New Westminster

New Westminster is the capital city of the United Kingdom of America and the only city of the Columbia District. It stands on the north bank of the Potomac at the head of tidewater navigation, holds within a few square kilometres nearly every institution that governs the Realm, and has about six hundred and eighty thousand residents, most of whom do not govern anything.

It exists because of a clause. Article III.3 of the Charter requires Parliament to assemble at a seat upon the river Potomac and at no other place, and names no city, because the delegates at Philadelphia could not agree on one and settled the argument by naming the water instead. Everything else about the capital follows from a compromise about where an argument could be stopped.

The rest of the Realm considers the city handsome, deliberately low and a little dull, and will say so without being asked. Residents answer that the Realm has seen four square kilometres of a city of a hundred and seventy-seven, and that the four are not the interesting ones. Both positions are held with some heat and this article does not adjudicate between them, beyond observing that the other hundred and seventy-three are its subject.

The constitutional position of the ground the city stands on, its instrument, its money, its federal estate and its unresolved status, belong to the District’s article and are not repeated here.

Name

The Charter fixed the river and left the name to be settled afterwards. George Washington settled it, and it was contested at the time.

The objection was that the name was servile. A Realm that had just negotiated a Crown of its own, a Parliament of its own and a court of its own was proposing to name its capital after the parliament it had left, and a good many members thought this a failure of nerve at precisely the moment when nerve was the thing in shortest supply. The alternatives put forward were a personification, a river, a founder’s name and two polities’ claims dressed as compliments, and the name stuck largely because the alternatives were worse and because Washington had already used it in correspondence for a year.

The argument has never entirely stopped. It is raised about once a generation, usually by somebody with another name in mind, and it has never come close to a division.

Within the metropolitan region the city is simply the capital or Westminster, the latter used mostly by people who work for the government. The full name appears on official instruments, in datelines and nowhere else.

The site and the plan

The ground

The city stands where the coastal plain meets the fall line, at the point where ocean-going ships could come no further up the Potomac. The eastern branch, the Anacostia, joins the main river below the old town, and the ground between them is low, flat and was in places marsh; behind it the land rises to a ridge that carries the cathedral and the northern wards.

It is on the north bank only. The original grant was a square of ten miles straddling the river, and the southern portion went back to Virginia in the nineteenth century. What lies across the water now is another polity: the built-up region of the capital spills into Virginia and Maryland and holds several million people, and none of it is the city.

What was there first

The ground was not empty and had not been for a very long time.

An Algonquian people held the confluence, and their town gives the eastern river its name. They were gone before the survey, through disease, pressure and dispersal, and the river’s name is what the capital retains of them.

A tobacco port town stood on the north bank, chartered decades before the Charter, with warehouses, a market, a customs house and merchant families whose descendants are still in the city. It was swallowed whole and is now a quarter, and it is the only part of the capital that was a place before it was a plan.

A second, smaller town on the eastern branch was swallowed the same way and has left less.

And the rest was farms and a few plantations, worked by enslaved people, whose owners sold the ground to the commissioners at a considerable profit and are named in the conveyances.

The plan

Pierre Charles L’Enfant drew the plan and Andrew Ellicott finished it after L’Enfant was dismissed for being impossible to work with, which he was.

What they drew was a grid with diagonal avenues cut across it, so that the crossings open into circles and triangles and the resulting blocks produce a great many awkward corners, which two centuries of architects have treated as either the plan’s chief gift or its chief cruelty. The avenues were laid to run between the principal public buildings, so the plan is a set of sightlines before it is a street pattern: you are constantly being shown a monument you did not ask to see.

Three consequences follow, and residents will name all three.

Distances look short on the map and are not. The plan was drawn for carriages and for ceremonial, at a scale that assumed you would be driven, and walking it in August is a different proposition from reading it.

The circles and squares are parks. Visitors see traffic islands with statues; residents see the places they walk dogs, eat lunch and hold small demonstrations, and most of the city’s ordinary outdoor life happens in them.

And the awkward corners produced a particular architecture, of flatiron buildings and rounded ends, which is the city’s most recognisable domestic form and appears in no plan at all.

The survey, and Banneker

The survey that fixed the plan on the ground was run by Ellicott, and the astronomical observations that fixed its base point and its boundary stones were taken by Benjamin Banneker, a free Black astronomer and almanac-maker from Maryland, working nights in a tent with a borrowed clock and instruments he largely understood better than the men who owned them.

Two things are worth stating precisely, because the story has attracted a good deal of embroidery since.

He was known at the time. Banneker published almanacs computed by himself, corresponded with ministers about the contradiction between the Realm’s professions and its practice, and was cited in the argument over slavery during his own lifetime. His presence on the survey was reported in the newspapers and was understood by everybody involved to be remarkable.

And the Realm then forgot him for a century and a half, and has rediscovered him in the last two generations with more enthusiasm than accuracy. He did not design the city, he did not reconstruct L’Enfant’s plan from memory after the drawings were taken away, and he was not the survey’s chief. The true account is impressive enough and the article declines to improve on it: the boundary of the Realm’s capital was fixed by a free Black man’s observations of the stars, at a moment when most people of his descent in the polities around him were owned.

The boundary stones he set are largely still there, in hedges, gardens, back lanes and traffic islands, and they are the oldest federal monuments in the Realm. They are looked after by a volunteer society rather than by anybody official. The stones on the south side are now in another polity, which nobody thought about at the time of the retrocession and which has produced a small and permanent administrative muddle.

The builders

The capital was built substantially by enslaved people, and the record is unusually complete because the Realm paid for their labour and kept the accounts.

The payrolls survive and are published. They name enslaved workers by first name only, with the sums entered against the names of the men who owned them, so the ledger records what a week of a man’s work was worth and does not record the man. On the same pages, in the same hand, free Black craftsmen are recorded in full, with surnames and trades, which makes the omission visible to anybody who reads a single sheet.

Irish and Scottish stonemasons were brought over for the cut stone, and most of them stayed; the city’s oldest working-class parishes descend from them.

