Invisible cities: the changing faces of Washington, D.C.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

DOWN ON LOWER Pennsylvania Avenue, amid the courthouses and federal buildings, there used to be a run-down old diner called Barney's. Bureaucrats, after all, want to eat lunch too. Barney's was a real urban fossil, a reminder of the days when Washington's locals knew the famous street merely as "the Avenue" and when the area was full of department stores, pharmacies, restaurants, and other establishments that served local residents rather than the federal seat of power. That street is gone: Pennsylvania Avenue is now rebuilt as a grand parade route, lined with marble edifices and largely bereft of urban life. There's no place on it for a Barney's; the old diner was destroyed more than 20 years ago.

That's too bad, because Barney's actually reached back much farther into Washington's curious history, all the way back to the nation's own roots. Above Barney's ornate neon sign were a pair of Greek Revival windows that were the last surviving remnants of the old Metropolitan Hotel. That was one of the capital's premier hostelries when the city was an unpaved backwater and the muddy Avenue contained most of its commercial life. It was at the site of the Metropolitan (called Brown's in those days) that "The Star Spangled Banner" was first sung in Washington, and it was in its lobby that Abe Lincoln first signed for a room when he got to town.

Washington is an unusual palimpsest. It appears to lead at least two lives that have little to do with each other: a federal one that impinges on everyone and is constantly in the news, and a largely unknown local life. The larger and grander the capital has grown over the years, the more these two lives have seemed to diverge. But these apparently disparate narratives are only different pages from the same history; neither is complete without the other.

The city's usually separate lives meet, for a change, in James M. Goode's lavish work Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings (Smithsonian), a thickened update of a work first published in 1979. Goode, who spent 17 years as the curator of the Smithsonian Castle, has not assembled a picture book for nostalgics. In the course of presenting Washington's lost streetscapes and structures (among them Barney's), Goode also tells a tale of power, evoking the changing role of the city as a great (and not so great) capital. Reflected in hundreds of images of now-demolished wood, brick, and stone structures are the changing demands that...