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A Walk Down K Street

By Lionel Beehner

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On a recent visit to Washington DC, I paid a visit to K Street.  I wanted to get a feel for the street that inspired HBO's eponymous semi-fictional docudrama (developed by Hollywood Heavyweights Steven Soderburgh and George Clooney), also the same street that has played host to backroom dealing since Harding put the warm phrase "Teapot Dome" into out American history textbooks.

I was not impressed.  For all its historical hype, K Street is as colorless and empty as, well, L Street or I Street (spelled mischievously on one corner as "Eye" Street, causing me to wonder if DC's Latinos spell K Street "Que" Street), or any street in out nation's capital for that matter.  HBO producers agree with me, I would learn. The show's filmed at Bergstrom Lowell, a fictional nonpartisan political consultancy situated on I Street, not K.

Downtown DC is a grid of nothingness, a sea of concrete and creativity-free buildings, purposefully designed to encourage bigness and bureaucracy.  No Gehry or Gaudi structures here.  No Greenwich Village either.  Walk up the escalator at Farragut Square and one sees nothing but square, windowless offices, all miraculously the same height, inhabited by grayish suits which are in turn inhabited by infectiously sleepy-eyed, politics-obsessed workers.  Everyone in DC radiates tiredness; frowns are the local currency.  Little wonder the city has such a low job retention rate (for the record, I lasted all of 10  months there).

Walk back down the escalator and whoa!  You find yourself emptied into a massive, tubular labyrinth that is as eerily efficient (a digital clock counts down to train arrivals, which are then announced by flashing platform lights) as it is eerily dull.  The stations, devoid of musicians, riff-raff and all semblances of artistic impression, evoke the setting from a bad Aldous Huxley novel.  They might look futuristic, if the year were 1973.  Just like the buildings upstairs, the metro stations are copycats of one another.  Washington, or at least its architects and engineers, looks down upon uniqueness.

Back outside, I stroll down K Street (or up it, I'm not sure).  The sidewalks are wide and parade-friendly, but unmanicured, befitting a city crippled in debt.  The buildings are big and boxy.  Above the glass doors, the insignia read like a who's who of banks, think tanks or airline agencies.  Their ground floors, occupied by fast food restaurants and photo shops, are uninviting.  Cafes, bars, or restaurants are sparse.  Suffice it to say, no fashion models would be caught dead sashaying down K Street, Chanel bags in tow.

Of course, K Street is a street best seen from the inside, where the action is.  Caged inside its numerous buildings are the famous lobbying firms that have put the street on the map, and now on Sunday night television.  K Street is supposed to symbolize power.  It is to politics what Wall Street is to money.  Tom DeLay, the Republican house majority leader, and Grover Norquist, chairman of Americans for Tex Reform, even launched what's colloquially known as the "K Street Project," a drive to lure more Republican-leaning lobbyists to the capital.  I kept half-expecting James Carville to come charging out of one of K Street's many offices, gabbing on a cell phone about HR-4025 or some such bill.

But I see no power brokers, no lobbyists, no action - just a barren street.  I approach one of the city's "Golden Triangle" workers, a team of directions-dispensing good-Samaritans clad in bright yellow jackets who camp out on busy street corners.  "Seen Clooney yet?" I ask him.  WIthout looking at me he shakes his head and answers, "Nope.  But I seen Martin Sheehan a coupla times."

I move on.  Down the block I steal a glimpse of the White House.  Every time I come to DC I become increasingly less impressed by the digs of our head of state.  It's remarkably nondescript.  In New Orleans' Garden District, it'd be the smallest, plainest house on the block.  Jazz it up a little.  Add a wing.  Put in a garage.  Change the landscaping.  But do something!  I stand and stare at the building, but not too long for some dumb fear I have that I'll be shot by one of the handful of snipers whose office space is the White House roof.  Don't look suspicious, I tell myself.  I sit down on a bench, facing Pennsylvania Avenue.  Given the weather, there is little foot-traffic, save a few frumpy tourists and diligent staffers from some agency or other, most likely one with a three-letter acronym.  A bike messenger speeds past me humming a familiar pop tune whose title I should know but don't.

As the day drones on, I can't help but feel let down.  I know livelier pastures abound close by, notably to the north in Adams Morgan, or across the Potomac in Alexandria, but the heart of DC is completely uninspiring.  Funny how this seems to reflect the legislation and policy choices our leaders make.  In the back of my mind I also know that DC, despite its sticky setting and BO-friendly temperatures, is a summer place-to-be.  Every May a new crop of fearless, go-lucky interns armed with Stephanopoulos-smiles swarms the city looking to putty over that last ugly spot on an otherwise spotless resume.  Yet paper-pushers, come closing time, are looking to party, and cheaply.  In the summer, DC happy hours are among the best I've experienced.  No one knows anyone else.  Everyone's young and equally broke.  And there's nothing else to do (except bike some of the capital's excellent trails, but in the heat, this is ill-advised).

I walk back to K Street and head back down into the depths of the DC metro.  I've given up on my quest for inspiration.  It was the rain, I tell myself.  Maybe it's that New Yorkers like me are so spoiled, blessed with an endless conveyor belt of entertainment options.  Or maybe out nation's capital does in fact need a shot in the arm.  That's where HBO comes in.  The channel did, after all, make northern Jersey come alive.

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Lionel Beehner is a contributing writer for Seed Magazine. He can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three