making it one of the most visited tourist destinations in the country. Kept away from the city’s peripheral dead zones, they tour a scrubbed, policed and largely safe downtown swathe where famous landmark – White House, US Capitol, Washington Monument – follows world-class museum – National Air and Space Museum, National Gallery of Art – with unending and uplifting regularity. Even better, most of what you see in Washington is free, and getting around (on a subsidized transport system that has few equals in the United States) is easy. True, a sense of community, or even neighborhood, is rare – especially downtown, where the entire place falls strangely silent after 6pm and on weekends. But pockets of vitality do stand out, in historic Georgetown, arty Dupont Circle and trendy Adams-Morgan, where what nightlife there is shakes its fist at the otherwise conservative surroundings. You’ll eat well, from a bounty of different cuisines, and nowhere will you be better informed about what’s happening in America. Pick up the paper, switch on the TV or radio, and tune in to the thousands of broadcasters, lobbyists, journalists and politicians who shape the views of the world from this city of glorious compromise.