Curiously enough, my office in Rome hall on 22nd and Eye is the second in a row that has borne witness to a major demolition project soon after my arrival.
The first was my office in Freshman Writing at Maryland, which saw the old dance building come down in dramatic fashion. Dance had a new home in the Smith Center across campus, and shiny new dorms were on their way in.
Now my office overlooks the site of the old GW hospital demolition; a new shiny hospital sits across 23rd, and I can see across the entire block to Washington Circle.
I mention this today because coming up out of the metro and walking to my office, I had to literally weave through the dozens of people on the sidewalk staring up at the demolition, mouths agape.
When I was a child, I assume I was, like many boys, obsessed with construction and construction equipment. I had a Tonka dumptruck that rusted through in places from overuse, and too many nights left in the sandboox. I used to play "My Guy" with the Layton boys next door (While this game initially sounds like three young boys' entrance into an innocent homoerotic world, it was actually something more like a sandbox competition: "My guys is driving his dumptruck to his new house, and building an addition." "Oh yeah? My guy is driving his backhoe over to your guy's house to knock down the main building.") Our friends Jennifer and Dave Ayoroa have a four-year-old who is obsessed with the children's character Bob the Builder. Kids love new buildings.
But adults seem bored with them. When I hear the word "construction," far from my eyes lighting up, I instead start thinking of traffic back-ups, delays, and blocked views.
But bring in a demolition crew and adults in the nation's capital stop on the sidewalk and gawk.
I wonder: Is the mental shift from a construction orientation to a demolition obsession a growing awareness of death, of aging, of sudden and cataclysmic loss? Is this merely Freudian Thanatos? Are we so easily bored by the new, or rendered impatient by its long processes, that the rapid change of ending provides a remedy to the old-hat of growing up, and growing old?
I'm watching a hospital come down, of course, so thoughts of death necessarily linger in the air. Who knows how many ghosts roamed those halls? And yet I'm not really looking forward to whatever new comes in, because I'm sure it'll be ugly and concrete like everything else downtown. But for now, I'm enjoying the view created by what has recently fallen, and watching as the last walls of the building come crumbling spectacularly to the ground.