Rome is known as the Eternal City.
Paris is called the City of Light.
Both have been important to history for centuries and even millennia, much further back than Western Hemisphere nations have even existed.
Despite what folks in Boston or New York might think, there is really only one American city that even approaches that level of historical significance.
Washington, D.C.
It’s a city that didn’t even exist when the country was created, one that sat right on the border of the Confederacy during the Civil War. One that became an incredibly overcrowded nerve center during World War II.
It has been sardonically called a city of Northern elegance and Southern efficiency, a city with such an unpleasant summer climate Congress generally adjourned for the year by Memorial Day until the invention of air conditioning.
It was something else to me.
Home from age 13 to 32, a place where most of the good and bad things that shaped my life happened.
The city has changed so much. The picture above was of a place that was a big part of my life in the early ’70s. The Circle theater was a repertory house that showed double features of old movies. This was Pennsylvania Avenue five blocks west of the White House before a big buildup wiped out the whole street of businesses.
It was the place I first saw “Casablanca,” “Night of the Living Dead” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” among other classics. It was one of the last places I remember that did continuous showings, starting one movie as soon as the other one finished.
It was a part of my first two real relationships, where I took women I loved to see movies in 1970 and 1973.
Gone now but not forgotten.
It was a city where I attended my one and only presidential inauguration on January 20th, 1965, and where I covered a newspaper that I no longer have with the autographs of two dozen or so state governors. The only one I remember was Californian Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad and the governor of the Golden State from 1959-67.
Washington is a unique city in one respect, with Los Angeles just about the only parallel. Both are company towns, and while the company in Los Angeles is Hollywood and the entertainment industry, in Washington it’s the government and politics.
When I moved away from the D.C. area at the end of 1981, first to North Carolina and then farther south and farther west, I was surprised to see that most people didn’t spend their time talking about politics and the ramifications of what Congress and the president were doing.
But Washington has so much history. In fact, Washington is its history. Walk through the halls of the Capitol building and consider all the great men and women who have walked those same halls for more than 200 years.
It isn’t London, Paris or Rome, but it ain’t Boise, Idaho, either.
Most of the pictures in the video clip are from the years soon after World War II, and while the city had changed a lot by 1963, the view was much closer to them then than it is now.
Most of my family no longer lives there. My parents passed in 2008 and 2020, and two of my four siblings are in Ohio and Boston. But there is one thing that will draw me back again and again. My son and his wife now live in Northern Virginia, less than 10 miles from where my parents lived.
They’re happy there.
They ought to be. They’re living and succeeding in one of the world’s great cities.