DC By the Book

Excerpt: The black ball rose up the flagpole. Spotting it from two blocks east, Cynthia May allowed herself to slow down. The hoisting of the canvas sphere, as big across as a wagon wheel, meant that ten minutes remained until noon, when Potomac ferry captains and fat boardinghouse mistresses all over northwest Washington would watch it drop and reset their clocks, and she would be due inside the Naval Observatory for her appointment. She crossed E Street at the corner of Virginia, taking off her hat as she went. March 8th, and already so hot that, after twenty blocks of walking, she'd sweated through the skimpy silk lining beneath the straw. With the hat in one hand and her book in the other, she had no hand free to hold her nose against the stink coming up from the water filling half the street. She wondered why the whole swamp that was Foggy Bottom didn't sink, once and for all, into the river... -- HISTORICAL CONTEXT --> South of Virginia Avenue, the Potomac River’s tidal flats extended north through today’s National Mall until the 1890s. The stench of swamp and industry was made worse by an open sewer, known as the Tiber Canal, that emptied into the river near here. “By night swarms of rats…disputed the right of way with the pedestrian,” wrote an astronomer of his time working at the Naval Observatory, then located nearby along the canal. The Naval Observatory’s time ball, mounted on top of the building’s dome, was lowered each day at noon for ships and DC residents to set their clocks. Later the observatory used telegraph lines to transmit time signals to railroads and eventually to stations throughout the country. The world’s largest telescope was installed here in 1873, allowing for the discovery of Mars’ two moons four years later. The observatory eventually moved out of this neighborhood in part because it was losing staff to malaria. Fog from the river combined with smoke rising from factories here also made for poor views.

Excerpt: After several minutes, she was rushing through Lafayette Square, ahead of the professor, for all she knew, and then angling up Vermont Avenue, clear to Fourteenth and M, where a circle of ground had been fenced off for an equestrian statue of General Thomas, "The Rock of Chickamauga." The granite support was already in place, as yet without its horse and rider. The District's new bronze forest of wartime commemorations generally repelled her, but something in Cynthia felt denied by this empty pedestal... She would like to see this general, no doubt wreathed in laurels for having so famously defended his army's left flank--while [her husband] got shot on the right one, to die on a littter during the retreat to Rossville that General Thomas has finally had to make in any case.

Excerpt: ...she heard schoolchildren shuffling through the hall outside. Elsewhere pierces of equipment were being wheeled and crated. Here in the library the astronomers came and went in quiet, disputatious pairs--the older ones wearing full beards, the younger just muttonchops or a mustache--to fetch down a volume and settle a point. And yet, all this activity was only preparation of postscript. This was a theater, and what counted could not happen until night fell.

Excerpt: PRESENT ADDRESS: The first word looked more like a command than an adjective, an order to embarrass herself into admitting that 203 F Street, Mrs. O'Toole's peeling green lodging house, was her only remaining perch in the world.... For the last six years there had been no mouth to feed but her own, at the hotel restaurants and boardinghouse tables along F Street. From one rented room to the next, she carried with her what few pictures, books, and spoons she could stand to look at or afford not to sell.

Excerpt: ...he had headed out to Trinity Episcopal at Third and C, where during the war, when it was a makeshift hospital and he a new congressman, he used to see the boys from his district bleeding through their bandages. In the years, since, he had sometimes repaired there to think.

Excerpt: "Tell him that I want him. Now." Roscoe Conkling hit the punching bag with his bare first. The stunned leather rattled its metal stanchion, and the Arlington Hotel's bellboy cried "Yes, sir!" before taking off in search of the fellow who ran errands for the residents. Stripped to the waist, Conkling resumed his workout, refusing to take a bite of his boiled fish and spinach, or even a sip of soda water, until he had given the bag two hundred jabs.

Excerpt: On Pennsylvannia Avenue, she stopped at a sidewalk hoto vendor to look at the oval-framed miniatures of yesterday's soldiers and today's Great Men. She flipped through the pictures of blue-coated boys--leftover images, unnamed and unclaimed, taken by cap photographers. She was hoping, as always, to spot one of [her husband]. The odds against this were nearly infinite, but the exercise had a soothing fidelity. She had no photograph or sketch of her dead husband...

Excerpt: Cynthia had the afternoon free to navigate the noisy aisles of Washington's Center Market. Looking up toward the grand ceiling of the young Gothic structure, she thought of the shabby old Baghdad that had once filled half of Lafayette Square, and where as a girl she had gone to buy groceries before meeting her father at the edge of the Treasury's lawn. Madam Costello, walking the aisles with her, knew no other market from her time in the capital, and had remarked coming in that with more great brick piles like this, the fire would have gone easier on Chicago.

