Travelogue- Our Nation’s Capital for My Trip’s Last Night
July 31, 2014
By Temple Ligon
Leaving New Orleans on the train Wednesday morning, May 30, 2012, I settled in my sleeper for the 30 hours to Washington. When I travel I usually come out of the trip well informed. Newspapers and magazines always offer good companionship, particularly in a private railcar compartment.
The train route is called the Crescent by Amtrak, although I had taken it before for a 1978 honeymoon when it was called the Southern Crescent run by the Atlanta-based Southern Railroad. On that trip we had more than just a private compartment, or a roomette, as Amtrak called the narrow space for two, one up and one down, and a toilet hidden under the upholstered seat. We had a suite, sort of, with a walk-in bathroom replete with shower and a clothes closet besides our two bunks, again one up and one down.
Our dining car waiter back then was a tennis player who had played tournaments with the great Bitsy Grant of Atlanta. Grant played for Chapel Hill, graduating in 1933. He beat Don Budge in the 1935 U. S. Open on the grass at Forest Hills, New York City, but he lost to the Brit Fred Perry in the semi-finals.
Bryan Grant’s nickname Bitsy came from his small stature. Grant was 5’-4” and 120 pounds, hardly a big gun. But he had an incredibly reliable ground game, returning just about every shot until his competition wore down. He never won a major, but he did win the U. S. Clay Court Championships three times. He stayed with it. Before he died in 1986, Grant had won 19 senior singles titles. I have seen where he is memorialized in the International Tennis Hall of Fame in the casino museum in Newport, R. I.
Atlanta loved him. He escorted Olivia de Havilland for the world premier of Gone with the Wind.
Our waiter was proud of his connections with Grant, never beating him but still playing with the best the South had to offer, including Columbia’s Sam Daniel. The Southern Crescent food wasn’t all that great, but the white linen tablecloths, the fresh flowers and the brush with Daniel and Grant through our waiter all helped to make for a great trip.
On my return to the Crescent two years ago, I didn’t bump into people who knew Connors or McEnroe or any representatives of later generations. I did get a half-hour off the train in Atlanta’s Midtown, near the wildly popular Bitsy Grant Tennis Center and near the location of the defunct Oxford Books. I used to visit that area of town fairly regularly in the early 1990s, in particular the Bennington apartment building, and I really enjoyed visiting between the South’s best bookstore and the city’s salute to Grant.
The Crescent rolls through the northwestern corner of South Carolina, stopping at Clemson, Greenville, Spartanburg and running on to Charlotte, but none of these stops is long enough to climb down for a walkabout.
My arrival in Washington’s Union Station, architect Dan Burnham’s masterpiece, was about 30 hours after my New Orleans departure. I chose Washington as my trip’s last night because Washington is one of my favorite cities. I love old cities. Jerusalem is more than four thousand years old; Rome is a little less than three thousand years old; and Paris and London are about two thousand years old, while Washington wasn’t even located until 1790.
In September of 1789, about when Georgetown University was founded and several months after Washington was first inaugurated, citizen Pierre L’Enfant wrote a letter to President Washington, explaining that since L’Enfant’s father was a court painter in Paris – until July 14 probably – and since L’Enfant grew up next to the gardens behind Versailles, L’Enfant was aptly educated and unusually well-suited to design the street plan of the nation’s new capital on the Potomac. The king’s garden paths behind Versailles made for an illustration of what L’Enfant had in mind for a capital street plan.
Washington bought it, and a year later the town plan was complete, as drawn up by L’Enfant’s successor. Like all bright designers, L’Enfant was entirely too difficult to deal with and was gone before he held the job for even a year. But is plan made his points. With the combination of a grid plan superimposed over a radial street scheme, there were many corner sites suitable for important buildings. With a pure grid, like Columbia’s early plan five years before Washington’s, every corner is the same, so it’s not logical necessarily where to put the important buildings. The grid street plan is too democratic, not enough of a ranking of importance.
Walking to the Mall from Union Station, I dragged my wheeled three-suiter behind me all the way to the White House, where we South Carolinians feel right at home. The White House was designed by the same architect who designed the first South Carolina State House, James Hoban of Charleston. And next door to the White House is the Treasury Building by Robert Mills, whose nearby Washington Monument hovers over all.
In front of the White House is Lafayette Square, and on the square’s northeast corner is St. John’s Episcopal Church, where if you go for the 7:00 a.m. service, you would likely be impressed by who else is attending. On the northwest corner of the square is the Hay-Adams Hotel, built in the 1920s as a luxury apartment building and later converted into a boutique hotel.
The Hay-Adams ain’t cheap. After all, look at the view: The White House. But if you’re staying in Washington for one night, enjoy it.
The Lafayette Room restaurant is a few steps up from the lobby in the Hay-Adams and on the hotel’s southeast corner, giving a view of the White House to go with breakfast. And down below the Lafayette Room restaurant is the Off the Record bar. Actually, it’s also a restaurant, but there is no view. Off the Record is in the basement, and many conversations are by people who are not impressed with a view of the White House because they go inside the White House every day.
Walking east through Lafayette Square gets you to the old Hotel Washington, now the W. In the ground-floor dining room is where economists Arthur Laffer first showed his Laffer Curve on a cocktail napkin to White House staffers.
Upstairs on the roof is where you’ll find some of Washington’s most attractive bar hoppers. Always crowded, the place at night is something of a home to the best-dressed set.
And for something completely different, I always walk up 16th Street, which is where 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the south node, to N Street. At N I take a left, heading west to Connecticut Avenue, but I stop about halfway down the block on N and walk up the few steps to the Tabard Inn, the best cheap hotel deal in the country and home to the liveliest lobby conversation since NYC’s Algonquin Round Table in the late 1920s. Always ask for room 39 at the Tabard. You get a street view and you’re next door to the hallway bathroom. The place is affordable because the bathrooms are community features on each floor.
Get back out on N and proceed to Connecticut to hang a right for Dupont Circle, a hippie haven in the late 1960s. About a half-block above Dupont Circle on Connecticut is Kramerbooks, just about the greatest indie bookstore/newsstand/café/bar combination in the country. Just ask me. I know.
From Kramerbooks it’s not far getting back to the Hay-Adams, but I spent too much time in the back at Kramerbooks, so I took a cab to the hotel.