A memorial stands near the Axis. It was put up far too late, it is too small, and the city argues about it continuously: about its size, its siting, its wording, and about whether a Realm that kept such good accounts might have managed something proportionate to them.

History

The move, and the diagram

The government arrived in 1801, six years after Columbia Palace was finished, and found a great diagram with a village in it: avenues surveyed across fields, public buildings kilometres apart with nothing between them, mud in winter, dust in summer, and a population that came for the session and left.

It stayed like that for the better part of a century. Foreign visitors were merciless about it in print for two generations, in books the city has never quite forgiven, and the Realm’s own members complained about the lodgings, the distances and the fevers in terms that make the Parliamentary record of the period read like a long letter of complaint.

The canal

A canal was cut west along the river towards the mountains, intended to carry the interior’s trade down to the capital’s wharves. It never paid, was overtaken by the railway within a generation, and survives as a towpath and a linear park that is now one of the best-loved things in the city.

A second canal was cut through the middle of the city itself, along the low ground, and became an open sewer within twenty years. It was filled in and built over, and the street that runs on it floods to this day.

The nineteenth-century city

Between the arrival of the government and the crisis of the 1860s the capital was a small southern town with a large public sector, and the two had almost nothing to do with each other.

It had a market, a wharf trading down the bay, a brickfield, a handful of foundries and a great many boarding houses. Members lodged in them during the session, four and five to a house, in arrangements sorted by polity and by party which had a measurable effect on how the Realm’s politics worked: men who ate breakfast together for five months voted together, and the mess table is a real mechanism in the parliamentary history of the period.

Slavery was ordinary in the city until the crisis. Enslaved people worked the households, the hotels, the wharf and the public buildings, and the trade in them was carried on within sight of the legislature until it was abolished in the District alone, after which it moved across the boundary and continued.

The city’s free Black population was nonetheless large, organised and old: churches from the 1830s, schools run privately because the public ones excluded them, benefit societies, and a business street that predates the war. It is the reason the capital had an intellectual centre to build a university on afterwards.

The streetcars arrived in the 1860s and are the reason the city has a shape at all beyond the original plan. The wards north and east of the core were laid out along their lines, in the long terraces that still define them, by speculators building for clerks, and the capital’s row-house city is essentially a streetcar suburb that the plan then caught up with.

The secession crisis

The capital was threatened, ringed with earthworks and camps for the length of the war, and filled with soldiers; its works on the Virginia heights were attacked once, at Arlington Heights in 1862, and it was never taken. The public buildings were taken over as hospitals and the wounded lay in the corridors of the ministries.

Two things from those years changed the city permanently.

Emancipation came to the District ahead of the Realm, and thousands of people arrived who had freed themselves by walking. They were housed, if that is the word, in camps that were squalid and that became neighbourhoods, and several of those neighbourhoods are still there and still known by the names the camps were given.

And the King’s Guards were raised in 1861 and given the policing of the District, which they kept until 1954. That is the District’s story and is told there; what it meant for the city is that for ninety-three years the constable on the corner was a soldier from another polity who would be gone within a few years.

The public works, and the loss of self-government

In the 1870s the city acquired, in about four years, the sewers, the pavements, the water mains, the graded streets and the planted avenues that made it habitable. It acquired them from a board of public works under a vice-president named Cornelius Vane, who built at a speed and on a scale nobody had authorised and left the city bankrupt.

The consequences were the appointed commissioners who governed the District until 1912. The city built itself a modern infrastructure it could not pay for and lost its elected government for it, which is a bargain the District has been arguing about ever since.

Vane himself is remembered with genuine ambivalence, and the ambivalence is the honest position. The city he left is the city that exists. He ruined it doing so, he enriched his friends along the way, and every subsequent Lord-Mayor has been measured against a man who was never elected to anything.

The alleys

Behind the street fronts, inside the blocks, the city grew a second city.

The plan’s blocks were deep, and the ground inside them was built over with alley dwellings: small houses in courts reached through archways, invisible from any avenue, with their own lanes, shops, churches and names. At their height tens of thousands of people lived in them, overwhelmingly Black and overwhelmingly poor, a few metres and a whole world from the houses of officials on the street outside.

They are the most characteristic thing about the city’s poverty and the least visible, which was the point. The alleys were cleared over decades by law, on grounds of health and decency that were real, and the clearances turned out in practice to be evictions rather than rehousing: the dwellings went and the dwellers were not provided for. A handful of the courts survive, restored and expensive, and are now among the most sought-after addresses in the city, which residents find a bleak joke.

The plan revived

By the end of the nineteenth century L’Enfant’s plan had been half-built, encroached on, and in one place crossed by a railway that ran across the ceremonial ground with a station on it.

A commission of 1901, of two architects, a sculptor and a landscape man, was appointed to consider the capital’s parks and took the opportunity to do considerably more. They went to Europe for a summer, looked at Rome, Paris, Vienna and Versailles, and came back with the answer they had left with: that L’Enfant had been right and the Realm should finish what he drew.

What they did:

Threw the railway off the Axis, which was the hardest thing and the one that mattered, and which required the company’s agreement and a new station elsewhere: Union Station, now the southern end of AmRail’s Crown Limited.

Reclaimed the river flats and placed the great memorials on ground that had been water within living memory.

Fixed the classical manner for everything public, for the next fifty years and arguably still.

And treated the original plan as scripture, which is why the capital is one of very few cities in the world built substantially to a drawing made a century before.

Segregation

The Realm’s capital was segregated, and it was segregated by the federal government on federal premises: separate entrances, separate canteens, separate lavatories, and a promotion ladder that stopped. It ran in the capital of a Realm whose Rights Act of 1866 bound the federal government and not the polities, which made the position exquisitely awkward and did not stop it.

The city’s Black population fought it for two generations against an employer that was also the reason the city existed, and it is the central fact of the capital’s twentieth century.

The wars

The federal establishment doubled in the first great war and doubled again in the second, and never shrank back.

Temporary buildings were thrown up along the Axis in both wars, hideous, and some of them stood for forty years. Women arrived in tens of thousands to do the clerical work and did not leave afterwards, which changed the city’s demography, its housing and its politics in that order. And a vast new office for the armed forces was built across the river, in Virginia, which is the largest building in the Realm and is not in the capital, a fact the city mentions whenever the subject of its own economy arises.

