A White House Tour, from Outside Trump's Fence
Washington is a city of tours, of carefully curated tellings of history. Official White House tours were suspended nearly three months ago, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s not clear when they will resume. For now, the closest that most Americans can get to visiting is something of a self-guided tour along the fence that went up June 4th, swaddling the White House, the Treasury, and other buildings in reinforced black-metal mesh.
Pennsylvania Avenue is blocked, so a circumnavigation is best launched a couple of blocks east of the White House, at the corner of Fifteenth Street. Heading south, one of the first sights is the face of a pig, scrawled in graffiti beside the word “Oink!” The pig, on the wall of the Treasury building, evidently went up before the fence, during the early protests over the police killing of George Floyd, so, ten days after the marches began, it still peers out, like a museum piece behind glass. Continue south along the fence line, and other graffiti on the wall of the Treasury, in and among the Greek columns, composes a montage of recent history: “I Can’t Breathe,” “We Are Unarmed,” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Walking on, a glance to the left offers a glorious view of the limestone blocks of the Herbert C. Hoover Federal Building, which houses the Commerce Department and is named for a President who mishandled an economic crisis and tried to shift the blame to other nations, telling Congress, in 1930, that “the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States.” (Two years later, after losing his bid for reëlection, Hoover left Washington on a train, weeping during the journey, and then dedicated his life to resisting the work of his successor, Franklin Roosevelt.) Above the door of the Hoover Building, the inscribed words of George Washington offer a soothing reminder of greatness: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” But you can’t linger in the reveries for too long before running headlong into a street sign that has been recently adorned with a sticker marked “Bunker Bitch.”
Glance right again and you pass the darkened hall of the Ellipse Visitor Pavilion, usually a destination for tourists seeking shade in the splendid fifty-two-acre public park south of the White House. When the Secret Service ordered the fence put up, Deborah Berke, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, observed that it was not just the vicinity of the White House that became inaccessible. “Part of what’s so offensive to me isn’t just the wall, but the grabbing nature of it,” she told me. “It takes a public park along with it.” Last week, when William Barr, the Attorney General, dispatched members of law enforcement and the National Guard to barricade the Lincoln Memorial, Berke saw another example of a seizure of space. “I had a childhood connection to the Lincoln Memorial—my father idolized Lincoln and could quote many of his speeches by heart—and when I go to Washington, I always make a point of going to the Lincoln Memorial. It’s an homage to our better selves,” she said. “Preventing any one of us from going to stand in that hallowed space and read those words is like a wall at the White House. We, as Americans, should be able to go and talk to Mr. Lincoln whenever we want. This stuff should not be taken away from us as citizens of this country. This stuff is ours.”
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