The Hotel Harrington

The Hotel Harrington announced its closure the other day, which brought back some old memories.

For those of you who never had the pleasure, the Hotel Harrington was the place to go if you wanted to stay in central Washington DC without going bankrupt. It was old and cramped and long past its prime when we were there and it made no pretense to be anything otherwise, but it was mere blocks from the National Mall and pretty much right on the path to anything else in that city, as much as anything is on any path in a city that has two completely different road systems – one grid and one wheel-and-spoke – overlaid on top of one another. The places where a grid intersection hits a wheel-and-spoke intersection on a tangent can be a quarter mile across with traffic islands scattered about like poppyseeds on a bagel and you take your life in your hands as a pedestrian in DC so a hotel that minimizes walking to your destinations is a good thing, especially if you can afford it with a family of four on an academic salary.

We stayed there back in 2008, shortly before I started this blog, and I never did end up writing anything about that trip.

By that point in their lives Oliver and Lauren were old enough that we could drive from Wisconsin to Philadelphia with them, and that summer we decided that we’d make a tour of things. We visited friends in Pittsburgh, stayed with my parents outside of Philadelphia, and spent some time down the Jersey shore as all good Philadelphians must do in the summertime. It was a lovely trip.

On the way from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia we stopped in Washington DC for a few days and stayed at the Hotel Harrington.

Our room was on an upper floor, somewhere closer to the top than the bottom, facing away from the main street. It had a prime view of the building next door and overlooked the Walgreens on the corner down below, which would turn out to be useful. It had two double beds and just enough floor space to put our suitcases down if we didn’t mind stepping over them to get anywhere, and it had a bathroom covered in the kind of small black and white tiles that went out of style with the New Deal.

But it was more than enough for what we wanted from it.

It was maybe a four minute walk to the Smithsonian, where we checked off the first of the required elements for that trip – the National Air and Space Museum. Oliver and Lauren insisted on seeing the Wright Brothers plane that is displayed there, and we spent a happy time of things exploring the rest of the place as well. It also has the Natural History Museum (dinosaurs! rocks!), and the National Portrait Gallery, where I made the mistake of describing a gallery of Dutch Master works as “paintings of men with hats and beards,” a description that, while accurate, was apparently not what the situation called for.

At one end of the Mall you have the Washington Monument, and we spent some time there both staring up at it and going inside to the top of it. The tickets for that are free – or at least they were at the time – but you have to get there at about 7am to get them before they are gone. I remember standing there in the rain to collect them, and then walking back to the Hotel Harrington with my prizes. Caveman Dave! Need tickets! Forage for tickets! Return to cave! It was worth it. You ride up on this tiny little elevator, and then you have just the best view of the city you’ll ever have.

On the other end is the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps the most sacred public space in the United States.

It was hot that trip, and we spent time by various fountains, time running through grass watering systems, and a fair amount of time eating ice cream.

We saw the original Constitution, and walked by the White House just to say we were there. They’re both things you should do at least once in your life as an American.

One of the nicer memories of this trip was just the first night we were there, sitting in a hotel room the size of your high school gym locker, planning out our schedule for while we were in town. It occurred to us at that point that we needed some entertainment for this process, specifically a deck of cards – an item we had not packed. We looked out the window, noticed the Walgreens, and went down to get one. It was fairly late and apparently everyone in Washington DC had had the same idea sometime earlier that day, as the only deck of cards that they had for sale was one that was entirely, vibrantly, pink and white. The backs were pink and white. The suits – even the clubs and spades – were pink and white. The face cards were entirely pink and white. It was, as Oliver fondly describes it, “the worst deck of cards in the world,” and we have treasured that deck ever since. Oliver used to take it to school with him to play cards with his friends. It’s kind of a talisman around here, really.

We sat there in the hotel with our pink deck of cards and our roughly sketched plans for the next few days and we played our games together and you don’t often realize when the good times are when you’re in the middle of them but we did that night and I will be forever glad to have stayed at the Hotel Harrington for that moment alone.