It’s easy to want to compare New York and Washington. After all, one stands for overarching economic power, the other for indomitable political power. Very often in our system of government, economic and political power is so intertwined as to be indistinguishable, one and the same. Yet few cities are so different in personality and temperament as New York and Washington. DC is the ultimate company town, and most of the District’s sidewalks are figuratively rolled up at around 6pm. Walk through most of downtown DC after dark, and (except for the histor and the architecture) it has all the charm and energy of Bismarck, ND.
New York, especially in mid-town and lower Manhattan is all about getting things done quickly. No one ever made a buck while they were asleep, right? At least that seems to be the prevailing philosophy at work if you’ve ever wandered through Times Square virtually anytime day or night.
Weekends are something else altogether. When DC closes for the weekend, most everyone goes home to the suburbs, whether in Maryland or Virginia. Just about the only people left in the District over the weekend are the tourists. Weekends in New York just mean that people get up (and stay up) later. With all the tourists crawling around Manhattan, it can be difficult to tell what day it is without a calendar.
Of course, there are areas of the District where life after-hours is actually evident- Chinatown, Dupont Circle, and Eastern Market come to mind- but DC is such a company town. Washington, DC exists for one reason, and one reason only. If not for the federal government, the District would still be a malarial swamp on the Potomac River. Someone once described DC as a great place for “tourists, newly-weds, or nearly-deads”, and there’s a lot to that. Of course, if government and public policy is your passion, but you don’t necessarily want to party like it’s 1999, DC is a great place to be.
I will say this about DC, though: it IS a great place to be a tourist. The history is all around, and the architecture is unlike any other city in America. It’s almost as if the seat of our government was designed with large, imposing stone builidings in order to de-emphasize the significance of the individual and to emphasize the power and authority of the state.
Hmm…d’ya think that might have been done deliberately??
