DC By the Book

Excerpt: On Seventeenth Street, across from the buff-colored stone facade of the Mayflower Hotel, now wreathed in the heavy humid air, he pulled up before the Little Tavern. As usual, he parked in front and left the motor running. "Okay, man," he said to the youth behind the counter, "sack me and Coke me." He put fifteen cents on the counter, and walked out carrying a white paper sack with a hamburger, French fries and ketchup, and a Coke in its thick greenish-glass returnable bottle.

Excerpt: He got back in the Packard and headed down Connecticut Avenue, onto Seventeenth alongside the graceful old State and War Department with its towers and balconies hovering over the White House grounds. As he passed by, he glanced up at the heavy machine-gun emplacements across the top of the building, then looked across at the soldiers with fixed bayonets ringing the heavy black iron White House fence beyond. It always surprised him how normal it seemed to see all the security. Only months before there had been none.

Excerpt: His customary spot by the cupola, shaded by a grove of massive Dutch elms and hemlocks standing a hundred yards from the Lincoln Memorial, was deserted. he put his food beside him on the same park bench overlooking the river that he used every evening during his break before returning to pick up the Old Man, checked his watch once more, idly noted a pair of ducks bobbing gently on the water, and began to eat.... Two .38-caliber slugs slammed into the back of his head, tearing away part of his skill and shattering the Coke bottle. Brown syrup from the drink mixed with his blood and dribbled down his shirt as his body toppled to the ground.

Excerpt: Thomas stared out the window of the yellow cab as it jolted along the trolley tracks and cobblestones up Seventh Street from Pennsylvania Avenue past the dingy two-story brick buildings stretching uniformly ahead into the gathering night.... Outside, in front of the credit clothing, Like Nu Furniture and Surplus stores, the Jewish merchants were locking the protective iron gratings around their small storefronts.... As the cab moved through the blackout past the shadows flitting in and out of the bars and gill joints of the Second Police Precinct, the radio boomed out the evening sermon from Elder Sweet Daddy Bolding's Radio Church of Jesus, with the call letters WJSU.

Excerpt: The cab crossed Florida Avenue, a block from the Howard Theater where the white folks came on Friday and Saturday nights to hear Duke Ellington play. It was near the District's largest gambling salon. Washington's leading white businessmen, dollar-a-year war executives, and political operatives gathered there each night around the roulette and card tables after the blackout began. Substantial old brick and stone row houses rose among the shadows of a darkened street as the cab drew to a stop near the corner.

Excerpt: He smiled slightly, stepped down onto the platform, moved with the crowd up the steps to the upper level, then strode leisurely though the open doors into the main waiting room and great concourse. It was massive, one of the largest of its kind anywhere. Barrel-vaulted ceilings rose ninety-five feet above the white marble floors. The room was conceived in the Roman Imperial manner similar to the vast central hall in the Baths of Diocletian; the central pavilion was straight out of Constantine. Across the concourse, visible through five archways constructed of Vermont granite and the colonnaded portals beyond, he could see the immense pearl-white Capitol dome rising over the Hill a few blocks away. Everywhere, crowds of people congregated. They occupied each polished wooden bench. the spilled onto the floors. The say among mounds of baggage. They stood and milled about, or slowly picked their way across the waiting room. The war had transformed this place into something more than a railroad station; now it, and the people who streamed through it, were part of an endless procession linked inextricably, somehow, to the great release of raw energy that had been set in motion across the American continent only months before with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then 45,000 people poured into Union Station every day...

Excerpt: Accustomed as he was to wealth and comfort, Henry was always astonished at the grandeur of Marjorie Stith's Georgetown home--and it, he knew, was only one of her estates.... He had never seen her Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park, but if it contained only a fraction of the treasures displayed in the old red brick mansion on O Street, extending half a block off 34th Street near the Georgetown University campus, it would be infinitely grander than even the world into which he had been born on Boston's Beacon Hill.... In some mysterious fashion, her dinner parties enabled the combatants of political Washington to put aside their daily armor, establish personal connections, and exchange views candidly in ways impossible during their demanding and all-too-public work days. Her home was a great hothouse of inside information.

Excerpt: In a city of false appearances, the alleyways of Washington were a world apart. And not by chance, Thomas knew. When the white folks planned their city, they laid out block after block and ringed them with imposing row houses. Out front were flower gardens, wrought-iron fences, and elegant stonemasonry. Hidden behind, among extraordinarily deep back lots, were hundreds of narrow twisting alleyways. They bore such names as Louse Alley and Slop Bucket Row and Pig Alley and Goat Alley. Ever since the civil War thousands of colored people lived there in shacks and small frame structures invisible to passersby on the streets beyond. Every so often the reformers tried to do something about conditions in them. Just eight years before, in 1934, after prodding from Eleanor, Congress passed a law to clean up the alleyways. But it made no difference. The alleyways were still the center of an illegal world that existed for the convenience and profit of white and colored alike.

Excerpt: Washington had changed since [1932]. The trolley tracks and wooden boarding platforms still ran down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, as Gunther remembered them, but all the old structures that occupied the south side of the street since the Civil War -- the saloons, gambling dens, and rooming houses like the one from which Whitman watched Lincoln's body borne to the Capitol in the long funeral processions -- had been demolished during the New Deal. They were replaced with huge marble buildings housing the agencies of the greatly expanding federal government.... He noticed the grand structures on the south side and the same, small, old, dilapidated ones on the north he had seen before. Overstated and uncompleted.