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.

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.

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.

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.

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.