California Street Not Quite a Grand Avenue

When Pierre L’Enfant was asked by his close personal friend George Washington to plan the federal city in 1791, the French-born military engineer decided every state in the union would be represented by “a grand avenue.”

Pennsylvania snagged the classiest addresses, with the White House on one end and the Capitol on the other, while the rest of the former colonies landed some nice, showy arteries that are today the heart of the federal city.

Then L’Enfant got fired “due to his temperamental nature” (in less colonial terms, he had a ‘tude) and as new states were eventually added to the union, the street naming thing got left to real estate developers and Congress.

And you know how that can be.

So, it being the end of summer when everybody important is on vacation and the rest of us look for stuff to do, we decided to take a little ride over to California Street and see how the old Golden State made out.

*

It is 11 a.m. on a drizzly Tuesday as we climb into our friend’s black Miata and head to Northwest Washington’s Kalorama section, named after the Greek word for “beautiful view.” This pleases us.

We turn left onto our grand avenue and find that things start out very nicely with the embassies of the former Yugoslavia, the former Burma and El Salvador nestled among some stately old townhomes where in 1916 there once lived Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. Not bad!

A little farther down the block we encounter the Hotel Brighton--”home of the Army and Navy set . . . and a first-class fireproof hotel,” as it was once advertised decades ago--a nicely kept neighborhood market and a very trendy real estate brokerage where we learn that those brick townhomes start at a million and go as high as three. Very impressive!

Tooling down the block, we are just beginning to think that Washington finally did right by the 31st state when, bam, we run smack into Connecticut Avenue and our journey ends before it’s even time for lunch.

Three blocks? This is the best they could do to honor the home of the fish taco, inventor of the Boogie board, the state that selflessly loaned Congress Sonny Bono?

“We got dissed,” Los Angeles streetwear manufacturer Ramesy Salem concluded while hunting for an apartment for his sister. “Couldn’t we get a boulevard?”

It is no secret that Californians often feel slighted by Washington. For example, there is a magnificent statue called Freedom that sits atop the Capitol dome, and upon close inspection one can’t help but notice that it faces east, its back turned to our fair state. One Californian recently noted that if not for the restrictive properties of bronze, Freedom would probably be mooning.

So maybe we are a little sensitive on the subject. Who wouldn’t be? Washingtonians are forever making fun of California--the surfing, sprouts, shopping malls, a leisure culture modeled around the hot tub--the very essence of us! And that recent little scuffle between the Chihuahua and the boa constrictor didn’t help matters any.

But rather than jump to conclusions, we persevere, resolving to ask some of the people who live and work on California Street what they think of our beloved state. We first encounter a plumber with a tattoo on his left hand that says “Sally,” sitting in his red truck smoking what must have been a filterless Camel and waiting to snake out some guy’s air conditioner.

He looks like kind of a mountain man, with a big fuzzy beard that just keeps growing until it connects with his chest. The mountain man doesn’t like to talk much and the Camel is gagging our intrepid correspondent, so we get right to the point.

“What do you think of California?”

“Bunch of crazies,” he grunts.

Ever magnanimous, we put the question to Realtor M. Steve Jacobson.

“Heh, heh,” he begins, to our dismay. “I think of one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons where this guy is driving down the highway and he passes a sign that says ‘Leaving California. Resume Normal Behavior.’

“But San Francisco is nice,” he adds.

Next we find Meg Kelly, walking from her condo to mail a letter.

“Every time I write my address down I think of California,” she says sweetly, to our delight. She is listening to the score from “The English Patient” on headphones so we immediately deduce that she is a very smart person. “I love San Francisco.”

“And L.A.?” we venture.

Long pause.

Great.

We stand in the drizzle, gazing at the pageantry of the embassies, when it dawns on us that Yugoslavia, Burma and El Salvador are not exactly on the A list of human rights supporters.

*

Well, it could be worse. Washington state didn’t even get a street named for it until 1989, and Hawaii got a really crummy street far away from everything. And anyway, it’s never going to change. Way back in 1897 a guy named Alexander B. Hagner delivered a very long lecture on “Street Nomenclature of Washington City” in which he said “blunders and absurdities” long endured by time are impossible to correct.

“And so the the gay equestrians will continue to gallop along Rotten Row,” was how he put it.

And even if California were a really big street, it would still be in Washington and Marion Barry would still be the mayor and you could never be sure that they would come to plow the snow or pick up the trash.

So there.