October 3,—1935-D. C. After 12 Years Still Is City of Enchantment to Pyle
The Washington Daily News—Thursday—October 3,—1935
D. C. After 12 Years Still Is City of Enchantment to Pyle
By ERNIE PYLE
It was in the soft warm spring of a dozen years ago that I first saw this city of Washington.
My lot was that of a cub reporter, and the editor had compassionately invited me to stay at his hotel until I found a place to live. We were walking to work that first morning, walking with the world ahead of me, walking thru McPherson Square, so green and pretty, with people sitting leisurely on the benches even as early as 7 o’clock, and the editor said to me:
“You’ll probably like Washington. But let me warn you. Don’t stay here too long. It’s a nice easy-going city, and people get in a rut, and if you stay till you get to liking it too well, you’ll never leave. You’ll just settle down to a pleasant routine and never amount to anything.”
I was too young at that time, of course, to ask why it was necessary to amount to something if you could be happy without it. But I didn’t think of that, and the editor’s words impressed me very much, so that I have never forgotten them for a minute.
So for a dozen years I have been heeding the editor’s advice, and getting out of Washington. But somehow or other, I always keep coming back. Maybe it’s the city that pulls me back, or maybe it’s some stubborn part of me that doesn’t want to amount to anything. Anyhow, here I am again.
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The Washington of today is very different from the Washington of that morning a dozen years ago. Different in appearance, that is. But the character of the place seems to change hardly at all, and there is still the same easy enchantment in the streets and the trees that I saw then.
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about the three North American cities with character—San Francisco, New Orleans and Quebec. Somehow I forgot about Washington. It has character, too.
Washington, as people so truthfully say, is really a big city which has achieved small townishness in character. It has running water and electric lights without the sewing circle gossip. It has the personal liberty of that most cosmopolitan of all cities, New York, without its cruelty and loneliness.
The business section of many a smaller midwestern city would put Washington with its half-million right to shame. And yet you see more handsome men, more beautiful women, better dressed people in general here than in any city that has ever been honored with my presence.
I have often wondered how Washington has achieved that ideal—the appearance and the niceties of a small town, while retaining the best features, as the ads say, of the big city. Anyone who sends in the correct answer, plus $10 in gold, can have my 1935 season pass to the American League ball games.
My own guess is: Washington, on the edge of the real South, naturally has some of the South’s delightful slothfulness; a good big percentage of the population came here from somewhere else, many of them from small towns; physically, Washington is broad and smooth, its parks are big and frequent, its streets are wide and its buildings low, the result is spaciousness; many of its people live in apartment houses, hence the city doesn’t spread all over the eastern seaboard; a good part of its population is in comfortable circumstances, so that the pinched look and the anxious stare and the goad of hurry, hurry settles but seldom on the citizens of Washington. The whole thing, summed up, makes for easy living.
The New Deal, it is true, has brought a new alertness to Washington, and people with responsibility on their faces do rush about, but they seem to rush sort of slowly (if you follow me), in line with the character of the city. And if they stay they’ll slow down even further, and eventually not amount to anything at all. I think it’s a rather nice prospect.
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