A Portrait Of Washington, D.C. - 31 March 1989

I suppose there is no other city in America that expects and deserves a bigger invasion of tourists at this time of the year than the city which the first Congress of the United States ordered to be created in the triangular join of three rivers on a plot of purchased land of 6,000 acres, Washington in the District of Columbia.

George Washington hired a Frenchman and said “Build me a capital city”. His name was Pierre Charles L’Enfant. He studied sculpture and architecture under his father in Paris and, at the age of 22, like so many vigorous young French idealists, he was taken with the American cause and came here to volunteer in the American Revolutionary Army and was commissioned a lieutenant in the engineers.

He was captured by the British at the battle of Charleston and not released for four years, until the war was over and he was sent home, but two years later he was back here. He took up various architectural jobs in New York – the City Hall is his – and in 1791 had the call from General – by then President – Washington to design, according to the commission, "a noble city on a plain" or what Thomas Jefferson, who loathed the below sea-level climate of Washington called "a city to be set on an Indian swamp in the wilderness".

Still, Jefferson gave L’Enfant a set of maps of various capital cities of Europe as a sort of composite guide. L’Enfant, however, had his eye and his memory on Versailles. He had the 18th-Century love of long, spacious boulevards and pleasing prospects and, as a soldier and an engineer, he also bore in mind the prospect of an advancing enemy.

So in copying from Versailles great broad diagonal avenues crossing a gridiron of long streets, wherever the diagonals crossed a vertical and a horizontal street there would be a three-way vista where you could put cannon as a point of tactics.

But his main idea, his vision, was of a spacious city where there would be grand parades past elegant buildings. “The plan,” he wrote “should be on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote”. To that end, of the 6,000 acres set aside for the whole plan, over 3,000 were for the avenues which to this day can be as much as 400 feet wide.

Well, there was shocked resistance to this plan by the Congress and by the commissioners of the city who had given him the job. On a pretext, he was dismissed – over Washington’s protest – but after a squabble about alternative designs and a run-in between a posse of politicians and the greed of real-estate men, L’Enfant’s plan was more than less accepted and followed.

Of course there were still precious few buildings to bruise this immense vista of boulevards and avenues. In fact, there were not too many 40, 50 years later. Dickens, in the 1840s, wrote in a characteristic passage, “Washington is a place of spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere. Streets a mile long that want only houses, roads and inhabitants, public buildings that need but a public to be completed.”

But time, and the increase of the wealth of the nation permitting, first there went up the federal-style buildings, then the classical revival efforts, then early Victorian, later more forbidding piles of white stone and cement and marble, more porticos and rows of ionic and Doric columns and saucer domes and inset arches than you’d expect to find in Rome or Athens.

So it stands, and this week saw the first big invasion of tourists who have been well instructed by tourist pamphlets and films and calendars and the telly about the annual arrival just now of the Japanese cherry blossom.

It is out in full flower and the westerners and the Japanese and the Europeans pad around with their cameras, ride up the Washington Monument, tread quietly into the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial, explore the wonders of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery, the new splendid Air and Space Museum, pause and talk in low tones before the vast sombre slab of the Vietnam Memorial, stroll along the great avenues and, at set times of the day, troop marvelling through the elegant glitter of the White House. The dreadful new meaning that has been given in these late years to security has not, so far, deprived the ordinary citizen and his family of that memorable ritual.

But what about the drugs, the crime, Washington’s new and unenviable reputation as the murder capital of the nation? What’s the matter with the tourists? Haven’t they heard? Haven’t they read the horrified European papers or, come to that, the horrified American press, including the Washington papers themselves? Yes, they have.

The rationale for touring was put crisply and sensibly by a young mother from Milwaukee. Yes, she’d read about it, seen it on the tube, but she brought her children and toured far and wide just the same. “We don’t plan” she said “to tour any crack houses or go looking for the turf warfare”.

The main tourist organisation was, of course, pretty nervous in the late winter about the prospect of a shrunken army of visitors. They decided that to work up a campaign either of warning or reassurance would only draw attention to the thing they wished to play down, on the reminder of the teacher who said to the class, “Now, children, I want you to think about anything you choose, anything in the world, except elephants.”

It was a smart move. As it turned out, business is booming, up 6% over the last year. The only relevant note that has been mentioned is the fact that Washington ranks sixteenth in the nation for the prevalence of crime.

By the same precaution my favourite American city does not make a point of reporting that, for random street crime around the whole city, San Francisco is, or was 'til lately, number one. Yet the fact remains that 372 people were murdered in Washington, and this year, after only three months, the count is now about 120.

Mr William Bennett, who was Mr Reagan’s secretary of education, has just acquired as thankless a job as any in the Cabinet. He is the new, the first so-called "drug czar" and, in order to qualify under last year’s new drug law for federal funds, he has declared Washington DC to be a high-intensity drug trafficking area, thus prompting a chorus of cries of "unfair" from the mayors of many other cities who find themselves in the uncomfortable position of proclaiming – if not boasting – that their city is just as badly off as a centre for drug peddling and drug-related crime.

I ought to remind you that, until 1975, the capital was run by a committee of Congress. In that year Congress passed a law granting the city home rule. It has a mayor, a city council and most of the other bodies of the other big cities.

Its mayor is a lively, shrewd black man, Mr Marion Barry, and he has come glaringly into the national picture since the new and shocking figures on this year’s murder rate were published and since he has become the object of a Grand Jury investigation into his own personal habits. He brushes off, as a form of political slander, the rumbling allegation that he himself has used cocaine.

Speaking the other day before a press club, Mayor Barry got off a sentence that has echoed mockingly through the press and over the telly. He said, "The killings apart, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country”. It’s quite as gloriously silly as it sounds.

He would not have been mocked if he’d said, “If you isolate the small black section of the city, where the drug peddlers fight and slaughter each other to dominate their section, the rest of the city is, compared with most big cities, remarkably crime-free.” That, though clumsy, would be true. Over 80% of the murders are of competing drug peddlers and most of the rest of blacks caught in the crossfire.

The Washington picture is, in frightening miniature, the Chicago of the 1930s. Another city that foreigners and strangers hesitated to visit, but which was as safe as London or Paris provided you didn’t make a point of visiting those compact districts for the domination of which the bootlegging Capones and the O’Banions fought it out to the death.

Washington is peddling ground, not a distribution centre. In desperation, Mayor Barry the other day said it wouldn’t end until the army and the air force and the marines invaded and bombed to bits the coca fields and the labs of Colombia – the nation, not the district.

The question of guns, the new threat of assault weapons, the legal possession of guns itself – that is another, a national, problem and another talk.

By the way, if you ever go to Washington and visit Arlington Cemetery where the military and other national heroes are buried you might look out for a modest monument. It is to Pierre L’Enfant. When he was dismissed as the city’s planner he asked $95,000 for his services. He got $3,800. It doesn’t say on his tombstone that he died penniless.

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