What's Right.

Our Town

In his one-man play Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray explains why he, an old-stock Bostonian, chose to settle in New York City: "I always wanted to live on an island off the coast of America." That's a funny way to describe Manhattan, but despite a dozen bridges and four tunnels, it's very deeply true.

And likewise for my home, Washington, D.C.: One may think of it as the capital of the nation, possibly as the symbol of American democracy, or more likely as the bottomless pit into which you toss your tax dollars -- but for most of the people who drive its streets and walk its sidewalks, Washington, D.C., is first and foremost one of the great tourist spots of planet Earth.

Understandably so: The city is packed with things to see, and Mt. Vernon, Gettysburg, and other historic sites are within a relatively short drive. Local boosters call the Washington Mall "America's front yard" or "America's main street." Many summer weekends it's full of tents for some national gathering (National Tangerine Fiesta!), and on the Fourth of July and at Christmas there are grand national extravaganzas of fireworks and tree- lighting. What could be more attractive?

Courtesy of you, the federal taxpayer, the city's museums are all free of charge, so you can spend a weekend roaming from the Air and Space Museum to the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of American and then Natural History, all without laying out a dime. In London, a four-museum weekend could easily cost a family of four $200 in admissions.

And yet, while Londoners -- and Venetians, New Yorkers, and Parisians -- accept and appreciate their role as tourism meccas, and while people in Las Vegas and Orlando positively revel in it, Washington does not. In the minds of the permanent residents, and even more in the planning of city officials, visitors are like extras in the movies: hordes of people to be shoved this way and that and kept as far as possible from the working life of the city.

It starts with the signs. Washington is a tough city to navigate. It was designed 200 years ago by a Frenchman, who laid out his great traffic circles and grand diagonal boulevards with no regard whatsoever for the city's ravines and rivers. I pity the poor pedestrian who imagines he's mastered Washington's system of numbered blocks and calculates that a trip from 1800 N Street to 2900 N Street will be an easy eleven-block stroll.