Ruination & Despair

Those of you in the Washington area will, I am certain, be eager to learn that we are sending a flunky to sell our fine cards at the Second Annual Holiday Bazaar of the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum on the corner of Constitution Avenue and 2nd Street, NE, this Thursday, December 3, 2009, from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. We encourage you to seize this golden opportunity to do your holiday shopping in an attractive historic setting! Additional inducements reportedly include music, free gift wrap, seasonal refreshments, and wine tasting. Admission is free to members of the Museum or the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, and a mere $5.00 to common riff-raff like the rest of us.

The Sewall-Belmont House & Museum is a pleasant stroll from the metro stops at either Union Station or Capitol South. It is located within the security perimeter of the U.S. Capitol, so attendees are requested to leave any dangerous weapons at home.

We are frequently asked by well-wishers (or at least I hope that’s what they are) how Archelaus is weathering the current economy. I am pleased to report that the answer is “surprisingly well, thank you.” Indeed, those of you who follow this blog should have noticed that we have undergone a considerable expansion since the National Stationery Show in May. We have not detected any slump in sales at the local open-air markets we attend, either. To the contrary, out of the 112 markets we have gone to over the last four years, nine of our ten highest grosses have occurred since last October.

It must be acknowledged, however, that the recession has caused cashflow problems for some of the fine merchants who carry our cards. As a result, a few of them (and they know who they are!) have fallen behind in paying their invoices. We are struggling to find the right balance between being understanding about their difficulties and insistent about demanding our hard-earned money.

It is clearly a tough time for retailers generally. Today I took a walk through the cluster of stores surrounding the Cleveland Park Metro entrance, and I counted eleven empty storefronts, meaning that about one out of every seven retail spaces is currently vacant. A twelfth shop had a sign in the window stating that it would be closing soon. Of course, Cleveland Park is a comfortably well-off sort of neighborhood. If it were not, no doubt things would be much worse.

Eastern Market’s historic North and South Halls will finally reopen on Friday, June 26, 2009, having been thoroughly renovated after the devastating fire of 2007. On Saturday, June 27, 2009, the market will throw what is being billed as an “all day street party” from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Weather permitting, Archelaus will be sending a lackey to sell cards during this exciting event (rather than on Sunday, as we usually do). He is expected to be fully set up by 8:00 a.m., so if you want to beat the rush, escape the worst heat of the day, and avoid exposure to festive live music, by all means drop by before 10:00.

Although 7th Street has been closed for repaving between C Street and North Carolina Avenue, Eastern Market remains open! Inevitably the street work has caused some dislocation, and the city government is distributing the postcard shown below to clarify the situation. The temporary East Hall continues to be open during the restoration of the historic North and South Halls. The Farmers’ Market is now divided between the North Hall Plaza and the Poolside Patio. And last, but not least, non-farm exhibitors such as Archelaus are now found in four locations: on the east side of 7th Street below C Street, under the green Farmers’ Line Shed on the west side of 7th Street above C Street, on the North Hall Plaza, and on the Poolside Patio. The separately managed Flea Market continues to function in the schoolyard between 7th and 8th Streets.

Archelaus continues to attend the market primarily on Sundays, weather permitting, although going forward we cannot exclude the possibility of attending some Saturdays, particularly if the weather forecast is more favorable than for the following day.

Here at Archelaus we’re not all that wild about seeing animals in cages, which explains why we’ve spent little time over the years exploring the National Zoo, even though it’s nearby and free.

On the other hand, we are big fans of the kiwi — the nocturnal, flightless, and generally peculiar national bird of New Zealand. And since I don’t personally foresee any trips to the Antipodes in my future, it seemed about time to take advantage of the Zoo’s “Meet a Kiwi” program.

I am pleased to say it was worth my time. The kiwi keeper duly produced Manaia — a handsome adult North Island Brown Kiwi who hatched at the Zoo in February 2006 — from a carrier and placed him in an open-topped glass case. The latter had a thick floor of soil, just crawling with juicy worms that Manaia eagerly began to devour. I had spent a fair amount of time reading about kiwis on the Zoo’s website, so I was glad that the keeper had interesting facts to add to what I already knew. One thing I had not fully appreciated was just how alarmingly large a fully-developed kiwi egg is relative to the bird itself. It is frankly astonishing that the female has any room left inside her body cavity for internal organs! I was also intensely interested to learn that DNA studies have established that kiwis are not at all closely related to the regrettably now-extinct moas.

After about fifteen minutes, Manaia had eaten his fill of worms and seemed anxious to find a way out of his glass case. The keeper then dismissed us and returned him to his carrier.

Apart from meeting a kiwi, I was fascinated to see that the Zoo had construction workers in captivity — presumably in response to news reports that the species is now endangered. The workers were housed in an impressively large enclosure, replete with earth-moving equipment and every sort of loose rubbish, just like in the wild.

Archelaus makes its headquarters in Cleveland Park, a pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which was developed as one of the capital’s first “streetcar suburbs” starting in the 1890s. Our local Historical Society recently sponsored the restoration of Cleveland Park’s fifteen antique police and fire call boxes as public art. The cast-iron call boxes had been neglected since the 1970s, when the introduction of 911 emergency service rendered them obsolete. Now they have been spruced up and decorated with attractive paintings and instructive text.

In any case, yesterday morning I happened upon the call box at the corner of Quebec Place and Reno Road, adorned with a verdant landscape. The accompanying text noted:

An 1897 study for Washington, D.C. by the renowned landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted influenced the layout of many streets in Cleveland Park. Rather than following the standard grid pattern, streets east of 34th Street (Reno Road) and north of Newark Street are curvilinear, irregular in block size, conform to the natural hilly contours of the land, and reflect the small tributaries of Rock Creek.

I found this information interesting, because the original plan for downtown Washington, created by Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), was based on a rigidly rectilinear grid, intersected with diagonal avenues. It is a clear product of the Enlightenment, with a unyieldingly rationalist concept and a strictly neo-Classical aesthetic, a sharp reaction against the disorderly, unplanned streets and crooked byways of medieval and early modern cities. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, city planners were seemingly prepared to react, in their turn, against the geometric severity of L’Enfant’s vision in favor of an organic, curvilinear aesthetic more in keeping with, say, the Art Nouveau movement of their own day.

I am even more intrigued, however, by the reflection that better than half a century later, in the profoundly different cultural milieu of the postwar period, planners of sprawling suburban subdivisions evidently embraced this curvilinear aesthetic anew. It must have been clear, even to them, how oppressively regimented, soulless, and sterile a rectilinear suburbia would be. Not that the ubiquitous curvy streets and culdesacs of the suburbs and exurbs really solved the problem. It may be an unfair example, but I am reminded of the aerial opening shot of the relentlessly suburban Upper Whinging in the second Harry Potter film, which conveys nothing so much as the impression of a vast concentration camp.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream, an exhibit exploring “the vibrancy of early modern views of sleep and dreams,” opened today at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I mention this fact both because the exhibit is well worth a look and because one of the curators is an avid customer of ours. The exhibit runs until May 30, 2009.