OMH 4: Pope John Paul II

When Pope John Paul II died in 2005, the surreallity far eclipsed the mourning. Baptized and confirmed during the Johannine-Pauline era, I never learned came to think of the Papacy as a rotational office like the President or the BC goalie. The pope was … a guy. And if you’re in Catholic school, he’s a guy who’s everywhere. You hear the Pope’s name every Sunday. You pass the Pope when you go to the principal’s office (when you’re nine, they both speak ex cathedra). He’s just the Pope.

Sometime (if you live in West Roxbury, when you’re about 25), you meet your first non-Catholics. For many raised in the universal church, this is pretty monumentous. Even if we didn’t understand their religion, if they (gasp!) had one at all, they undoubtedly knew who the Pope is. They might find his political forays petty or superfluous – hey, even some of us do – but at least they knew him. Everyone knew the Pope. And the Pope was ours.

The Pope John Paul II statue in DC is, fittingly, across the street from the Catholic University of America in front of (go figure) the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. Without an appointment, there’s little reason to stop by. The statue is maybe a thousand feet in from the street, which in itself is far enough from the Metro or major thoroughfares, that there’s no reason you’d just be wandering through. For DC monuments, this may as well be Neptune.

The statue itself is impressionistic, maybe six feet, bent at the shoulders and with open hands that invite – and encourage – believers to hold them. Suffer the faithful to come unto the statue, it says. Pray with the pope before you go in. He’s smiling, mouth slightly agape – perhaps we caught him mid-syllable. Maybe he’s talking to us. Maybe about the time he and the rabbi walked into a bar.

He’s tinged with copper, long patinated into a greenish hue. Maybe the sculptor wanted a twinge of timelessness, maybe a fit with the grass carpet around it. But for a child of the ‘80s, and one who traversed bits of the Eastern Bloc soon after liberation, for me the green recalled a figure at the apex of communism’s fall. It’s no stretch to hear the whispers of another likeness some 200 miles north.

That the Pope wound up in DC, near Catholic University and the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, is apropos. You have to want to see the Pope, and when you do, it’s among the serenity of trees and gravel, not tour buses and Metros. He doesn’t belong belong in politics, and would be awkwardly out of place near the friezes, Greek deities, and oversized presidents downtown.

He doesn’t belong to the nation. He’s ours.

OMH 3: The other FDR Memorial

The National Archives sits on the Via Touristica between Pennsylvania and Independence, and preaches “Freedom! Liberty! America!” with all the subtlety of Brett Favre’s data plan. You walk in under a frieze gods and angels, and if you’re lucky, you exit from the largest bronze doors in the world. Inside, the Rotunda is more cathedral than museum. As you stare at the documents — err, “Charters of Freedom” — the Founding Fathers watch o’er you not as 18th Century bourgeois lawyers, but as philosopher-kings modeled, how subtly, on Rafael’s “School of Athens,” though they may as well be the closest thing a secular government has to a Sistine Chapel. In his image, George Washington created you.

Outside, though, the Archives grounds hold DC’s most disproportionately unostentatious monument, one where subtlety and (for a while) personal preference overwhelmed that American disposition to honor a currency-worthy president as an Olympian deity. Lincoln and Jefferson, meet the block.

That monument, a block with six words, was for 32 years all the capital had to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yes, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one who since 1997 has sat at the nouveau 7.5 acre monument on cherry-blossom landscape across the Tidal Basin, the “I hate war” guy who beat Hitler, the “Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races” guy that built the Japanese internment camps, the “I see a third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished” guy that ordered the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the “we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world, at peace” guy that ignited the Manhattan Project.

Say what you want for Roosevelt, he arrived in an isolationist, Greatly Depressed country and left it a superpower with the Atomic Bomb. Nearing eighty years since his first election, he’s far enough in the past for armchair (or talk show) historians to demonize or lionize.

For a city, and a building, where the fortuitous can become legend, the legend can become statue, and statue can become an “I love liberty” tourist’s Mount Olympus, the austere Roosevelt memorial is strikingly, and reassuringly, simple. Unlike the landscaped architecture across the Tidal Basin, you're not guided, taught or preached to. In the block's simplicity, your mind can wander to demonization, deification, or somewhere between – a blank slab on which to draw your own conclusions.

OMH 2: Rhodes Tavern

It always, it seems, comes back to the drink. Just as Chaucer’s storytellers convened at the Tabard Inn, Faust signed his diabolical contract at Auerbach’s Tavern, and Han shot Greedo at the Mos Eisley Cantina, it somehow makes sense that a watering hole stood at the apex of a maturing American democracy.

That watering hole was Rhodes Tavern, which stood for 183 years at F and 15th, behind the Willard and east of the White House and the Treasury. It went up in 1801, a year after the bankers moved in across the street. William Rhodes was a shrewd capitalist; when your customers control the nation’s money, they can’t ever deny you a tip. Rhodes must have had excellent happy hours to boot: his tavern spared the British burning the White House in 1814. All’s beer in love and war.

