David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which opens today, is another gangster movie, like the director’s 2005 A History of Violence. While the two films are quite different, as Cronenberg explained on promo trip to D.C. a last month, one thing that links them is star Viggo Mortensen. “I love Viggo,” Cronenberg said. “He’s just a mensch of mensches, a wonderful collaborator. The lead actor and the director, I’d say, account for 90 percent of the tone on the set. And we both like the same kind of set. Funny, but serious. Efficient, but relaxed. And very humane.”

The film is about Russian gangsters in London, but the cast is diverse.
It was a great puzzle. There are not Russian actors around who speak Russian well enough and act well in English. And I didn’t want to do the traditional thing, cast English actors and they’ll do fake Russian accents. So instead I cast German and French actors who did fake Russian accents.

Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski also has a role.
That was my idea. Totally out of the blue. I remembered that Jerzy had played a KGB agent in White Nights. So I said, “Where is he?” It turns out he knew my cameraman, so we got in touch with him.

There are many “family” connections here. The movie’s cast includes Sinéad Cusack, the wife of Jeremy Irons, who starred in your Dead Ringers and M. Butterfly. And Skolimowski directed Irons in Moonlighting.
Yes, and that was the movie that convinced me that Jeremy was right for Dead Ringers. Because there, unlike most of things I had seen him in, he was vulnerable and funny, and I needed those characteristics.

Steve Knight, who scripted Eastern Promises, wrote Dirty Pretty Things. Did you like that movie?
I liked most of it. I think the ending was a little too neat and sentimental. I think what happens with Steve is that he just falls in love with his characters, and he can’t bear to do bad things to them. [Laughs] There was some of that in the original script, and I expunged it. Mercilessly. But Steve was a very happy expunger.

The script was a lovely collaboration. For example, the whole tattooing thing, which is a central metaphor in the movie, was peripheral in the original screenplay. Viggo, doing his own research, as he does, found a book called Russian Criminal Tattoo, which is fantastic. It explains the symbology of the tattoos, why you have no identity in the prisons without them, and are not trusted if you don’t have them. I sent it to Steve, and it really snapped the whole movie into focus.

I imagine that, everywhere you go, people ask about the film’s steam-room knife fight.
Yes. The knife fight is really realistic. I want my audience to really experience it. I think people go to a movie to become someone one else, to live another life for a while. I wouldn’t want to shortchange them. If you want to be Nikolai, this is Nikolai’s life.

But as you watch, you don’t just feel Nikolai’s vulnerability; you feel
your own.

Absolutely. I guess—and this is the first time I’ve thought of it, I swear—it’s like the shower scene in Psycho. It’s nakedness, steam, knife. Now that’s interesting. I really had not thought of that before. But it’s classic. You’re never more vulnerable than when you’re naked and wet.

D.C.’s Department of Transportation scored a few supportive mainstream-media articles after its August 17 announcement that its Circulator bus service had boarded its four millionth rider sometime earlier that week. Four million is a lot, right?

Well, no. Metrorail handles that many trips in less than a week. And the 30 line, Metrobus’s busiest, carries that many passengers in about 200 days. It took the Circulator’s three routes approximately 760 days to reach the four million number. That means the service has carried, on average, about half the 10,000 to 11,000 daily passengers Circulator co-planner Dan Tangherlini
projected in 2005. (Tangherlini’s number was for 2008 and may have been supplanted by later estimates. But if those exist, DDOT won’t release them.)

Secret numbers and boosterish press releases aside, the fact that the Circulator is struggling is revealed by DDOT’s regular tinkering with the Union Station to Georgetown line, the only one (almost) anyone uses. The latest attempt to boost low ridership partly undoes the last one: Half the buses will return to the original course, which entered Georgetown via K Street and turned back to Union Station at the intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and L Street. The rest will continue to follow the reroute instituted in March, taking M Street into Georgetown and continuing up Wisconsin Avenue to the Georgetown Safeway.

The latter route—which is longer, more congested, and thus slower—was designed to serve riders on the canceled Georgetown Metro Connection “Blue Buses” that ran from Foggy Bottom to upper Georgetown. That service was killed to reduce costs for its sponsor, Georgetown’s Business Improvement District, which also pays a small subsidy to the Circulator. But the end of that blue-bus line was also clearly intended to boost Circulator passengers, which apparently didn’t work.