The housing crisis dates from exactly then and has never been resolved.

The clearance

In the middle of the last century one whole quarter of the city, the low ground south-west of the Axis, was demolished almost in its entirety.

Some twenty thousand people lived there. The quarter was poor, overwhelmingly Black, and by the standards applied at the time genuinely bad: alley housing, no plumbing in much of it, and rates of illness the city’s own surveys had documented for decades without acting. It was cleared, comprehensively, and rebuilt to a modern plan of slab blocks, plazas and expressway ramps that architects admire and almost nobody else does.

The promise that residents would return was made in writing and was kept for almost none of them. The new housing was built at a fraction of the old density, at rents the displaced could not pay, and the people who had lived there were dispersed across the eastern wards and into Maryland. It is the largest single act of destruction in the capital’s history and it was done by people who believed they were improving it.

What did not happen

The capital did not burn in the 1960s, and the absence needs explaining rather than enjoying.

The Realm’s civil rights movement worked through the courts and through Parliament, using the American Rights Act case by case and statute by statute, and its decisive victories were judgments and enactments rather than confrontations. No single killing in those years touched off a night of it. And the capital’s own Black institutions, the university, the churches and the press, were the movement’s headquarters rather than its bystanders, which meant the people who could have led a rising were the people conducting the litigation.

None of that makes the Realm better than it was. The grievance in this city was identical to the grievance anywhere: the same segregation, the same alley housing, the same clearance, the same police. What differed was where the pressure went, and the article states that as a fact about the machinery rather than as a credit to the state.

What the capital had instead was the marches. The city is where the movement came to be seen, and the largest of them, in 1959, is a fixed point in the Realm’s memory and is generally credited with the District’s own Commons seat two years later. There was also an encampment on the Axis that stayed for weeks and was cleared, and the clearing of it is remembered badly by everybody who remembers it at all.

The sentence did more for the District than for the movement that wrote it. The Commons seat followed two years later, and the campaign for it has quoted the petition at every anniversary since, occasionally to the discomfort of people who would rather the two questions were kept separate.

The metro, and the last forty years

The metro was built late and built well, with deliberately monumental stations, at enormous expense, and its lines were drawn to serve commuters from Maryland and Virginia rather than residents of the city. Residents said so at the time and were told they were wrong. It made the suburbs in two other polities possible and it is very good at what it was built to do.

Since then: the city’s population fell for decades and has been rising again, and the people arriving are not the people who left. Gentrification of the row-house wards is the loudest domestic argument in the capital. The downtown was rebuilt on the money that law and lobbying brought in. And the waterfronts, industrial and rail land for a century, have been reclaimed and turned into the most expensive ground in the District.

May Day

The bombs of 1 May 2006 were in New York. The capital’s part in that day was constitutional, and belongs to the District’s article and to the May Day account.

What belongs here is what did not change. There are no checkpoints on the Axis, no barriers at the Palace, no sterile zone around Parliament House. A visitor who saw the government quarter in 2004 and returned twenty years later would find it recognisable in every particular, and that is the Realm’s standing exhibit for the claim that its security settlement is invisible rather than absent.

The working city

The capital is a workplace before it is anything else, and a particular kind of workplace, and the machinery of that is worth describing because it is what most of the four square kilometres is for.

The session

Parliament’s year governs the city’s. When the Houses are sitting the population of the core roughly doubles by day, the restaurants take bookings a fortnight out, the committee corridors are full, and the hotels are at capacity from Monday night to Thursday morning. When they rise, it empties.

The Monday-to-Thursday week is the capital’s characteristic rhythm: members and a great many officials come in on Monday and leave on Thursday, which means the city has a weekday population and a weekend one, and that a substantial part of its professional class does not live in it.

The committee rooms

Most of the Realm’s business is done in the committee rooms rather than in either chamber, and the corridors outside them are where the capital’s own trade is conducted: the waiting, the passing of papers, the quiet conversation against a wall. Anybody who has worked in the capital can describe the geography of those corridors in detail and will if allowed.

The clubs and the tables

The city has clubs, of the old kind, and they matter less than they did and more than their members admit. Below them is a layer of restaurants and dining rooms chosen for acoustics and sightlines rather than for food, in which a substantial proportion of the Realm’s business is actually settled, and which the lobbying register does not reach.

The offices in between

Between the ministries and the Axis stands the trade that exists because the government does: the associations, the institutes, the firms of attorneys, the consultancies, the polling houses, the printers of official forms, the couriers, and the small industry of people whose job is to know which official has moved to which desk.

The quarters

The monumental core

The Charter Axis runs from the river to Charter Hill with Columbia Palace closing its western end and Parliament House its eastern, and the Civic Triangle of ministries fills the ground between the Axis and the old commercial streets.

Along it stand the museums, the galleries, the national memorials and the reclaimed ground they sit on. This is the four square kilometres the Realm has seen. It is magnificent, it is free to walk into, and about two thousand people live in it.

The sentence has no legal force and never had. It is nonetheless the ancestor of the statutory height limit, is carved in the District’s own council chamber, and is quoted by both sides of every planning argument the capital has, which is the surest sign that it means less than either side claims.

The old town

The tobacco port that predates the capital is now a quarter of narrow streets running down to the water, brick warehouses converted twice over, a market that has operated continuously since before the Charter, and the most expensive residential property in the Realm outside Manhattan.

It is the one part of the city with a street pattern older than the plan, which is why it is the only part where a visitor gets lost.

The diplomatic quarter

Along the ridge north-west of the core, in the largest houses in the city, behind railings and flagstaffs. It gives those wards their schools, their shops, their churches and their restaurants, and it pays no rates on any of it.

The Civic Triangle and the ministries

Between the Axis and the old commercial streets stands the wedge of ministries the city calls the Civic Triangle: a dozen departmental blocks in pale stone, built between the 1910s and the 1930s to a single design intention, around courtyards that are open to the public and that almost nobody enters.

