Capitol City
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
All the corridors and windows in the cityscape open up onto the Capitol dome. Aglow in the tree branches, above the rooftops, it’s illuminated in an orange band around the inside center and from the outside with floodlights at each side, the solid white paint accentuating its purity, maybe even its patriotism, its history and symbolism.
Flanked on either side by American flags and both houses of government, it sits up high – the highest point except for two rusty smokestacks in the foreground (as seen from the south side.) Energy seems to radiate from atop this hill and its luminosity, but its really the streets that bear extra life around the Capitol.
Ambulance and fire engine sirens whine through tight traffic and mothers pushing strollers never look twice, and instead carry on conversations with their own mothers as they walk past old renovated movie theaters (now become flower shops), sidewalk cafes, street-side tables with rows of sunglasses, hot dog stands surprisingly burning incense, and hip professional women carrying dry cleaning over-shoulder.
The streets are so narrow, built for horses and buggies 200 years ago. Parked cars line the streets, no space untaken outside three-story, brick houses with American flags drooping over doorways as if the northern Calvary had just ridden through in some great parade – little children and their parents knees waving flags – celebrating the soldiers’ departure to the South to battle the Confederates.
I could see their ghosts on the red brick sidewalks, among the small squares of greenery between front doors with exotic pink flower pedals, wrought iron benches covered in flaking leaves, trash barrels ready for Monday pick up and rotting their in the shade.
History not only lives here – it is thick here on the shady blocks, in the diagonal parks cut in between major thoroughfares. The Jefferson and Lincoln monuments stolid by passing traffic, close enough for cab drivers to point at and give brief history lessons in their own native dialects. The Washington monument plain and visible just off the Potomac on the plane flight into Reagan Airport.
Among this rich past, the Capitol still stands as it did when the bodies were smaller and could fit through the slim doors and halls of these old houses. It is symbolic of the past and the modern all at once.
The photographer I’m traveling with first snapped it from our hotel room and later on the street outside the restaraunt where we ate dinner. He took his camera out from his bag and shot it from the sidewalk, round, luminous and as alluring as the full moon.
