DC By the Book

Excerpt: This was [his] second day in Washington, and as they drove he began to understand the extent to which there were racial countour lines in the city. As they approached U Street, he noticed that the number of whites in the street abruptly dropped away. Within a few blinks rather than blocks, the population had changed from white with an occasional black face, to crowded black with barely a white face. He saw a lot of thin girls with stiff plaits playing hopscotch, women stout with poverty, and men with hair so oiled a scraped back that the sides of their heads resembled fresh bitumen on felt roofing. At the corner of one shabby street was a fat man wearing extravagantly wide, chalk-striped trousers, pink braces, a hat with a pink band and a tie that looked like a primary-coloured ray of lightning. The man had fold rings on all his fingers, and when he smiled he showed gold teeth. "Washington pimp," muttered the driver.

Excerpt: The FBI office was included in the Department of Justice building, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, part of the Federal Triangle. It was another pseudo-classical building given the dignity of columns.... Inside was art deco, with aluminum detailing and large stretches of mural.... The murals in the Department of Justice -- and there were a lot -- were of the worthily noble, historically didactic school, meant to be inspirationally realistic.... There were also a number of smooth, metal statues, neither classical nor art deco, but somewhere uninteresting between.

Excerpt: "[We've] been making some strategic investments, you, see, in up-and-coming areas." -- "Georgetown is one of these?" -- "Yes. The New Dealers came in a while back. They passed a slum-clearance law about ten years ago. And well, there is some way still to go, of course, before the area is quite white, but I think the investment is a good one. Bricks and mortar you see, bricks and mortar in the right place."

Excerpt: The Lansburgh Department Store was what he called Victorian, brick-built in the nineteenth century with arched windows on the upper floors and a huge Stars and Stripes flying from the roof flagpole. It had the old-fashioned shell of an emporium but had been somewhat modernized on the insides. It had a "Whites Only" soda fountain and cafeteria.

Excerpt: The Statler [Hotel] was new -- three separate, short, brick towers rising from a single high ground floor. It was factory-plain and functional on the outside but with quite grand interior decor: crystal chandeliers, a plethora of mahogany-clad columns, highly polished dados, pale leather-buttoned booths in a bar, deep red and green velvet coverings for other chairs and the atmosphere of a gentlemen's club on ladies' day. "Like someone's idea of a neoclassical aquarium," said Tibbets.

Excerpt: Mullins lived in a fourth-floor apartment in Foggy Bottom, a rusty industrial area that had started being cleaned up but still had a long way to go. There were some empty lots, an abandoned factory, some industry still producing smoke.

Excerpt: Later he went out to the Scottish Rites Temple further along 16th Street between R and S Streets. [He] had heard of the tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus on which it was modeled but had never seen an illustration. It was white and prettily elegant, certainly against some of the other neoclassical buildings in DC. It had been voted the fifth-most beautiful building in the world by American architects, the original, in modern-day Turkey, having been one of the Seven Wonders of the World....