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17 June 2004

Lunch with Lincoln

It has been a long time since I worked someplace that invited me to wander aimlessly at lunch.

When I worked at the Pentagon, I ran, but to run anywhere interesting you were a sweaty mess when you got there. I tried running to some of the historic places in the district, across the Key Bridge or the 14th Street Bridge and taking the Metro back, but other riders clearly resented my radiant aroma and I gave that up.

Working at the Greyhound Bus Station has opened up a whole new world for me. I was walking down 12th Street, pleased to be out of the office and happy that the summer was not yet upon us. I realized I was just up the street from the magnificent brick Building Museum, which for a hundred years was better known as the Pension Building for veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The Army and Navy that saved the republic still march endlessly around in pale bas-relief, each figure carved in rich detail.

I was walking back past the old Patent Office the other day, on the way to nowhere in particular.

They don't do patents there anymore. Instead, it houses two of the Smithsonian's finer galleries, the National Portrait and Museum of American Art. It has been under reconstruction for the last couple years. The whole area has, really, some of the old building facades still upright on great girdered frames, saving the looking and a bit of the feel of the old streetfront. The buildings behind will be completely new, of course, like the Greyhound bus terminal where I work.

My Lincoln would have known the Patent Office, which in its time was one of the largest public buildings in the town of muddy streets. It covers the entire block, defined by F and G Streets, and 7th and 9th Streets. It took thirty years to construct, back in the day, and many early government offices were located in it's massive Greek Revivial halls.

In the 1850s, Clara Barton worked here as a clerk to the Patent Commissioner, the first woman federal employee to receive equal pay. During Mr. Lincoln;s time in town, the building was turned into military barracks, hospital, and morgue. Wounded soldiers lay on cots in third-floor galleries, among glass cases holding models of inventions that had been submitted with patent applications. Walt Whitman cruised the wards and read to wounded men.

It is supposed to look pretty good when they are done with it, but I think that is true of the whole neighborhood. After the riots, this was not a safe place to be. It seems OK now.

Walking into Chinatown I was thinking about one of the stir-fry lunch specials. I looked at the menu on the door of one place and there was a brass plaque on the wall. The restaurant was housed in a nondescript three-story brick building that had been Marie Surrratte's boarding house.

John Wilkes Booth visited there often, and was in the parlor on the day of the assassination to confer with other conspirators.

The White House is the most visible place associated with Mr. Lincoln lived. I have never been invited to a coffee there or offered the opportunity to stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, but there it is. It is a pain in the ass to have it as an integral part of the daily commute. Pennsylvania Avenue has been closed to traffic, on and off, since some loon tried to fly a small plane into the executive mansion and almost succeeded.

Mr Lincoln didn't hang out there all the time. He spent about a quarter of his time up on the bluff above the city, on the grounds of the Soldiers' Home. They started construction on the institution in 1851 with money appropriated from the civic government of Mexico City, which we graciously accepted in exchange for not putting it to the torch.

Four of the original buildings still stand on the property. Two of them, Quarters 1 and the Anderson Cottage, served as the summer White House for U.S. Presidents Chester Arthur, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Buchanan, and of course, Abraham Lincoln.

The uplands of the District, high above the malarial Potomac. It gave the sallow Chief a break from the hot, humid city, and the hot humid politics of his war. It was here that he wrote the last draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Anderson Cottage was originally constructed in 1842-43 as the home of George W. Riggs, who went on to establish the famous Riggs National Bank. It is constructed in the early gothic revival style and is named after Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter.

Lincoln's election had galvanized resistance to the new Republican administration. The lame-duck Buchanen Administration when Lincoln dispatched the side-wheeler Star of the West in to provide relief for him, after having abandoned the more vulnerable Fort Moultrie and most of his suppies.

The South Carolinians felt they had to shoot, and that was the beginning of it.

The middle of the war is covered down the street at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.

They ripped down the 1850's vintage church where Mr. Lincoln worshipped, but in the solid brick structure they erected to replace it is the original place he sat. The pew in the second row in front of the altar is a curious dark wood, not in common with the blonde color of the rest of the pews.

It is the same seat where the President sat. There is a little brass plate on the end of the pew with a facsimile of his signature. A.Lincoln.

I strolled over on a weekday at lunch and sat there in the dimness of the sanctuary. There is a rich musty smell of old rug. Being a downtown congregation, the place has a distinctly liberal fervor, and some of its recent Ministers led all manner of social activisms.

Who knows, maybe Mr. Lincoln would have approved.

Yesterday I stood outside Ford's Theater and watched the construction next door. The place was gutted by the Park Service, and rebuilt to appear as it did on the day Mr. Lincoln died. The little passageway to the Presidential Box still has scraps of the wallpaper that was there when Booth crept down, looked through the peephole, and burst in on the President, shooting him from behind. There is a bunch of mementos of the event in the basement.

Across the street is the Anderson House, where they carried the President to die the next morning. I walked through to look at the bed that rests behind the Plexiglas shield.

There is an odd postscript to the assassination. Lafayette Square is just across from the White House. Before 9/11 a variety of gentle loons were allowed to exercise their freedom of speech with semi-permanent displays of a number causes. They were swept away, possibly with more than we know, in the furor that followed.

Jackson Place is just off the Square, and the house at Number 8 was built at the same time as the White House. Maj. Henry Rathbone lived there, and he was included in the party for the viewing of Our American Cousin. He was seated next to the President on the night that Booth walked from the Surratte Boarding house.

After firing the fatal shot into Lincoln, Rathbone rose to struggle with the assassin. Booth stabbed stabbed him with a long wicked blade that is now on display in the theater's basement museum. Rathbone survived the attack, but he never fully regained his sanity. The last victim of the assassination was Rathbone's wife, eighteen years later. He first killed her, and then tried to kill himself. But he failed, as he had failed in his military duty to save his Commander in Chief.

He didn't die, but rather spent the remainder of his days in an asylum. They say that 8 Jackson Place is haunted and that cries have been heard to come from the house periodically.

But you could say that about a lot of places in this town. It is not far from the office, and maybe I will walk over and see if I can hear anything. There might be a good place to have lunch over in that direction.