DC By the Book

Excerpt: While New York surrounds you with sheer concrete mass and energy, San Francisco sits perched like a delicate work of art on a glorious landscape, Boston drips with provincial charm, and Chicago’s skyline towers impressively over the prairie flatlands, Washington is by far the grandest city in the country. Flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport, Justine marveled out her window at the inspiring scene below. To her wide eyes, the tall, impossibly slender, gleaming white Washington Monument looked like a giant tent pole in the center of the city preparing to hold up the great green expanse of the Mall for a circus of celebrity politicians. To older knowing eyes, however, its concentrated weight might have resembled a pinpoint in a gravitational field, distorting light and pulling other bodies of buildings towards it; its two-toned blockwork hinting at a history of struggles and violent collisions over the years as federal satellites circled in trying to get closer and closer to the epicenter. Only the bulbous glory of the Capitol building perched high on its Hill appeared to keep this whole thing from collapsing in on itself. Like a second foci, it acts as another attraction point—weighty enough to draw its own orbiters, but not quite large enough to suck in the other center. One monument dedicated to individual glory; one dome signifying the power of the people. Both symbols drawing patriots eager to be subsumed in these eternal goals. Both built on a former swamp, which used to bring death and decay to all things that flowed there.