Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tooverfivemillion.Butthecityitselfisquitesmall,withapopulationofjust637,000,less
than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city,
but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World
Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most start-
ling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along downtown,
looking in department store windows, browsing at cravats and negligees, and you turn a
corner and there it is-the White House-right in the middle of the downtown. So handy for
shopping, I thought. It's smaller than you expect. Everybody says that.
Across the street there is a permanent settlement of disaffected people and crazies, living
incardboardboxes,protestingattheCentralIntelligenceAgencycontrollingtheirthoughts
from outer space. (Well, wouldn't you?) There was also a guy panhandling for quarters.
Can you believe that? Right there in our nation's capital, right where Nancy Reagan could
have seen him from her bedroom window. I refused to give him a penny. “Why don't you
go and mug somebody?” I told him. “It has more dignity.”
Washington's most fetching feature is the Mall, a broad, grassy strip of parkland which
stretches for a mile or so from the Capitol building at the eastern end to the Lincoln Me-
morial at the western side, overlooking the Potomac. The dominant landmark is the Wash-
ington Monument. Slender and white, shaped like a pencil, it rises 555 feet above the park.
It is one of the simplest and yet handsomest structures I know, and all the more impressive
whenyouconsiderthatitsmassivestoneshadtobebroughtfromtheNiledeltaonwooden
rollersbySumerianslaves.I'msorry,I'mthinkingoftheGreatPyramidsatGiza.Anyway,
itisarealfeatofengineeringandverypleasingtolookat.Ihadhopedtogoupit,butthere
was a long line of people, mostly restive schoolchildren, snaked around the base and some
distance into the park, all waiting to squeeze into an elevator about the size of a telephone
booth, so I headed east in the direction of Capitol Hill, which isn't really much of a hill at
all.
Scattered around the Mall's eastern end are the various museums of the Smithsonian
Institution-the Museum of American History, the Museum of Natural History, the Air and
Space Mu seum and so on. The Smithsonian-which, incidentally, was donated to America
by an Englishman who had never been there-used to be all in one building, but they keep
splitting off sections of it and putting them in new buildings all over town. Now there are
fourteen Smithsonian museums. The biggest ones are arrayed around the Mall, the others
are mostly scattered around the city. Partly they had to do this because they get so much
stuff every year-about a million items. In 1986, just to give you some idea, the Smithsoni-
an's acquisitions included ten thousand moths and butterflies from Scandinavia, the entire
archives of the Panama Canal Zone postal service, part of the old Brooklyn Bridge and a