Excerpt: The noontime summer dust flew up here from bare patches of the road where pavement laid by Boss Shepherd, the District's modernizing governor, had failed to take. Hugh pointed toward Ninth Street and a house on the south side of E. "That's Marini's lair," He and Henry Paul sometimes went to the bachelors' cotillions run by the Italian dancing master.... Hamilton Fish Jr., the bachelor congressman from New York and one of Marini's social impresarios, greeted then at the door. "Come in!" he cried, gesturing toward the scene within. "Magnificent, isn't it?" The two of them entered a ballroom festooned with silk swag and lilies. Mounds of ice cream sat atop a table at the far end, not far from a magnificent cheval-de-frise, left over from the famous night that Sir Edward and Lady Thornton had appeared. ---------- The building that housed Marini’s Dancing Academy was originally erected as “Temperance Hall” in 1847, after Gen. Van Ness donated the plot to the Freeman’s Vigilant Total Abstinence Society. In addition to hosting temperance meetings and speeches, it could be rented out as an event hall. Although some sources allege that Charles Dickens once gave a reading there, there is more evidence that he actually did so around the corner at Carroll Hall. At some point – possibly 1876 -- the building was purchased by Louis Marini to house his “Dancing Academy.” Marini was an Italian who fought for Garibaldi in Italy before immigrant to the U.S., where he served as a 2nd Lt. in the Union Army Corps of Engineers. After the war he took up the profession of “Dancing Master,” and Marini’s Hall became the site of lessons for ladies, gentlemen, and children of fine families. It also hosted many balls, fundraisers, state political functions, and all manner of celebrations. Descriptions of these parties, particularly the décor and costumes of the attendees were a regular feature of the social pages of The Washington Star until Marini retired in 1885 and leased the building to the Postmaster General for offices and storage space.

Excerpt: They parted in front of the Treasury, and as her horsecar made its way up Pennsylvania and then High Street, she tried to look forward to the evening, reminding herself of all the reasons she liked Georgetown more than her own neighborhood near the Capitol. The alley dwellers weren't so thick on the ground, and sitting the Peabody Library had a way of calming her, of making her feel less like the interloper she always imagined herself in public places.

Excerpt: While the kettle boiled, she petted Ra and tired, against he fast beating of her pulse, to remember all she had once tried to forget: the unexpected rush tot he Armory Square hospital; the bleeding and infection and delirium; the first sight of Sally, scarcely alive; and afterward, when she was conscious enough to hear them, the moans of wounded soldiers behind a door and down a corridor. She recalled the countenance of one of Miss Dix's nurses, a mixture of amazement and contempt that a girl could bring a new life int the world at such time as this and take up a soldier's bed in order to do it.

Excerpt: She held Hugh's umbrella while he handed a dollar, the cost of two tickets, to the Mary Washington's paymaster. The crowd at the Seventh Street wharf was smaller than usual for a weeknight excursion, but the boat hadn't cancelled its run.... The two of them marched arm in arm between garlanded banisters to the upper-deck's grand saloon.... While a piano player warmed up for a vocal concert by Professor Piscorio, the couple lowered themselves into a small love seat and regarded their multiple reflections on the saloon's mirrored walls.

Excerpt: At the Union Hotel they were shown to their table at a quarter past ten by Riley Shinn himself, the proprietor who took such pride in the "Pocket Tuileries" he had created on a corner of Bridge Street. They ate their supper, while at the bar several men drunkenly argued the recent railroad strike, each a loud parrot of what he'd read in the papers or heard on the streetcar.

Excerpt: The Patent Building, her former place of work was crowned with flames. The greenhouse over the Ninth Street portico puffed great plumes of black smoke while broken glass crashed onto the sidewalk below. Burning papers rode the air, scintillating into wisps before disappearing altogether.... At a quarter past noon, the pine roof of the Patent Building's western wing collapsed, exposing its iron supports like tree trunks during a brutal winter. "There go all the models," said a sad old-timer, realizing that the room set aside to house so much Yankee ingenuity--a bit of it patented, most of it rejected--was now gone.

Excerpt: At ten minutes before twelve, the two women were at Fifteenth and H Streets, climbing the steps between Saint Mathew's red sandstone columns. They took seats in a pew near the back, but to the dismay of Cynthia's head and stomach, they were not allowed to keep the seats for very long. All the standing and kneeling and sitting down again seemed more complicated than the whirling movements at [the dancing salon]. But the Papists' Latin did, Cynthia had to admit, soothe her uncomprehending ears, and the olive-skinned children of the Catholic diplomats who filled the church were prettier than the native urchins she saw gamboling over the District.

Excerpt: It had been years since she'd been west of Lafayette Square, but the astronomers, twelve years later, were still where they had always been. Some time ago she had read about the purchase of a farm northwest of the city, off Tenallytown Road, and had even lately heard rumors that construction of a new Observatory was soon, at last, to commence there.

Excerpt: The Pension Building's ventilation was excellent--some of the windows even had screens--and she was comfortable entering it each morning, crossing under the frieze of tiny, endlessly tamping soldiers. She felt at home with the superannuated and, especially, the dead--all those names, more of them each year, crossed from the rolls. They were easier company for her mind than the living.

Excerpt: Passing the empty pedestal of Washington's Monument...she recalled how, as an eleven-year-old girl in '53, she has seen a few of the last stones set into the base of the obelisk, before the money and national unity required for the work ran out.... The cattle sheds she could remember ringing the truncated Monument during the war had given way to a handful of what looked like miner's shacks: construction sheds for the Corps of Engineers. Thanks to the last Congress's centennial spirit, the Corps has been asked to inspect the Monument's foundations and see whether it was worth resuming work on the site after more than twenty years. Ground had been carved out around the steps at the base, exposing the old underpinnings. Looking at the 150-foot shaft, Cynthia has the impression of something being driven into the earth instead of raised above it.

Excerpt: "Away with you, now," she murmured, kissing the old cat an placing him in a patch of sun on the windowsill above her hand-painted sign: "Madam Costello, Disciple of Mlle. Lenormand, Paris. Planet Reader." It was a big day here at the corner of Third and D Streets. She laughed a herself in the mirror, before taking the window seat below [the cat]. Together they looked out onto the street, toward the people getting down from the trolley: the women, sweating in their velvet; the anxious, office-seeking men, moving between their hotels and whichever new Cabinet Secretary they'd be calling on next.