If our scribblings here at The Weekly Standard have, for the last two years, had a jittery, anxious quality, it might be because we haven’t had a minute’s calm. And I don’t mean the mad whirlwind that is the Age of Trump. I refer to the daily slam-bang from the construction site next door.
It was fun at first, watching an iron menagerie of Jurassic demolition beasties destroy a building with their concrete-hammering snouts and steel-rending claws. Every other day would bring a fireworks display of showering sparks as the masked man with the acetylene torch did his thing. There was, as well, a certain pleasure in watching what had been the Washington Post headquarters being torn down. Once it was razed, you could see that the building had backed up to the rear of the Russian ambassador’s residence. There were jokes about whether the wrecking crew had bulldozed the secret tunnel that allowed the Post editors to get their marching orders in person. But the joke turned out to be on us: Days of jackhammering turned into weeks and then months.
Nor was the noise over once that last load of rubble had been trucked out of the big dirt hole. After the deconstruction came the new construction, every stage of which has been announced with its own special drumming or thumping or banging or clanging. Which is why the workers’ rig includes not just helmets and goggles, orange vests, steel-toed boots, and harnesses, but hearing protection (I guess I should be happy that someone is getting relief from the noise). But their earplugs are at odds with other safety measures, such as the relentless hurdy-gurdy of forklifts proclaiming they are backing up. For the muffle-eared construction crews to be able to hear the warning bleats, it’s not enough for the forklifts to beep, they have to shriek. Which they do, all day long.
We’re not the only people suffering from construction clatter these days. The monumental architecture of the capital remains timeless, but the modernist boxes of lobby-and-lawyerland have not aged well. Just about every block in downtown Washington has its own 1970s atrocity, the architectural equivalent of the maroon double-knit leisure suit worn with white belt and shoes. But instead of a full teardown it’s often cheaper to gut the old embarrassments and strip away their façades, leaving bare skeletons of iron columns and reinforced-concrete slabs. Then the whole thing can be draped with a new sheath of glass in a fashionable hue, et voilà!—a fresh triumph of modernism is born. This architectural style is something we might call “ecdysiast”—buildings that shed their skin.
Alas, every one of these projects creates its own din. Walking to get a sandwich is like wandering into a symphony for power tools written by Charles Ives.
When the noise gets to be too much, I take refuge in writing from home. Or at least I used to.
My once-quiet neighborhood, out on the northwest corner of the District of Columbia, was mostly built about a century ago. The typical Palisades house, handsome in its working-class modesty, was made by Sears, or rather, Sears sold the plans and provided everything from pre-cut lumber to plumbing, windows, and shingles for a local contractor to assemble on site. Now many of the old charmers are being torn down to make room for flashy four-level mansions that hulk up against the property lines. (If I sound miffed, that’s because I am. One of these monsters—its design based on the principle that if your neighbors can still see the sun, you didn’t make it big enough—is going up next to my happy little 1927 house.)
With the space invasion has come yet another assault on the ears. No doubt home-building was noisy back in the day when carpenters hammered and sawed by hand, rabbeting the lintels and whatnot. But now we listen all day to the explosive report of the pneumatic nail gun and the ear-searing skirling of the table saw. And don’t forget the boom boxes. The crews working the site can’t seem to settle on a soundtrack. When their workday begins at 7:30 we’re sometimes treated to screaming ’80s hair-bands, sometimes to ranchera music, and sometimes to a Twisted Sister/Pepe Aguilar mashup.
The D.C. building boom, whether it’s new office space for lawyer-lobbyists or grand new houses with double-garages for their Range Rovers, tells you the swamp hasn’t been drained. Such is Washington. I just wish they’d keep the racket down.
