I’m writing from Washington, D.C., this week. It has been a while since I visited, and the city remains impressive and stately and all that, but it’s also mildly depressing.
Maintenance of the sidewalks and Metro stations seems to have slipped, and the unsightly security barriers on virtually every block are truly hideous. (On the other hand, the ability to walk all the way around the White House is a step in the right direction.)
On the way into town from Reagan National Airport on the Metro, on a whim, I decided to get off at Arlington National Cemetery. I was prompted by a couple of interesting facts that I had read recently about the place, and I wanted to “connect the dots.” It has been a very long time since I visited Arlington, and it is an awesome and inspiring place, at once somber and hopeful.
Yet Arlington was not always a cemetery. It was the family home of Robert E. Lee—more accurately, it was the historic home of the family of his wife, Mary Custis Lee. She inherited the 1,100–acre estate from her father, George Washington Parke Custis, whose grandfather, by adoption, was George Washington. During the Civil War, the Lee estate was rapidly overtaken and subsequently seized by Union troops, and it served several purposes during the war.
The land did not become a cemetery in any thoughtful way; rather, in the heat of the war, and the heat of the boggy summers prevalent here, many people died in the area. It was simply a field expedient to bury them close to where they fell, and Arlington was centrally located.
Union General Montgomery C. Meigs pushed to create Arlington National Cemetery, using a variation of eminent domain and wartime powers to take ownership of the land. Through a variety of legal and other battles after the war, ultimately ending up in the Supreme Court, the Lee family wrested ownership of its estate back from the federal government. Of course, by that time, thousands of people had been buried there, so the place was slightly less desirable than it once had been. The government bought the property back from Lee’s son, and the rest is history . . . literally.
In the City
I revisited a place that I used to frequent when I was in D.C. regularly, Kinkead’s.
Housed in a refurbished brownstone, it’s a nice place to get away from all the craziness in the district, with quiet nooks and crannies conducive to conversation. And, unlike most high-end restaurants here, prices are not over the moon, especially for lunch. (I’m not usually a big flounder fan, but I tried it on the recommendation of the waiter, and I’m tearing up just thinking about it. Fantastic.)
In closing, I recommend that everybody, at least once when they visit D.C., make a pilgrimage to at least one of the great old hotel institutions in town. The Mayflower is the lesser-known, but more accessible of the two. Within a couple of blocks of the White House, The Willard is famous for its political past, having served as Abraham Lincoln’s home for a time. At both hotels, maybe enjoy late-afternoon tea, and you might see some famous politicos, and you can eavesdrop on the political deal-making that’s undoubtedly going on there.
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