The tavern’s history reads as curriculum vitae (curriclum vini!) that rivals the taps of Sam Malone and Geoffrey Chaucer. Rhodes’ barroom served as DC’s first town hall, a boardinghouse for members of Congress, home to Riggs and the First Bank of the Metropolis, and even the Washington Stock Exchange. Yes, America, the forerunners of your government and financial system were drinking on the job. Or drinking was the job. Moving on…

Today, Rhodes’ tavern is little more than a pair of plaques and a painting on the delta of F into 15th. The tavern was razed in 1984 despite a DC vote to the contrary, and its commemorative plaque was paid for by pennies collected from DC schoolchildren. The painting that stands across the sidewalk is rudimentary, one whose British torching the neighborhood bears uncanny resemblance to the burning Chateau Mal Voison in “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown.”

While we all lost a bit of history when the wrecking ball shut Rhodes in 1984, the most unfortunate ultimate victim is, and always will be, Mrs. Rhodes. Turn around from the plaque and cringe: the lady of the house is henceforth penned to posterity as an androgynous, cross-dressing Tony Danza.

Victims of Communism Memorial

In the middle of June 17th Street, about 200 yards West of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, stands The Caller. It gets lost amid the other nearby world-bending landmarks – the Victory Column, to taunt France; the Soviet Memorial, to taunt Germany; and the Reichstag, where … well, nothing of note has ever happened. The Caller is a curved, avant-garde figure on an unmarked pedestal; you’d miss him if you weren’t scanning the median. With lips agape and hands cupped, he screams a clanging “We haven’t forgotten you,” a silent chord of solidarity with East Germans that never saw him.

Thirteen years on, The Caller remains my favorite Cold War relic. And so, when I came across a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, it had to be the first station on the Obscure Monument Hunt. The memorial, which opened in 2007 at the triangle of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and First, stands three blocks from the Capitol and four from Union Station. Like The Caller, there’s little to the memorial itself – The Goddess of Democracy statue and a few engravings, and there’s little to learn there and even less cause to stay more than a few minutes.

For a country whose reputation hung on all things anti-communist, the memorial demonstrates remarkable restraint. Unlike the WWII Memorial – a visual treat, but which reads like a resume (“So, Mr. States, tell me about the time you were at Guadalcanal…”), the lack graphic symbolism or depiction of figures is particularly poignant. No victim or hero encapsulates an Iron Curtain that swept half the world. Like The Caller, its simplicity speaks more.

Ironically, though, the Goddess of Democracy looks, well, REALLY communist. The actual statue is a five-foot iron mockdown of a ten-meter papier-mâché statue that sprung up for four days at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The Goddess, research tells me, was purposely not modeled on the Statue of Liberty, but on the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, a suburban-Moscow, Leninist wet dream. (Though, if the architects WERE going Tiananmen Square, it’d have been tremendously ballsy if they’d bronzed a guy in front of a tank. Had they, China probably would have ended our relationship. Just saying.)

What’s bittersweet about the VOCM, and its stated mission to educate subsequent generations about state-begotten terror, is the flitting gravitas that the word “communism” portends. Communism once connoted totalitarianism and Big Brother, telescreens and death camps, Stalin and Kolyma. Now, the term has degraded to one in common discourse, a slur that Fox News viewers use to describe people who don’t watch Fox News.

It’s a slippery alley, these semantics, one which the Goddess all but begs us not to take. The Kolyma camps, the Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng, Katyn Forest, Great Famine and the other atrocities she recalls are among the darkest moments in history. By degrading the word that defined them to a quip about a countryman who disagrees with you, you risk silencing the Goddess’ very message, sullying the 200 million deaths from tyranny and oppression. As visitors to the monument, it’s incumbent on us to separate history from demagoguery.

When The Caller went up in 1989, he screamed that we hadn’t forgotten. The Goddess implores us not to now.

We Begin...

Three weeks before Christmas 2005, and I was on unpaid work duty, shepherding dignitaries around Washington for the umpteenth time. This Saturday, I was leading a group of Ukrainian accountants - who, in hindsight, could probably have helped with those T-accounts a few years later - on a tour, a chance to take in a few tourist sites before debits, credits, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

On 22nd Street, in front of the Church of the Pilgrims where Christina Cleary (“my first mate!”) tied the knot in “Wedding Crashers” stands a statue of Taras Shevchenko. Empirically, there’s no good reason for a statue like this; a Ukrainian poet is as out of place here as Babe Ruth would be in Algiers. Shevchenko is the “poet of Ukrainian Liberation” and is as revered a name in Kiev as Tolstoy in Moscow, Goethe in Frankfurt, or Meyer in Forks. But in DC? My Ukrainians were shocked: Why Shevchenko? Why Ukraine? Why build a statue to a guy you’ve never heard of, from a country few Americans know exist?

Because this is DC, and we memorialize everything.

And suddenly, that everything beckons. Five years after greeting Taras, fate and fortune have planted me back in my favorite city; and, as a career tourist homebound by new job and hefty loans, I need to reinvigorate the explorer gene and explore my District. Our District.

Thus was born The Obscure Monument Hunter. Out with Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington (blasphemy!) in with the statues, plaques, buildings, parks, and other obscure monuments maligned by tour groups. Perhaps, if you believe Dan Brown, my trail will unmask the grand conspiracy that is secretly marionetting the UN. Or maybe it’ll just be fun.

And yes, this has been done before. You can look up most DC statues online, and find histories and tributes far more comprehensive than anything I care to scribble. That’s fine. I intend no comprehensiveness, no encyclopedic entries, no flattery a la James B. Goode or DCmonuments.com.

What I do want is to develop is my own take on my once and future city, know the touristless neighborhoods a bit better, and to satiate the tourist gene without draining my checking account. Come along.