The Fortification of Washington, or, Two Weeks in the Red Zone
On June 1, non-violent demonstrators, who were responding to the recent murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans, were violently cleared from Lafayette Square so that Donald Trump could cross from the White House to pose holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church. The square was then “largely . . . fenced-in.” In response, the city government renamed the stretch of Sixteenth Street NW adjacent to the church and the square Black Lives Matter Plaza. The enclosure was extended during election season. A few days before the presidential election, the ad hoc enclosure around Lafayette Square was superseded by a “non-scalable” steel fence that enclosed it along with the White House and the Ellipse to the south.[1]
Despite these obstacles, Black Lives Matter Plaza has become a daily gathering point for demonstrators (Figure 1). On November 7, the day the election was called for Joseph Biden, Biden supporters people flocked there (Figure 2). The crowd overflowed to nearby McPherson Square, where a large-screen television was set up and a go-go band entertained the crowd. A week later Trumpists, comprising a mélange of far-right and neo-fascist groups, descended on the city, choking the streets near the mall, destroying posters and other art work attached to the perimeter fence at Black Lives Matter Plaza, and assaulting passersby (Figure 3). Two other pro-Trump demonstrations followed, the second resulting in the assault on the Capitol on January 6.
In the weeks following the election, the neighborhoods between the White House and the U.S. Capitol were increasingly fortified. As political events came and went, private businesses repeatedly boarded and unboarded their windows (Figure 4). After the January 6 insurrection, three concentric defensive lines were created. The first line, established immediately, surrounded the Capitol with steel fencing topped by razor wire. At the same time, the National Park Service began to fence the Mall to deny public access to the inauguration.
“The media were, as usual, integral to the entire drama, recording and framing what was happening for national distribution.”
The second line, several blocks further out, was marked by more concrete barriers and steel fences that restricted incoming traffic to few points. It was installed on January 12. This defined the Red Zone. (I take the name from maps published in the Washington Post that depicted the area in red.) At the third line, a few blocks farther out, military vehicles and armed troops controlled entry to the area beginning on the weekend before January 20. Dump trucks and other heavy vehicles closed side streets and channeled vehicle traffic past military vehicles and soldiers to checkpoints on the second line (Figures 5, 6, 7). In the last days before the inauguration, most of the bridges connecting the District and Virginia were closed. All alleys and parking garages were blockaded with concrete barriers. On Inauguration Day there was no access to the Capitol or the Mall, but people gathered around the perimeter to see what they could see (Figures 8, 9, 10, 11).
Two aspects of these events struck me. The first was the eerie contrast of presence and absence. Motorists unaware of the travel restrictions created a perimeter traffic jam that acted as a fourth wall around the Red Zone. Spectators gathered at some checkpoints to watch the action (Figure 12). Inside the cordon, the streets were empty. National Guard, Capitol Police, and Metropolitan Police occupied every corner, supplemented by FBI Police, Customs and Border Protection officers, and agents from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (Figures 13, 14). Under their guns, parents and children on bicycles and teenagers on skateboards took advantage of the empty streets. Residents found that local businesses might or might not be open. Some closed for the duration, some intermittently, and others not at all (Figure 15). On Inauguration Day a crowd of spectators, press, and armed agents surrounded the fortified, invisible inauguration ritual.
The second aspect has to do with the performative nature of the events of the last seven months. The media were, as usual, integral to the entire drama, recording and framing what was happening for national distribution (Figure 16). Locals and non-locals were happy to play to the cameras. On January 20, the press outposts closest to the Capitol lured people who wanted attention. They came in costumes and with signs, and many of them scored interviews with reporters waiting for something to happen outside the fences (Figures 17, 18).
The fortification of Washington is not new, of course. It dates back at least to the Civil War. Since the middle of the twentieth century, often-inconspicuous security measures have been slowly insinuated into the public spaces of the national capital unsystematically. In 1976, the nineteenth-century gates to the White House were replaced by automobile-proof steel gates. In 1983, the Reagan administration placed concrete barriers around the White House following the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. Pennsylvania Avenue, which separates the White House and Lafayette Square, was closed to vehicles. Sidewalk bollards were installed in front of the executive mansion in 1988. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Jersey barriers were placed around the building and Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to pedestrian traffic. The latter measures ended in 2004, but the many metal detectors and other types of security screening installed in the Capitol, the Washington Monument, Arlington Cemetery, and scores of obscure agency offices were not. Entry to public buildings in the city remains difficult and often impossible.[2]
“The fortifications erected in the summer of 2020 were both the next step in a long series and the first step in the creation of a conspicuous, systematically militarized cityscape overlaid on the scattered, less visible sites of securitization that had accumulated before then.”
What is new is that, beginning with the closure of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to vehicular traffic in 1995, after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, the fortification of Washington has increasingly been directed at American citizens. An “anti-climb” fence was erected around the White House in 2015 and in 2019 the six-foot-six-inch fence was replaced by one thirteen feet tall. Thus the fortifications erected in the summer of 2020 were both the next step in a long series and the first step in the creation of a conspicuous, systematically militarized cityscape overlaid on the scattered, less visible sites of securitization that had accumulated before then (Figures 19, 20).
If the insurrectionists achieved anything on January 6, it was to provide justification for the militarization of public space in Washington. The racialized paranoia that drives a gun-obsessed citizenry makes the official obsession with security as the primary goal in the management of public space easier to defend. In a January 26 House hearing on the storming of the Capitol, Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting head of the Capitol police, told representatives that “I do not believe there was any preparations that would have allowed for an open campus in which lawful protesters could exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and at the same time prevented the attack on Capital grounds that day.” She argued instead that “to prevent a similar incursion in the future, lawmakers will have to sacrifice public access to the building to bolster security measures.”[3]
Each incident, then, justifies an increase in the control of public use of ostensibly public spaces. While there has been some pushback to permanent fortification of the Capitol, both from politicians and from neighbors accustomed to using the grounds as park space, it seems to me to be almost inevitable that public spaces will be increasingly fortified and public buildings increasingly inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Claims that democracy had prevailed on November 3 or January 6 are surely premature.
Notes
[1] Paul LeBlanc, “Federal authorities expected to erect 'non-scalable' fence around White House,” www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/politics/white-house-fence-erected-again/index.html.
[2] The White House Historical Society has summarized the progressive enclosure of the White House in “History of the White House Fence.” Richard Longstreth analyzed the post-September 11 securitization of the city incisively in “Washington and the Landscape of Fear,” City and Society 18 no. 1 (2006): 7-30.
[3] Karoun Demirjian, Aaron C. Davis, and Peter Hermann, “Acting Capitol Police chief apologizes to lawmakers for ‘failings’ that allowed Jan. 6 breach,” Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2021.
