It’s a cliché to live in New York and hate Washington, D.C, but I do. Nora Ephron wrote, accurately, “If I have only one life to live, I thought, self-pityingly, why am I living it here?” of her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year in our nation’s capital, before she hightailed it back to Manhattan after her marriage to Carl Bernstein famously imploded.
Washington is sexless, they say. There’s no style. It’s all overhead fluorescent lighting and wall-to-wall carpeting. Everyone, like they do everywhere, is trying to jockey for power. But here those aren’t even the pretty people or the richest ones, but octogenarian lawmakers or lobbyists whose idea of a good time is a quorum call.
“But the cherry blossoms!” a Washingtonian might protest. And fine, I can give it that: For those 25 minutes when the blossoms are blooming, D.C. might be the best city in the country. For every other minute of the year, at least along the Eastern Seaboard, it’s New York.
Except, lately, there’s been some rustling down south that is hard to ignore.
For all his bluster about cutting government waste, and despite his shaming of Jerome Powell (in a hard hat!) over the Federal Reserve bank’s bloated renovation, President Donald Trump has unveiled plans for his own construction project. It’s a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that seats 650 people and will be built off the East Wing of the White House. It will cost an estimated $200 million. The president has never met a tract of land that he hasn’t dreamed of installing a bar and grill upon, and the White House’s lack of a mega-ballroom has been a fixation of his since the Obama years. But it so happens that the metropolis around the White House is catching up to his over-the-top tastes.
