Power, Terror, and Style

Last week, a federal panel approved the latest design makeover for Washington, D.C., this one attempting to marry beauty and fear. The plan's guiding principle is that as long as the city must assume the threat of terror—especially explosive-filled trucks—it might as well try to make its defenses as attractive as possible. Currently, the city presents an especially ugly—if prudently nervous—face, its major attractions ringed with fencing, jersey walls, and other barriers.

The most disturbing site in town, as millions of visitors can attest, is the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Those blocks have been closed since 1995, when, in the wake of Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration suddenly shut the Avenue down without warning to local officials. For the last seven years, the space in front of the White House has looked like the stage set for The Omega Man, as the feds dithered over whether or not to re-open the street. They've now made their unsurprising decision to keep the space closed, probably forever.

In fact, the capital has been gradually shutting down, becoming less open—less democratic—for a long time anyway. The more power that accumulated in the capital, the less open the city's style. The threat of attack has greatly accelerated what was anyway a known process, albeit a slow-motion one.

The White House space is the perfect example. In the city's early years, hopeful job seekers simply entered the White House to present their petitions. They would form a long line from the president's office, and wind down the mansion's stairs. Such petitioners were a famous headache to Lincoln. On the other hand, in those days the president might choose suddenly to address his fellow Americans by leaning out the White House window and saying a few words to passersby.

By FDR's presidency, the White House itself was closed, though the grounds remained open. Newsman David Brinkley, in his history of 1940s Washington, recalls pulling his car off Pennsylvania Ave. and through the White House gates to change a flat tire. That was a capital in which anyone might still wander into the public galleries of the House and Senate, to attend to legislative oratory. Indeed, it was a city in which the obvious place to park, if you were having dinner on Capitol Hill, were the Capitol grounds.

It was yesterday's capital. Now, you cannot even drive down Pennsylvania Ave. in front of the president's house; you cannot tour the White House; you cannot drive a truck within a 40-square-block area around the Capitol; you cannot enter the Capitol on foot unless you are part of an organized group; and you cannot even wander about the legislators' office buildings to petition your representatives. According to the new security plan, the city's core streets will be lined with reinforced "furniture," benches and the like, intended as obstacles to terror. A separate security plan for the Washington Monument will have visitors approach the obelisk not through the grand open vista of the city's monumental core, but through a subterranean tunnel.

Washington was always conscious of its security problems. Even the original L'Enfant plan is said to have taken security into account. The city's notorious traffic circles, the bane of tourist drivers, are said to have been planned with military defense in mind; soldiers and their artillery would have a clear shot down the city's major diagonal arteries, should any threat approach.

In other words, the verge between aesthetics and politics has always been the use of Washington's space. The man who best understood that verge was Thomas Jefferson. According to the original L'Enfant plan, for example, Pennsylvania Ave. in front of the White House was intended to be within the White House grounds, along with Lafayette Square. It was Jefferson who ordered a public street to be cut through the space, putting the president's house, and the president, within reach of the public, and reducing their apparent grandeur. Now the accumulation of power and the intensity of threat have to close the space after all, and it is unlikely they'll be open again.