Sometimes in DC you can forget you’re in DC. You know, in “DC.” ‘Cause it’s really just DC, but when is one not a tourist? It’s residential and row house-y, all sort of close together and easy and even Southern. With parks and zoning restrictions and Tatte. In some parks: strollers, one after the next, and folding chairs and Birkenstocks. In others, Catan and live jazz and hammocks and incense and, after the rain, only battle-hardened drummers by the Joan of Arc. Further afield there’s even a particular kind of stickered, low-lit, cheap-beer sensibility. But then you look down an avenue and there’s the Capitol’s squatting on the hill at city center (0, 0). Its long sloping grounds and the Mall and the Monument and the Smithsonians — all taken so directly, it feels, from Ancient Greece and Rome. So recently. Down on the Mall it’s “DC,” and it’s all tourists and barricades and different languages and different looks from all over the country and world. Or something like that.
There in the shadow of all that marbled might, a tent city with tattered tarps and grocery carts and chess sets on milk crates. The National Park Service wants to shut it down, the encampment in Columbus Circle, which basically sits between Union Station and the Capitol (reports Street Sense Media, a street paper in DC).
Jesse Rabinowitz, senior manager for Policy and Advocacy at Miriam’s Kitchen, said it’s possible that government officials also want to hide the lived reality of homelessness in Columbus Circle from the public eye. The Columbus Circle encampment is right outside of Union Station, Amtrak’s second busiest station in the country, and less than a mile away from the U.S. Capitol.
“D.C. and the National Park Service don’t want people to see the reality of the homelessness crisis in our nation’s capital. And one way to do that is to evict people from a major transportation terminal,” Rabinowitz said.
“We have decisionmakers on the national level walking past this encampment on their commute, and the solution shouldn’t be, ‘Let’s move these people so we don’t see them,’” he said. “The solution to homelessness is housing without strings, without coercion, without police or bulldozers or artificial timelines.”
It’s all very true, and it’s been so for a while. Malcolm X made these observations ~75 years ago when train layovers gave him a chance to pause between shifts and explore DC:
I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury; in dirt-floor shacks along unspeakably filthy lanes with names like Pig Alley and Goat Alley. I had seen a lot, but never such a dense concentration of stumble-bums, pushers, hookers, public crap-shooters, even little kids running around at midnight begging for pennies, half-naked and barefooted. Some of the railroad cooks and waiters had told me to be careful, because muggings, knifings and robberies went on every night among these Negroes… just a few blocks from the White House. (Autobiography of Malcolm X)
“Decision makers on the national level” stroll past, and, like the portraits of former headmasters of Hogwarts, look down from their high seats in the inner sanctum:
Also in the Portrait Gallery, a “folk art” exhibition and some found wood painted by New Orleanian, Herbert Singleton. “When the river [Mississippi] was low,” he said, “I would find a plank of wood to carve.”
We’ve made it through the Cherry Blossoms. Phew. For a while there it was all anyone talked about. Did you go see them? Down to the tidal basin? They were great this year. You’ve gotta get down. Go quick, I’ve heard with the wind and rain they’re going to be gone soon.
And before that it was the magnolias.
A half marathon’s coming up — sorry I can’t go tonight because my friend’s running in the half tomorrow and I’m going to go cheer him on so I gotta go to bed early.
And just you wait, it’s going to get real humid in a few weeks here. And the insects… God they get bad.
All the while, outside the Department of Education, the people organize and tell Joe to cancel student debt.
There’s a new associate justice and a gospel choir on the steps…
… and the Denny’s, it just so happens, is packed at 4:30 a.m.
What We Been Grokking
These crazy Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery of Christ descending into Limbo — Limbo being where everyone not in Hell is hanging out, waiting for redemption. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as such:
[T]he crucified one sojourned in the realm of the dead prior to his resurrection. This was the first meaning given in the apostolic preaching to Christ's descent into Hell: that Jesus, like all men, experienced death and in his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead… But he descended there as Saviour, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there.
Our question, though: who are these poor, flattened guys?