The gaudy psychodrama that led to January’s trashing of the Capitol gave Americans even more to fret about during the already dreary months when those of us who adhered to public health advice were compelled to interact with the country mostly from home, through televisions and computer screens. As an historian who has written at length about governance, planning, and development in Washington, DC, I fretted over, among other things, the likely worsening of the federal establishment’s tendency to turn “away from the city,” as planner Elbert Peets put it in the early 1930s. Peets was lamenting the Federal Triangle, the daunting aggregation of official buildings from the National Archives to 15th Street NW that in the 1920s-30s displaced the old Center Market district and the adjacent rundown neighborhood between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Mall. Few regretted this shabby quarter, known colloquially as “Murder Bay.” But, Peets argued, the spirit of Washington’s L’Enfant Plan was to “amalgamate” capital and city “to make them serve each other.” That entailed, the planner insisted, preservation of older and poorer neighborhoods amid the capital’s majesty and activity. Peets unsuccessfully pressed this principle again in the 1950s in his alternative rehabilitation plan for the historic, working-class Southwest district targeted for urban renewal.[1]
What Peets denounced in the 1930s as the “programme of isolation” has been evident in numerous ways since. The September 2001 attacks sped up the trend toward a surveilled, fortified capital, even as it catalyzed the security state overall. January 6 means even more bollards and fences, more cameras, metal detectors, guards, and black SUVs, more managed crowds and visitors centers. The insurrection means more barriers between Washington as capital and Washington as city and, by implication, between the federal city and the country. At first glance, the apparently accelerating movement for DC statehood amounts to a local demand for divorce for irreconcilable differences—the breakdown that Peets sought to avoid. From this perspective, DC statehood can seem a concentrated manifestation of the retreat into sorted space that the United States’ public sphere has been going through overall.
Frederick Law Olmsted’s redesign of the Capitol Grounds—begun in 1874, less than a decade after the first time that insurrectionists with Confederate flags sought to overturn the government—emphasized low walls, open vistas, stately terraces, and pleasant walkways. Though historians differ as to how he understood the Capitol as a place in Washington and his grounds as space for the city, Olmsted’s landscaping did weave the people’s house into the nation’s city, while symbolically weaving together people and government.