It is the most complete piece of monumental government architecture in the Realm’s world and it is also, at six in the evening, the emptiest ground in the capital. Nobody lives in it, nothing is sold in it after the working day, and the District has spent thirty years trying to persuade the Realm to let some of it be something else.

The Black city

East and north of the core lie the wards that have been the heart of Black New Westminster since before emancipation: the churches, the theatres, the business streets, the benefit societies, and Banneker University among them.

This is the part of the capital that the rest of the Realm knows least and that has the strongest claim to have built the city’s own culture rather than the Realm’s. It was the movement’s headquarters. It was also the part cleared twice, for the federal estate and then for the roads, and the wards that survived did so by being slightly too far out to be worth taking.

The northern ridge

Above the core the ground rises to a ridge carrying the cathedral, in the ward named after it, Cathedral Heights, the observatory, the older embassies and the largest houses in the city, in wooded streets laid out in the late nineteenth century for people who wanted to be above the summer.

It is the wealthiest ground in the District, it contains a disproportionate share of the capital’s private schools, and the line where it meets the row-house wards below is the sharpest social boundary in the city.

The row-house wards

Most of the city. Long terraces of red brick with bay fronts and front steps, built between the 1870s and the 1920s for clerks, and now occupied by a mixture of the people whose families have always been there and the people who have arrived in the last fifteen years, who are the subject of the city’s loudest argument.

Beyond the valley

North of the park valley the city becomes suburban: detached houses, lawns, garages, and a street pattern that gives up on the diagonals. It is still the city, it votes in District elections, and it contains a good deal of the District’s tax base.

The eastern wards

Across the eastern branch, furthest from everything, poorest, most neglected by every administration including the elected ones, and the part of the capital where the gap between the city’s per-head wealth and its residents’ actual lives is widest.

The Axis in use

The Axis is the Realm’s ceremonial ground and it is also a park that people run in, eat lunch on, play games on and cross on their way to work, and the two uses coexist with less friction than visitors expect.

It has been an aerodrome, a cattle pasture, a railway yard, an encampment, a site of temporary war offices and a place where the Realm’s largest arguments have been conducted in front of the buildings they were about. The grass is federal, the events on it require a federal permit, and the permit is granted almost always, which is a policy the Realm is quietly proud of and the District pays for.

Architecture

Pale stone in a classical manner for everything public, kept up long after it went out of fashion everywhere else, and kept up deliberately: the commission of 1901 fixed it, the height limit reinforced it, and the result is a capital of consistent scale and material that looks older than it is.

Red brick for everything else, in terraces of great length, with the flatiron corners the diagonals produce.

A twentieth-century layer of heavy government offices, built in the wars and after them, which nobody defends and which occupies a good deal of the ground between the core and the row-house wards.

And trees. The avenues were planted from the first survey and replanted twice, and the canopy is one of the things residents name first when asked what they like about the place.

The height limit governs all of it. It is federal and statutory and the District cannot alter it, so the public buildings remain the tallest things and the sky is visible from the street, which is the single most frequently praised and most expensive fact about the city.

The port town

The one part of the capital that was a place before it was a plan is the tobacco port on the north bank, chartered decades before the Charter and swallowed by the survey.

Its street pattern is its own and predates the grid, which is why it is the only quarter in which a visitor with a map still gets lost. Its warehouses were built for tobacco, converted to flour and coal in the nineteenth century, and converted again in the twentieth to offices and flats, and several are on their fourth use. Its market has operated continuously on the same ground since before the Realm existed, which makes it the oldest continuously trading institution in the capital and older than Parliament’s presence there.

The canal ran to it, the wharves silted, the trade moved downriver, and for a century it was the shabby end of a shabby city. It is now the most expensive residential ground in the Realm outside Manhattan, which its remaining old families regard with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation.

It also holds the capital’s oldest institutions that are not federal: the first Catholic foundation, the oldest synagogue, two of the earliest Black churches, and the merchant houses whose descendants are still on the District’s boards, committees and charitable trusts. When the city wants to demonstrate that it existed before the government, this is the ground it points at.

Climate, the river and the trees

The capital sits on tidewater and the summer is the dominant fact of its year: hot, humid and long, on ground that was partly marsh, with three months in which outdoor work is genuinely unpleasant and indoor work was, before air conditioning, barely possible. Parliament’s long recess still falls in that period and the habit has comfortably outlasted the reason.

Winters are short and mild by the standards of the northern polities, with two or three snowfalls that the city handles badly and discusses for weeks. The spring is the compensation: three or four weeks in which the planted avenues and the river basin come out together, and the capital receives more visitors in that month than in any other.

The river was a working waterway, then an open sewer, then a health emergency, and is now an amenity. The channel silted, the wharves moved, the flats were reclaimed, and the water was not fit to swim in for a century. It is cleaner than it was and is not clean, and the annual report on it is one of the few District documents the national press reports.

The trees are a deliberate creation. The avenues were planted from the first survey, replanted comprehensively twice, and are maintained under a federal programme that residents regard as the one part of the capital’s administration that has never failed them. The canopy covers a greater share of the city than of any other capital in the Realm’s world.

Wards and the neighbourhood commissions

Below the District Council the city is organised into wards, and below the wards into small neighbourhood commissions, elected, unpaid, and covering a few thousand people each.

They have almost no formal power and a great deal of practical influence. A commission’s written view must be given weight by the District’s planning and licensing authorities, which means that in practice a liquor licence, a building of any size, a change of use or a street closure passes through a body of unpaid neighbours who meet in a church hall and who can make an applicant’s life extremely slow.

The system is admired and complained about in roughly equal measure. It gives the smallest units of the capital a real voice in their own streets, which is more than the District as a whole has in the Realm, and it puts that voice in the hands of whoever turns up on a Tuesday evening.

Government of the city

The city has no government of its own distinct from the District’s, which is the fact that shapes everything about how it is run. The Lord-Mayor of Columbia and the District Council are the city’s government, and their constitutional position belongs to the District’s article.

