A Visit To Lafayette Square

I visited Lafayette Square during a biting January cold and walked around the Park and the surrounding streets. It was my first visit in some time. For nearly 40 years, I had worked in downtown Washington D.C. a few blocks from the White House.. During this time, I visited or passed through Lafayette Park countless times and often spent a lazy lunch hour watching the passers-by. I also visited many of the surrounding buildings for work or fun including the Court of Claims, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Renwick Gallery, and more. Lonnie Hovey, a restoration architect and former director of preservation for the Executive Office of the President has written a new photographic history, "Lafayette Square" (2014) which brought back memories of my own experiences. The book made me want to see a familiar place freshly and to notice things I had only seen casually over time.

Located across from the White House immediately North of Pennsylvania Avenue, Lafayette Square has a long history. The Park at its center has been visited by innumerable tourists and by demonstrators and advocates for every cause imaginable. Busy locals, such as myself, pass through the Park and take it for granted. The highlight of this little book is the opening chapter which includes a brief history of Lafayette Park and its changes over the years. Hovey's account focuses on Clark Mills' famous statue of General Andrew Jackson at the Park's center together with the statues of Revolutionary War Heroes Lafayette, Steuben, Kosciuszko, and Rochambeau at the corners of the Park. For more than 20 years in the mid-20th Century, a kindly woman daily fed pigeons in the Park, in a scene which still is repeated today. I was able to see and learn about Lafayette Park anew in reading the book and in my visit today.

In the remainder of the book, Hovey discusses the history and development of the areas around the Park and its transition from a residential community of the powerful and wealthy in the 19th Century to the historic commercial and governmental area it is today with the facades of many historic buildings preserved. Hovey tells the reader about buildings past and present, including the "Church of Presidents" -- St John's Episcopal Church, the Decatur House, the Hay-Adams House, the old Arlington Hotel, the Lafayette Square Opera House and much more. Hovey also regales the reader with stories of the areas colorful past. For example, he discusses Daniel Sickles murder of his wife's paramour, the son of Francis Scott Key. Sickles was acquitted of the murder on grounds of temporary insanity and later went on to a controversial career as a Civil War general at Gettysburg. Hovey tells the story of two lovers caught in Lafayette Park late at night in the 1860's after the gates which surrounded it at the time had been closed. They were rescued by none other than President Abraham Lincoln who brought them a ladder during a late night walk. Many of the pictures of protesters and demonstrations in the book center upon the work of the National Woman's Party from 1916 -- 1919 as the group campaigned diligently for a constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. The book is organized by sections on each of the sides of Lafayette Park, including Jackson Place to the West, H Street to the North, Vermont Avenue to the Northeast, Madison Place to the East, and Pennsylvania Avenue to the South.

Together with the nearly 200 photographs, Hovey's textual discussion is clear and informative. The book succeeded in bringing this familiar place to life for me and in moving me to visit on a frigid day. The book is part of the "Images of America" series of Arcadia Publishers, an outstanding series of local photographic histories celebrating the nature and diversity of American places and American life. I have enjoyed many books in the series both about Washington, D.C. and about many other places in the United States.