Photo by Andy Feliciotti

Washington D.C. has never been one of my cities. I am drawn more to New York, where I was born, but I do take pleasure in visiting Washington, at least for the first day or two. After that, I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s description of the White House as a “second-rate hotel”.

On a recent trip to Washington, I decided to try something different and dragged along my bicycle on an Amtrak Northeast Regional from New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The weather forecast was good, and I wondered if the capital’s broad boulevards might lend themselves to bicycle excursions.

At the very least, I could poke around, on my own terms, Trump’s gilded empire.

The Moynihan Train Hall is the given name of the new waiting room for Pennsylvania Station, that which was largely torn down between 1963-66—an act of urban vandalism on par with Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of White House. (Both offer a vision of America held hostage by real estate developers.)

The Moynihan Hall was carved out of the James A. Farley Post Office across the street from Penn Station. As with so many Amtrak stations, there’s a disconnect between the train platforms (closer to Seventh Avenue) and the new waiting space (mind you, for their $1 billion investment New Yorkers got almost no places to sit) between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. With Amtrak, it’s the political public relations (not the trains) that count.

Union Station Washington is another railroad Potemkin village. It has a soaring granite rotunda inside the entrance, but the actual train work takes place out the back on shabby staircases and platforms unchanged since the early 1970s.

President Richard Nixon tried to enlist the station as part of his 1973 coronation (that which followed the Watergate shenanigans of the 1972 election), but, as with his presidency, it fell afoul of leaks—those from the roof, not to the Washington Post.

It was a short bike ride in summer-like sunshine to the Capitol, which looks less like the American agora and more like a Crusader fortress surrounded by keeps, gatehouses, fencing, and drawbridges—everything but a moat and the noose that was measured for Vice President Pence.

To my amazement, the DC police allowed me to ride my bicycle around the empty plaza under the East portico, from which some of the January 6th attackers stormed the Capitol.

I was alone on the plaza. I think I could have done a few wheelies and no one would have cared. Instead, I biked over to a DC policeman and asked him if he was present on January 6th—that Trumpian “day of love” in which about 150 DC police were wounded and seven died of their injuries (some by later suicide).

The cop I was chatting with said, “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” which ought to line him up for a cabinet post.

I biked a loop around the Supreme Court, a columned Greek temple opposite the Capitol. From 1789 until 1935, the Court was more of an idea than a place, and it........

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