What belongs here is the practical division. The city’s streets, schools, police, fire service, housing, licensing, waste and transit are the District’s. The Axis, the parks, the river margin, the monuments, the museums, the great houses and roughly a third of the ground are the Realm’s, and the city government cannot direct any of it.

The line between the two is not drawn on any map a resident would recognise. It runs through the middle of streets, so that one pavement is swept by the District and the other by a federal commission; through parks, so that the maintenance of a single square is divided; and through emergencies, so that the question of who is in charge of a given incident depends on which side of an invisible boundary it happened.

Schools and health

The District’s schools serve a population running from the children of ambassadors to the children of families who have cleaned the ministries for four generations, and the gap between the best and worst wards is the widest of any jurisdiction of comparable size in the Realm. A substantial minority of the professional class educates its children privately, which is a political fact as much as a social one, and the schools east of the river have been the subject of four reorganisations in thirty years.

Health provision is unusually good and unusually uneven. The national teaching hospital serves the Realm as well as the city; the federal establishment supports specialists a city of this size could not otherwise keep; and the eastern wards have outcomes that would be unremarkable in a much poorer place. The District has built two hospitals east of the river in forty years and closed one of them.

Crime and policing

Policing in the capital is layered and the layers are the District’s business rather than the city’s, but two things belong to the city.

The first is that the Department of Public Safety inherited its buildings and a good deal of its manner from the King’s Guards in 1954, and the habit of a beat officer who knows the residents by name is a genuine survival from the regiment rather than a modern innovation.

The second is that crime in the capital is geographically concentrated to an unusual degree, along the eastern edge and in a handful of corridors, and that the parts of the city visitors see have among the lowest rates in the Realm while the parts they do not have among the highest. The District’s own statistics say so plainly and the national press reports the aggregate, which is how the capital acquired a reputation that fits about a sixth of it.

Institutions

The museums

A national institution of a dozen or more museums and galleries stands along the Axis, free to enter, funded by Parliament and run at arm’s length from it by a board of regents.

It was founded on a foreign bequest that Parliament argued about for a decade before accepting, on the grounds variously that the money was tainted, that the Realm should not take charity, and that nobody knew quite what the testator had meant. It took the money in the end and has been glad of it since.

The others

The national library, which is Parliament’s own library and the largest in the world.

The archives, where the Charter itself is kept and displayed, under glass, in a hall built for the purpose.

The naval observatory, which keeps the Realm’s time.

Columbia Cathedral, on the height above the city, which belongs to the Church of America and is used by the whole Realm for its state occasions and by the city for its own.

The botanic garden, the zoo and the observatory grounds, all federal, all free, and all used by residents as ordinary city parks.

The universities

Banneker University, chartered 1867, the Black university of national standing and the institution the city is proudest of. The naming was contested at the time, on the ground that Banneker was a surveyor and not an educator, and it has outlasted the objection.

Potomac University, chartered 1821, the oldest, private, and the one the diplomatic corps sends its children to.

St Jerome’s University, Catholic, with the basilica beside it.

And the Westminster School of Government, a graduate school the ministries recruit from directly, which is either the Realm’s finest training of public servants or an engine of a self-replacing official class, depending on who is asked.

Gazette Row

The street where the Realm’s press corps keeps its offices, opposite the ministries, and the name is genuinely used. It is emptier every year as bureaux close and correspondents work from elsewhere, which the trade finds ominous and the District finds a rent problem.

Economy

Government above everything, federal and District together, directly and through everything that exists to deal with it.

Law. The largest concentration of attorneys in the Realm, because everything the Realm argues about is argued here, and the firms that argue it are among the city’s largest private employers.

Associations and institutes. Every trade, profession, industry, church and cause in the Realm keeps an office in the capital, and the aggregate of those offices is a substantial economy in itself.

Lobbying, which is visible and registered. A public register records who is paid by whom to speak to whom, has been kept since the last century, and is generally complied with. Its weakness is structural: it catches the paid advocate and not the former minister who has people to dinner.

Universities and hospitals, which are the largest private employers in the District.

And visitors, in tens of millions a year, almost all of whom come for things that are free, which is a tourism economy of an unusual shape: enormous footfall, modest spending, and all the costs falling on a city that owns none of the attractions.

What the city does not have is anything that is not about government. Every attempt to diversify has produced another industry that exists because the government is here, and the city knows it.

Getting about

The metro: good, expensive, with the deepest stations in the Realm, and drawn for commuters rather than for residents.

Buses, which residents use constantly and visitors never find.

The circles, which no driver from outside the city negotiates correctly on the first attempt, and which are the subject of the capital’s single most reliable joke.

A walkable core and a suburban outer city, which surprises people who expect one or the other.

And closures. Routes vanish for a state visit, a funeral, a motorcade or a march, at short notice and often, and residents plan around them the way other cities plan around weather.

The airports

Columbia Regional is the close-in field, in the District, on the river, with short runways, a statutory cap and an approach along the water by sight that is one of the celebrated arrivals in the Realm. It could not take jets, which is why George Washington International was built and why the close-in field was not closed. Baltimore-Chesapeake, in Maryland, is the third.

Housing

A fixed quantity of land, a height limit that cannot be raised, and demand that rises with every expansion of the federal establishment. That is the whole of the problem and it has no solution within the District’s own powers.

Beyond it: a century of public housing built badly, demolished, rebuilt and demolished again; a waiting list measured in years; and a market in which the row-house wards have been transformed twice in fifty years, once by flight and once by return.

Parks

A great wooded valley runs up through the northern city, federal, taken into public hands early, and the largest thing of its kind in any capital: gorge, creek, mature forest and thirty kilometres of paths, inside the city boundary.

It also divides the city socially as much as geographically. Residents will tell you which side of the valley a ward is on before they tell you anything else about it, and no map shows why that matters.

Sport

Professional clubs in the national games, supported with the particular fervour of a city that wants something of its own that is not the government, and the Army-Navy Match, played annually, televised nationally, attended by the Governor-General, and a fixed point of the civic year.

The visitors

The capital receives tens of millions of visitors a year, which is more than any other city in the Realm, and it receives them in a shape no other city has to manage.

