Washington D.C. Penn Quarter. The location of the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, June 9-13. Walking distance to the multiple museums on the National Mall. Easy Metro access to the Capitol to the east, and the monuments and memorials to the west. Or you can walk.
Old downtown Washington has been reinvented over the past 30 years. It is now home to luxury condos, art galleries, and restaurants. A few steps from the Renaissance Hotel you can visit the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery which split a neoclassical building. In June there will be a special exhibition of paintings by Alexis Rockman. “Each exquisitely rendered painting is an amalgam of historical research, scientific observation, and unbridled imagination. Rockman's sources include botanical illustrations, museum dioramas, nineteenth-century landscape painting, science fiction films, and firsthand field study…. His vivid images transport the viewer to a place that is at once bountiful and besieged.” Rescued from a garage just blocks north of the museum on the artist's death, James Hampton's spiritual sculpture, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, a collection highlight, represents the powerful vision of America's self-taught artists. An open air courtyard on a sunny day has appeal as a place to enjoy food and drink from the café.
Across the street, a minor work by Mies van der Rohe: the main branch of the D.C. public library system. Just to its west, stands Ford's Theater, where, on April 14, 1865, as the end of the Civil War approached and what became Reconstruction loomed, Lincoln was assassinated with a single shot while watching “Our American Cousin.” The theater, dark in June, and the boarding house across the street where he died are run by the National Park Service as a National Historic Site. Tours are free but require a ticket. On Saturday evening, join actress Danielle Drakes, who plays Elizabeth Keckly, free black woman, and confidante to Mrs. Lincoln, on a 1.44 mile walking tour. She tells the story of her friendship with the Lincoln family and of her efforts to help former slaves find their way in the newly free city of Washington.
“In the early nineteenth century, Washington and nearby Alexandria, Virginia, were regional hubs of a flourishing slave trade, and early Washington monuments, including the Capitol building, were built largely by slaves….From the beginning blacks—slave and free—were a major component of the population. The black population from 1800 provided many of the basic services in the city. Some free blacks ran boarding houses and taverns, and had politicians as clients.” When Congress was in session, many members lived in boarding houses in the Old Downtown.
Around the corner, the First Congregation Church. On January 20, 1973, Phillip Berrigan, still a Catholic priest, spoke there and witnessed the trauma of the Vietnam War. His listeners then walked east a few blocks to the Pension Building, venue for one of President Nixon's inaugural balls. They stood somberly across the street and sang songs against the war. The Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, is on the National Register of Historic Places. “[It] was erected to serve the needs of the Union veterans after the Civil War. During and after the Civil War, Congress passed laws expanding the eligibility for pensions of the wounded, maimed, and the widowed and orphaned of the Civil War.” In the war, 618,000 died.
The Verizon Center, a linchpin to downtown development, was built privately by one of Washington's homegrown philanthropists, self-effacing Abe Polin. It is home to the Washington Capitals hockey team and the Washington Wizards basketball team. Tuesday evening before the scientific meetings, James Taylor and Carole King will be performing; on Saturday night, the Washington Mystics play New York Liberty.
In the next block, the Shakespeare Theatre. Director and impresario Michael Kahn's nationally recognized company has excellent actors and sumptuous sets. In June they will be performing Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw. “The world of the idealistic Vivie is turned upside down when she learns that her family's considerable wealth comes from her mother's management of a chain of brothels. Is Mrs. Warren's Profession an outrageous moral failure or a paragon of female achievement?”
And that is just the immediate neighborhood.
Walk down to Pennsylvania Avenue. As a citizen, turn left and visit your congressional representative or your senator. Let them know your views on health care and privacy laws.
But before you turn, visit the National Archives. It displays the original Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence. Ponder how we measure up, how we have exceeded, how we have failed the aspirations of our country's founders. Then look into the archives of immigration records. Staff is available to answer your questions. Microfilm publications may be examined during regular research room hours. Where did your ancestors come from? Were they fleeing religious or political persecution? Were they seeking economic opportunity? Adventure? Were they Chinese, from Southern Europe, Jews, single women? All experienced discrimination. Let us ponder.
On the Mall. There is a flavor for every taste. The National Gallery, given to the country by Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Mellon, who declined having it carry his name as he wanted it recognized as a national treasure, not a personal gift. Its grand spaces were designed by John Russell Pope. Across the street, I.M. Pei, himself an immigrant, designed the East Wing, a masterful interaction between a brilliant artist and an unusually shaped plot of land. The multicolored Alexander Calder mobile, an abstract sculpture, moves gently in the air, high over the central atrium. A people's space.
The National Museum of the American Indian addresses the native population of the Western hemisphere, whose cultures and patterns of economic and political life were bent, damaged, or destroyed by the advancing European settlers and their diseases. Millions died. Working with Native Americans, the museum celebrates the many cultures and recognizes the history.
An old favorite is the Air and Space Museum. Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis hangs from the ceiling; the Apollo 11 command module from the first lunar landing mission is on display. A dozen years ago a special exhibit closed on the Enola Gay, which carried the atomic bomb that utterly destroyed Hiroshima. A portion of the exhibit “detailed the painstaking efforts of Smithsonian aircraft restoration specialists who had spent more than a decade restoring parts of the Enola Gay for this exhibition.” A public relations crisis greeted the exhibit's opening and the curators' revisionist texts were rewritten.
If there are any with children, young or old, there is a carousel out of doors in front of the original James Smithson sponsored Castle. In 1826, James Smithson, a British scientist, drew up his last will and testament, naming his nephew as beneficiary. Smithson stipulated that, should the nephew die without heirs (as he would in 1835), the estate should go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” His motives are unknown, but his bequest got these venues of art and artifact, an outgrowth of Enlightenment values, started.
For those wanting to look at rare gemstones, go to the Museum of Natural History. It has exhibits “describing our earliest mammalian ancestor or primate diversity around the world, examining ancient life forms including the ever popular dinosaurs,” “The butterfly garden at the Smithsonian is located on the Ninth Street side of the National Museum of Natural History building. Four distinct habitats—wetland, meadow, wood's edge, and urban garden—encourage visitors to observe the partnerships between plants and butterflies.” The garden is on view at all times. On the second floor of the museum, visit the O. Orkin Insect Zoo, endowed by an exterminating firm. Consider our trajectory, our past and our future.
The African Art Museum plummets underground next to the collection of the Freer Gallery. “This first major presentation of 25 works from the Freer's Vietnamese ceramic collection reflects recent scholarship linking these Vietnamese ceramics with twelfth-to sixteenth-century production centers in the Red River delta in northern Vietnam.” Detroit industrialist James Lang Freer “became interested in Asian art through his friendship with artist James McNeill Whistler, whose work had been strongly influenced by Japanese prints and Chinese ceramics. In 1906, Freer donated 7,500 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and works in metal, lacquer, and jade to the Smithsonian, along with endowment funds.” Under terms of the gift, the museum's collected Asian art must remain in Washington. Its objects cannot be lent or travel.
All quotations are from the respective Web sites, with the exception of that on free and black slaves in Washington, D.C, which is from an article by Paul Fink Elman and Kate Maser in Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895.
Editor's Note: This is only the half of it; Michael Slevin will continue with his in-depth tour guide of our nation's capital in the next issue of TAP.