About nine or ten miles have actually been added to the original plan. Riggs and Corcoran streets and Sunderland Place near Dupont Circle, for example. Streets near the National Portrait Gallery have disappeared and reappeared, closed for pedestrian malls but later reopened to traffic.
Not all street closures leave dead neighborhoods in their wake. Union Station dug up roads but invited progress, redevelopment and millions of visitors and commuters.
"If you don't have the combination of streets and pedestrian areas, the streets lose life," architect Donald Hawkins said.
(Rich Lipski -- The Washington Post)
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But scores of those visitors and commuters must now navigate checkpoints and concrete barriers as they visit the Capitol grounds, whose gently curving roads serve as parking for Hill employees. Pedestrians slip past barriers that have been in place since the early '90s to get to several of the paths. Watching over the scene are police cradling automatic weapons.
In Foggy Bottom, security patrols spend all day reversing their Jeeps and vans a few feet to let State Department employees into sections of C and D streets that are closed to the public. Next door, a block of street parking in front of the Federal Reserve has been sacrificed for a security buffer -- the city is collecting an annual fee as a tradeoff.
Construction continues just north of the White House, where Pennsylvania Avenue will become a multimillion-dollar pedestrian park before the next inauguration.
"We've lost access to the symbols of freedom, and in some cases we've changed the symbols of freedom to symbols of fear," Hawkins said.
Larry Molumby, who can see the Capitol dome from his home on East Capitol Street, remembers his daughter sliding down the west front of the Capitol on a sled in the mid-'70s.
"Maybe that's part of the problem. People wouldn't even think of recreating there now. It used to be like a neighborhood park," said Molumby, a retiree who still walks the grounds with his wife, Patricia, nearly every evening but notes that the military band concerts in the park now have more restricted seating. "It's just not the same."
Calculating the permanent loss of streets and right of ways in the capital is hard to do. For one, there are definitions to tangle with. Streets closed to cars but open to pedestrians are not always "closed" but merely "restricted."
Then there is the problem of memory. People feel strongly about the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue and E Street near the White House. They forget that West Executive Avenue between the Old Executive Office Building and the White House was closed during World War I.
By World War II, East Executive Avenue between the White House and the Treasury Department was shut. It reopened and then closed again after the 1983 bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut.
The U.S. Secret Service does not invite a discussion of alternatives.
"These measures are in place because we take our mandated responsibility seriously in providing the president and the occupants of the White House a safe and secure environment," spokeswoman Lorie Lewis said.
Street closures are also a muddle complicated by competing city and federal agencies that don't always work together.