Almost everything they come for is free. The museums, the galleries, the memorials, the Axis, the Palace forecourt and the parks cost nothing to enter, which is a deliberate national policy and means that footfall and revenue are unrelated in a way that makes the District’s tourism economy unlike anybody else’s: enormous numbers, modest spending, and all the costs of crowd, transport, waste and policing falling on the city.

A large share of them are children. The school party is the capital’s characteristic visitor, arriving by coach in the spring, and the city’s ordinary life in April and May is organised around the fact.

And a share are here to be heard rather than to look. The march, the vigil, the lobby day and the delegation are visitors too, and they are the ones the District spends most on.

Residents’ relationship with all of this is the ordinary one of people who live somewhere everybody else visits: genuine pride, practised avoidance of the core in April, and a standing willingness to give directions, which visitors report as the single most surprising thing about the capital.

The city’s year

Spring brings the blossom on the river basin and the largest visitor month of the year, with a festival the District runs, the Realm attends and the city’s residents mostly leave town for.

The Fourth of July, Charter Day, is the capital’s largest fixed occasion: the parade along the Axis, the service at the Cathedral, the review, and the crowd on the reclaimed ground in the evening.

The state opening closes the Axis and the streets round Charter Hill and is the one occasion on which the whole ceremonial apparatus of the Realm is visible in one afternoon.

The recess, from high summer, empties the government quarter and gives the city three or four weeks that belong to it. Residents describe it as the best time of the year and say so quietly.

And the marches, which are not on any calendar and are the largest single thing the city does for the Realm. They arrive with a week’s notice or a year’s, they fill the Axis, and the District polices, cleans and restores after every one of them.

Institutions of the Realm in the city

Beyond the government proper, the capital holds the head office of almost every national institution the Realm has, and their buildings are a substantial part of the city’s fabric.

The Royal American Constabulary at Constabulary House. The Royal American Reserve and the Realm’s financial regulators. The Church of America, whose Primate lives beside the cathedral and whose national offices stand on the cathedral’s lawns. The broadcaster’s national newsroom. The armed forces’ departments, though their largest building is across the river. The learned academies, the national societies, and the great charitable foundations.

Each brings a headquarters, a staff, a conference season and a quantity of visiting members, and collectively they are the reason the capital has more hotel rooms per resident than any city in the Realm.

Population and society

About six hundred and eighty thousand people, in a city whose population fell for four decades and has been rising for three.

The old Black city

Families four and five generations in the same wards, descended variously from the free Black population that predates the capital, from the people who walked to the emancipation camps in the 1860s, and from the internal migration out of the southern polities.

This is the community that built the churches, the university, the business streets, the press and the benefit societies, and it is the one with the longest continuous claim on the place. It was a majority of the city for most of the last century and is no longer, and the change is recent enough that the city’s politics has not caught up with it.

Ethiopia and Eritrea

The Realm holds about half a million Ethiopians and Eritreans, and the largest Ethiopian and Eritrean community anywhere outside Ethiopia lives here, concentrated in a few wards along one corridor, arrived in successive movements across fifty years, and visible in a way few immigrant communities anywhere are: whole streets of shops, restaurants, groceries, churches, travel agents and remittance offices, with the signage in two scripts, the Latin and the Ethiopic.

It is now a settled part of the city rather than a recent arrival, with a second and third generation in the professions, and its food is not exotic here but ordinary.

Central America

A large Central American community, drawn from the United Provinces of Central America and arriving through the labour of building and cleaning the capital, which stayed to become a substantial part of several wards. Its relationship with the city’s employers, federal and private, is the subject of the District’s most persistent labour disputes.

The transient class

An enormous graduate population, here for a ministry, a firm, a committee staff or a degree, and gone within four years.

It gives parts of the city the population turnover of a university town and the property prices of a capital, it votes in smaller proportions than anybody else, and it is responsible for the city’s reputation for being full of people who will tell you what they do before they tell you their name.

The corps, and the servants of the state

The diplomatic corps and the people who serve it, and beside them the families who have worked for the federal establishment for four and five generations and have never worked anywhere else: messengers, clerks, printers, drivers, cleaners, curators, gardeners. They are the city’s continuity, they are routinely mistaken by visitors for newcomers, and they are the people who know how the buildings actually work.

Culture

The music

The city has its own music and almost nobody outside it knows what it is.

Crank is a percussion-led dance music, played live by bands of ten or twelve with several drummers, congas and a horn section, and its defining characteristic is that it does not stop between songs: the beat runs continuously through a set of two or three hours, the band moving from one number to the next over an unbroken rhythm, with a caller working the crowd across it.

It came out of the Black wards in the 1970s, it is played in halls, parks and school gyms rather than in concert venues, it has never had a national hit of any consequence, and it is played in this city every weekend of the year. Attempts to export it have failed consistently and residents are not sorry.

Crank, and how it works

A crank band is ten or twelve people: a drum kit, two or three congas and timbales, bass, guitar, keyboards, three or four horns, and a caller who is not quite a singer.

The beat does not stop. A set runs two or three hours on a continuous rhythm, the band moving between numbers over the top of it without a break, so that a recording of a night is not a sequence of songs but one piece with sections. The caller works the crowd across it, naming neighbourhoods, schools, wards and people who are present, and the crowd answers, which is why recordings of a night are worth more locally than any studio version and are traded accordingly.

It is played in halls, parks, school gyms and community centres rather than in concert venues, and its economy has always been live and local: a band may play four nights a week in the same three wards for twenty years and be unknown ten kilometres away.

The city has tried to make it an export twice, in the 1980s and again in the present century, and both attempts produced records that sounded like something else. What could not be exported is the part that matters, which is a room in which the caller knows the crowd.

It has also been a municipal argument. Crank draws crowds, crowds draw complaints, and licensing of the halls has been used against it in every decade since it began, most recently in wards where the new residents have objected to the noise that the old residents have been making there for forty years. The District’s licensing committee has become, unexpectedly, the place where the capital’s argument about gentrification is conducted in public.

Food

Crab and oysters off the bay in season, and a seafood wharf on the river that has been trading continuously for longer than the government has been in town and has survived three attempts to redevelop it.

