Oh, Say, Can You See? ... Not Anymore You Can’t

WASHINGTON -- It was a view, a vista, nothing more. But also nothing less.

Now, it has vanished, its passing barely noticed with so much else going on these recent months. If a vista presents itself and no one sees it, does it exist?

“It’s like they closed the rim of the Grand Canyon,” says Kenan Jarboe, a longtime Capitol Hill resident.

“The American public owns that view,” says Jeff Soule, policy director of the American Planning Assn. “They deserve to have it.”

It was the view you got when you stood on the west terrace of the Capitol, at the top of the steps, and surveyed the Mall.

Now the Capitol steps are closed. The terrace is deserted.

“It’s closed indefinitely,” says Lt. Dan Nichols of the U.S. Capitol Police.

The decision was made in October, shortly after anthrax reached Capitol Hill. Limited tours have since resumed inside the Capitol, but Nichols can’t say how, when or if the outside terrace and steps will reopen.

“It’s indefinite,” he repeats. “We never like to say permanent.”

Let us now praise that cool classical geometry lesson, that political landscape painting. The setting sun limns the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in lavender and gold. The presidential parade route, America’s Main Street, cuts a determined channel from “the people’s house” to the president’s mansion in the distance. None of the sight lines is accidental. At a glance, take in symbols of the nation’s founding, the greatest test of its union and its continued constitutional balance.

So many experiences there involved simple pleasures. Sit on the front stoop of democracy and listen to the National Symphony Orchestra or the U.S. Marine Band or Leontyne Price or Johnny Cash. Watch the fireworks, applaud the speech, join the protest, jog the steps. Focus the camera on your family saying “Cheese” with the obelisk appearing to rise out of their heads.

It was the most breathtaking, significant perch in the republic, and the details are already fading.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect who designed Central Park, was summoned to Washington in 1874 to work on the Capitol grounds. As he stood on the slope below the west side and pondered the great building, he could tell what was wrong: The Capitol looked as though it were about to topple off the hill.

This was not an engineering problem but an aesthetic one. “There is nothing more necessary ... in a building than that it should seem to stand firmly, that its base should seem to be immovable,” Olmsted wrote, according to a new history of the Capitol by William Allen, an architectural historian in the Architect of the Capitol’s office.

Olmsted’s solution was the broad marble terrace, with a strong wall beneath it and twin grand staircases leading down to the lawn. The design not only improved the view of the Capitol from the Mall, it also improved the view of the Mall from the Capitol, and it strengthened the connection of the building to the rest of the city.

The terrace was finished in 1892. The public responded immediately, making the new space its own.

“On summer evenings, when the heat drives the townsfolk from their homes, there is no more popular resort than the terrace-promenade,” an 1897 book on the Capitol reported, noting “the gay summer dresses, and the chatter of the voices of the merry throng upon the steps and along the balustrade, counting the stars or gazing languidly down the long line of lights that mark the avenues and streets of the heated city.”

The west front’s prominence increased with each passing decade as museums, monuments and landscaping transformed the Mall. Women’s lib advocates, Vietnam War protesters, Earth Day celebrants, gay-rights advocates, demonstrators on both sides of the abortion issue--all made their way here for a civic benediction of their causes.

Newt Gingrich chose the foot of the Capitol steps to announce his Contract With America; Louis Farrakhan addressed his Million Man March from the same spot.

The east steps always had a different meaning. Three small staircases leading to east front entrances are used by members of Congress heading to their chambers or giving news conferences. The east steps are for news, the west steps are for history.

Yet for a long time presidents were inaugurated on the east steps. When President Reagan took the oath of office in 1981, the ceremony was switched to the west terrace and steps, where it has remained ever since.

Today that view is the exclusive property of congressional leaders, who can survey the scene from their second-floor office balconies, and of Capitol Police officers, who stand guard on the Capitol steps.

Alan Hantman, the Architect of the Capitol, did not return a message left with his office to discuss the subject. His spokesman referred all queries to Nichols of the Capitol Police.

“I can tell you it’s a proximity issue,” Nichols says. “We have a concern on the upper west terrace in particular. Beyond that, I can’t elaborate, for security reasons.

“We’re cognizant of the symbolism of the Capitol itself, of the view,” Nichols says. “All those considerations are taken into account when we make these decisions. Nonetheless, we have to make certain decisions in order to protect the building itself, the institution of Congress and all those who work and visit within the building.”

Architect Hugh Jacobsen, who designed the $19-million restoration of the west terrace in 1993, says he understands elaborate precautions to screen people going inside the Capitol. “But this is the outside! What the hell is somebody going to do? No one can drive a truck up there. God, it drives you nuts.

“This is the best view of the city,” he says. “It’s just wrong.”

And: “They forget the symbolism. ... It is the center of the United States, where all the laws come from, and you can’t get to it.”

Dorn McGrath, a professor of urban and regional planning at George Washington University, used to take students to the top of the Capitol steps to show them how democratic principles inhere in the plan conceived by the capital’s designers. Indeed, the view itself is part of that plan. Citizens are supposed to be able to see and understand their capital city.

“That is just a terribly important vista,” McGrath says. “They’ve taken away a part of the national heritage.”