For the moment, let’s say we’re not buying the official, nothing-to-see-here story the White House is dishing about the gaping hole being ripped into the lawn outside the Oval Office.
Let’s say we suspect the construction crews that have been dipping their backhoes into the most secure soil in the free world are doing something more complex than mere utility work.
The feds may claim that it’s just “upgrades and replacement of utility infrastructure” of a size and complexity that require the excavation of a hole so big it could easily fit the entire Cabinet — and maybe some members of Congress, too. But they’re somewhat vague as to the specifics. And so we wonder.
It’s a bunker, right? It’s gotta be a bunker.
Make that another bunker. There’s already the underground Situation Room, which was renovated and expanded to 5,000 square feet in 2007, and the nuclear bomb shelter below the East Wing, where Vice President Richard B. Cheney was taken on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. And who knows what else sits beneath the White House? A tunnel to the State Department? A secret passage to the Treasury?
With all that subterranean space, think of the White House not just as a 200-year-old, neoclassical Federal-style mansion, but as the tip of an iceberg. Think of what you don’t see. It’s a building with roots, which in D.C. is not uncommon.
Underground is where it’s at in Washington — and not only for the president, who makes some of his most important decisions while at the altitude of a mole. Thanks to a height restriction that keeps the skyline in a sort of humble genuflection to the Washington National Cathedral, the city’s highest structure, there are no 100th-floor views. The elevators barely make it to double digits. From the rooftops, people on the streets below look like dolls, not ants.
No matter. In Washington, depth, not height, is the measurement that matters.
This is metaphorically true — information and knowledge, not money and glitz, are what really equate to power here — but it’s also literally true.
Much of Washington is down and out of sight. Some of this world we know well and visit often, such as Metro or the passageways that connect the Capitol’s buildings. Much of the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery is underground. The National Aquarium is beneath the Commerce Department building. There are steam tunnels and old Civil War bunkers and deep-down parking garages.
The height restriction “puts out of sight stuff that doesn’t need to be on the street — like lots of parking garages, which are deadly to the urban experience,” said Thomas Luebke, the secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the design review agency that oversees development on the Mall.
Imagine 200 years from now, a post-apocalyptic Washington, he says, “abandoned and left to collapse.” Imagine everything gone, the Capitol, the Washington Monument, all the buildings downtown. What would be left?
“You would find this landscape of elevated streets surrounded by pits,” he says.
Like the Ardennes forest, which is still pocked with World War II bunkers, the pits would endure.
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