A half-smoked sausage, coarse, spiced, split and griddled, sold from stands and counters, which is the city’s own and travels nowhere.

Ethiopian and Eritrean cooking as an everyday cuisine, to the point that the question of where to eat in the capital is frequently answered without leaving one corridor of one ward.

And the expense-account restaurants where the Realm’s business is actually done, which are numerous, expensive, mostly indifferent, and chosen for their acoustics and their sightlines rather than their food.

Religion

Columbia Cathedral on the height, which belongs to the Church of America, is used by the Realm for its state occasions and by the city for its own, and is the building most residents take visitors to first.

The Black churches, which were the civil rights movement’s headquarters in this city and remain the strongest institutions in several wards, running schools, clinics, credit unions and funerals.

A great Catholic basilica with St Jerome’s beside it, serving the Irish and Central American populations and a good deal of the diplomatic corps.

A mosque built for the diplomatic corps in the last century which became the city’s own, as the corps’ congregation was joined and then outnumbered by residents.

And synagogues, serving a Jewish community older than the capital, which came with the port town and has been in the city continuously since.

The press

The capital produces more journalism than any city in the Realm and reads less of it. The national bureaux cover the government; a separate and much smaller press covers the city, staffed by different people who do not much read each other, and the gap between the two is a standing complaint of residents who find their own city’s business reported nowhere.

The stage and the screen

A national theatre and a national concert hall on the reclaimed ground, both federal, both admired. Beneath them a genuine small-theatre scene in converted halls in the eastern wards, which is where the city’s own writing happens.

The region

The city is the centre of a metropolitan region of several million people spread across three jurisdictions, of whom fewer than a fifth live in the District.

The suburbs in Maryland are the older ones, closer, denser, and increasingly the place the city’s own population moves to when it is priced out, which has reversed the direction of a migration that ran the other way for fifty years.

The suburbs in Virginia, on the retroceded ground and beyond it, hold the armed forces’ great office, a substantial technology industry, and the airport, and they are richer.

The relationship is the ordinary one of a city to its suburbs with one addition: the suburbs are in other polities, with their own legislatures, their own taxes and their own schools, and the people who work in the capital and live in them are taxed where they sleep. The city provides the reason they exist and receives nothing from them, which is the District’s grievance and is told there.

What the capital memorialises

The Realm memorialises in this city and almost nowhere else, which makes the choice of what stands on the Axis a national argument conducted on a District’s streets.

The founding is the oldest layer: the Charter, the negotiators, the first Governor-General, and the Peace of Boston.

The wars are the largest: the great memorials of the two world wars, and the smaller and better ones to the Realm’s later and less popular campaigns.

The Crown is present and restrained, which is deliberate. There is no equestrian monarch on the Axis.

The capital’s own dead have their memorials too, which visitors mistake for national ones: the District’s fire and police memorials, the memorial to the city’s own regiments, and the small stone at the wharf for the men lost off the bay.

And the twentieth century added the reckonings: a memorial to the people who built the city, which is too small; a memorial to the civil rights movement, which is not; and, since 2006, the Realm’s memorial to the May Day dead, which is here although the attack was not, and which the District regards as correct and New York does not entirely.

What is not memorialised is as informative. There is no monument to the clearance, none to the alleys, and none to the emancipation camps, and the city has asked for all three.

Daily life

The capital is interrupted. Streets close, routes divert, motorcades run, marches assemble, and the city plans around it.

It is unusually well served: free museums, a great park, a good library system, decent transit in the core, and institutions a city of this size could never have built.

It is expensive, and short of housing, for reasons it cannot fix.

It is hot, oppressively, for three months, on ground that was partly marsh, and the ceremonial calendar is still shaped around the recess that heat originally required.

And it is saturated in politics and powerless in practice: everybody is three steps from the government of the Realm, and nobody can get anything done about their own street.

Writing about the city

The capital has a literature of its own and most of it is about the gap between the two cities.

The political novel set here is a recognised genre in the Realm, generally comic, generally about somebody arriving with convictions and leaving with a position, and residents regard almost all of it as being about a city they do not live in.

Against it stands a smaller body of writing from the wards: novels, memoirs and poetry out of the Black city, the alleys and the eastern neighbourhoods, which is the capital’s serious literature and is read considerably less. The city’s best-known writer of the last century grew up three streets from a clearance and wrote about it for forty years.

The journalism is the largest single body of writing produced here and almost none of it is about the place. A correspondent may spend a career in the capital and file nothing about it, which residents note with more resignation than bitterness.

Across the eastern branch

The wards across the eastern river are a quarter of the city’s population and are treated in most accounts of the capital as a footnote, which is itself the point.

They were farmland and a small town within living memory of the plan, were built up in the twentieth century largely for Black families moving out of the alleys and out of the clearance, and were then cut off twice: first by the river, which has too few bridges, and then by the expressways, which were laid along the near bank and made the crossing worse rather than better.

What is there: long streets of modest houses, a great many churches, the District’s largest concentration of public housing, two hospitals of which one has closed, the city’s best surviving stretch of riverside woodland, and a set of neighbourhood commissions that are among the most active in the District precisely because their wards have the least.

The gap between these wards and the northern ridge is the widest in the capital by every measure the District collects: income, life expectancy, school results, tree canopy and response times. The District knows the figures, publishes them annually, and has not closed the gap in fifty years of trying.

Every Lord-Mayor promises the east and is judged on it. Vernon Ashby’s administration is the fourth in succession to make it the principal domestic commitment, and residents across the river have heard the promise made before.

The capital in the Realm’s imagination

No city in the Realm is pictured more often by people who have not been to it, and the picture is consistent enough to describe.

On film and in television the capital is the Axis at dawn, a black car on an empty avenue, a corridor, a committee room and a set of steps. Almost every production shoots the same four square kilometres, frequently from the same angles, and a resident can generally name the street from a single frame. The District operates a filming office, charges for permits, and spends a good deal of its time explaining that the exteriors requested are federal and that the crew will need to ask somebody else.

