Ugly cement barricades still line many downtown streets and ring important monuments. The first thing you see when you approach the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue is a clunky “Delta” barrier that controls car access. The big metal gate reads STOP. Some welcome mat to the land of the free.
On Tuesday, there were so many police cars parked in front of 1600 Pennsylvania it looked more like the Big House than the People’s House. There was even a cop motorcycle parked on the sidewalk right in front of the White House, marring photo ops of the fountain. Most tourists, like Teresa Davis, a real-estate agent who was visiting from Carmel, Ind., with her son and mother, are pretty forgiving considering what the nation’s been through. Davis thought the orange emergency cones and the look of construction everywhere detracted from the city, but she was resigned: “That’s just the way it’s going to be.”
Not necessarily. “There is no reason that security has to be ugly,” explains Richard Friedman, who headed up the Interagency Task Force of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which has come up with a plan to secure D.C. without making it look like Beirut. “If it’s done properly, you wouldn’t even notice.” Friedman, a real-estate developer in Boston, says the ad-hoc security measures over the last few years have scarred the capital–and not just physically. “I was appalled by the psychological and physiological shape of Washington,” Friedman says.
So he and a team of architects and landscape designers sat down with Secret Service and FBI agents and others to figure out just how to balance beauty and brawn. It’s not as easy as it seems. Some building security managers around town have tried things like massive planters. If they keep the flowers watered, they are a pretty alternative to concrete barriers. But if a bomb did go off they would become some pretty weighty projectiles since they aren’t fixed to the ground. Heavy objects and high walls aren’t the answer for safety or aesthetics. “Just like you wouldn’t want urban planners protecting the president, you wouldn’t want the Secret Service designing our streets,” Friedman says. Together, they’ve come up with a security-conscious redesign of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Monument and other key sites.
Last week, First Lady Laura Bush unveiled a $26 million project to remodel Pennsylvania Avenue. The NCPC recently approved a simple, elegant plan by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh of Cambridge, Mass. Beginning in January, the bulky Delta barriers will be replaced with retractable bollards similar to the fluted steel posts they now have at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere. “That creates an openness, a transparency,” explains John Cogbill, chairman of the NCPC. “It allows people and bicycles to go through what had been a labyrinth.” Instead of the thick cement posts that dot the sidewalk in front of the White House, there will be mature elm trees and granite park benches. And the ugly asphalt that too often serves as a parking lot for police cars will be repaved with stone as a pedestrian-friendly space. The plan is to have it open for the next inaugural parade.
Meanwhile, construction has already begun around the Washington Monument. Temporary walls are going up now and landscaping designed by Laurie Olin and Associates out of Philadelphia is beginning. It turns out the grounds for the monument were never finished way back when. The firm will plant trees, grade the slopes to allow wheelchair access and build 30-inch-high walls that form concentric circles around the obelisk. Known as Ha Ha walls, an English country garden term, they serve a serious purpose. They are low enough to allow expansive views, but high enough to knock out a bomb-laden car’s axle. “That gets rid of the concrete barriers at the base of the monument and the square metal building that’s not really a visitors’ center and looks like a bad growth,” says Cogbill, a real-estate lawyer. A controversial plan for a new visitors’ center and passageway for approaching the monument underground will be hashed out over the next few months.
All Americans live with the threat of terrorism now. But working in Washington a block from the White House, it can feel very tangible. One of my friends says the Cosi sandwich shop directly across from the Old Executive Office Building has been nicknamed the “Israeli Cafe” because it is a just the kind of target terrorists like Hamas would attack. Thankfully, we don’t live with the constant fear that the Israelis must feel everyday. Things will probably never go back to “normal,” when anybody who stood in line could take a tour of the White House. But this week, the White House reopened its doors to the general public–though visitors must now submit to an FBI background check. Welcome to Washington.