In fiction it is a place people arrive at, and the arc is nearly always the same: conviction, compromise, position. The genre is a century old and shows no sign of exhausting itself.

In the Realm’s political language the city’s name is a metonym and rarely a compliment. “New Westminster says”, “the Westminster view”, “as far as New Westminster is concerned”: the usage attributes to a city of six hundred and eighty thousand people the opinions of a few thousand of them, most of whom are from somewhere else, and residents point this out at every opportunity and are not listened to.

And in the Realm’s affection it does better than any of that suggests. The museums, the blossom, the school trip and the memorials are shared national property, most citizens of the Realm have stood on the Axis at some point in their lives, and the capital is one of the few things in the Realm’s public life that almost nobody actively dislikes. It is simply not thought of as a place where anybody lives.

Failings

The builders. The capital was built substantially by enslaved people whose names appear in the payrolls under first names only, with the money entered against their owners, and it was memorialised far too late and too small.

The alleys. Tens of thousands of people lived invisibly inside the blocks for a century, and the clearances that ended it were evictions dressed as reform: the dwellings went and the dwellers were not provided for.

The clearance. A whole quarter of twenty thousand people demolished, its residents dispersed, and a written promise of return kept for almost none of them.

Segregation, imposed in the Realm’s own capital by the Realm’s own departments, on federal premises, against a population that had built its own institutions a century earlier.

The plan. Drawn for carriages and ceremonial, and responsible, through the height limit that protects it, for a city that is expensive, low and permanently short of housing.

And gentrification, which reversed the city’s population decline by replacing the people who stayed through it, and which the city argues about more loudly than any of the older wrongs because it is the only one still happening.

Preservation and the arguments about building

The capital argues about building more than about anything else, and the arguments have a settled shape.

The height limit is federal and unalterable by the District, and it is defended by residents and attacked by economists. Every study of the city’s housing market for seventy years has identified it as the binding constraint, and every attempt to raise it has failed, because the people who would benefit are hypothetical and the people who object live here.

The historic districts cover a great deal of the row-house city, which preserves the terraces and makes altering them slow and expensive, and which has been used both to protect neighbourhoods from clearance and to keep new residents out, sometimes by the same people.

The federal review applies to anything visible from the Axis or near the monumental core, and is conducted by a commission the District does not appoint. Its decisions are generally good and are entirely outside the city’s control, which is the pattern of everything else here.

And the memory of the clearance governs the tone of all of it. A city that demolished a quarter of itself in the belief that it was helping is a city in which every proposal to improve a neighbourhood is heard by people whose grandparents were improved out of one, and any planner who does not understand that will lose their first three meetings.

Symbols

The city uses the Columbia District’s flag: a white field with a red band at the hoist and two navy stripes, carrying a gold sunburst charged with a white crown, three red stars above and the river beneath.

There are two flags for one ground and that would be absurd, so there is one. The older civic arms of the port town survive on lamp-posts, manhole covers and a few nineteenth-century buildings, used by nobody officially and removed by nobody either.

The city’s politics

District politics is ward politics, and the wards are the unit of everything.

Council elections turn on services, schools, policing, licensing and development, in that order, and almost never on the status question, which is the Realm’s argument rather than the city’s daily one. Turnout is low in the transient wards and high in the old ones, which gives the long-settled parts of the capital an influence out of proportion to their numbers and is the single most important fact about how the District is actually governed.

The Lord-Mayor is elected across the whole city and must therefore hold together a coalition of the ridge, the row-house wards and the east, which have almost nothing in common except a shared irritation with the federal presence. Vernon Ashby’s is the fourth successive administration to be elected on the east and judged on it.

Party matters less here than anywhere else in the Realm. The city votes one way at Realm elections by a margin so large that the general election is not a contest, so the real competition happens within a single party and at ward level, between factions organised around neighbourhood commissions, churches, unions and development fights. Outsiders find this incomprehensible and residents find it obvious.

Assessment

New Westminster is a capital that was designed before it was a place, and it has spent two hundred and thirty years becoming the second without ever being allowed to stop being the first.

Everything good about it and everything wrong with it comes from that order of events. The plan is magnificent and was drawn for a city that did not exist, by a man who never saw it built, for purposes that had nothing to do with living there. The height limit that makes it beautiful makes it unaffordable. The free museums, the great park, the library and the cathedral were built for the Realm and are used every day by the people who happen to live around them, which is either a consolation or the whole story. And the four square kilometres the Realm has seen are the four that were designed; the rest is a city that grew the ordinary way, through speculation, immigration, streetcars, clearance and return, and it is the part nobody visits.

The failings are the failings of a capital built by a state on other people’s ground. It was built by the enslaved and it recorded their first names. It housed its poor in courts behind the avenues and then removed the courts. It demolished a quarter of itself in the belief that it was helping. It was segregated by its own principal employer. And every one of those things was done by a federal government that did not live here, to a population that had no vote in the Parliament at the end of the street.

Against that, the city has been more successful at being a city than a place built as a diagram had any right to be. It produced a Black intellectual centre of national importance, a music of its own, a press, a cuisine, and a set of neighbourhoods with two-century memories. It has defended the openness of its public buildings against its own government and won. It is the only capital in the Realm’s world where you may walk up to the seat of power and put your hand on the wall.

Whether the capital would be a better city if the Realm’s government left is the question residents ask each other and do not answer. The honest position is that almost nobody here would take that bargain: the government is the reason for the museums, the park, the metro, the university money and the work, and it is also the reason for the clearance, the height limit, the closures and the single member of Parliament. The city cannot have one without the other and has never been offered the choice.

Chronology

See also

• AmRail, from Union Station
• Columbia District: the ground the city stands on, its instrument, its money and its status
• Columbia Palace: the Crown’s American house, at the western end of the Axis
• Government House: the working seat of the Crown
• Columbia Regional: the close-in field on the river
• George Washington International Airport
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies: Article III.3, the clause the city exists to satisfy
• The May Day Bombings
• Royal American Army: the King’s Guards, who policed the capital until 1954

Trivia

Categories

Land & Nature · Cities and Places · The Capital · The Charter · The Crown and Government