The change will significantly reduce service levels for riders who need one of the two subroutes. Buses between Union Street and 20th & K Streets will maintain, if all goes well, the existing 10-minute headways. But the two Georgetown legs should see red Circulator buses only every 20 minutes or so. That should send some passengers back to where they came: Metro’s 30 and D lines, whose ridership the Circulator has cannibalized.

Perhaps someday DDOT will pay some attention to Metrobus, which carries most of D.C.’s bus riders. But it’s a lot simpler to keep dabbling with the Circulator, which can be manipulated with impunity precisely because its role in D.C.’s transportation system is so negligible.

Contrary to reports published elsewhere, Julie Delpy does not have a heavy French accent. The easygoing 37-year-old actress, screenwriter, and director, whose 2 Days in Paris opens in D.C. today, began learning English as a child, and has spent much of her adult years in Los Angeles.

I hate a lot of things about Los Angeles. I hate driving. But the weather is nice. There are a lot of trees. I can lock myself in my little house and write. My cat can go after mice. When you live part of your life in Paris, which is a very intense city, Los Angeles is a good alternative. It’s kind of like being on holiday.

2 Days in Paris is an anti-romantic comedy, set in the city that’s also the location for Before Sunset, which you co-wrote. Why return to Paris?

It could have been other places. I liked that it was in Paris, because I know it so well, and I know how grumpy people can be. How mean the city can be at times. Sometimes I come back, and it’s like a nightmare. People are rude, they’re mean; I want to cry. Sometimes it’s a wonderful city. It really depends.

When I show Marion arguing with the racist taxi driver, that’s happened to me. Not exactly as intense. Maybe I’m not as aggressive as Marion. I’m a little more scared. I’m an actress. If a guy punches me on the face, I’ll never work again. But it’s based on true things that I’ve experienced.

Does the character of Jack, Marion’s germ- and mold-phobic boyfriend, represent your idea of Americans, or a general French view?

I based him on a few people I know. A patchwork of different men I’ve dated, or even friends. Not necessarily American. Sometimes he blames being jealous on American ideas of private property. But I can tell you, every man is a little bit jealous. He blames the American side, but it’s the male side he should be blaming.

The mold thing is actually from a friend who is not American. But I know many Americans who are obsessed; they have the little hand-cleaning stuff. In Los Angeles, a lot of people are like that; they have perfectly clean everything. I’m the opposite. I kiss my cat, who just ate a rat. It’s a miracle I don’t have bubonic plague. Some people are horrified when they come to my house. My cat eats a lot of rats, so there are, like, tails left in different corners of the house. My house is a nightmare for anal people.

Marion’s cat is named Jean-Luc. Is that your cat’s name?

No one names their pet a name like that! People are named Jean-Luc, but not a cat. I don’t think there’s any cat in France named Jean-Luc. He’s the first cat named Jean-Luc!

Was the name a reference to Jean-Luc Godard, who directed you in King Lear and Detective?

Yes. I thought it was funny. They’re this New York couple that goes to see Godard films. She happened to name her cat after a director. I just think it’s funny. Maybe it’s mean to Jean-Luc Godard, but I don’t think so. It’s great to be a cat!

Judging from my first visit to West Elm, the new home-furnishings store at 11th & G Streets NW, I may never buy a thing there. But I will return, just to savor the lingering ambiance of the space’s former occupant, Woodward & Lothrop.

West Elm inhabits the north side of the first two floors of Woodies, which closed in 1995 after suffering a failed leveraged buyout by big-time mall developer Alfred Taubman. (The venerable department store chain’s operations were profitable to the end, but it couldn’t handle the debt with which Taubman saddled it.) Developer Douglas Jemal, who ended up controlling the building, had the exterior nicely preserved. Now West Elm has done its part for the (partial) interior.

Of course, it’s not Woodies anymore. Certain elements are familiar, while others are jarring. The staircase down from G Street is back in operation, but it’s now flanked by a new one to the second floor. The added stairs are open-slatted, and lead to a floating landing a few steps below the shop’s top floor. They are typical of an unfortunate aspect of West Elm’s makeover: In part, dignified old Woodies has been lofted.

Near the new 11th Street entrance, an “exposed brick” wall has been added. Upstairs, smaller brick dividers pick up the theme. Of course, they’re not real walls; they’re theatrical backdrops. So are the mismatched wood-slat floors and factory-style interior windows (which don’t actually function as windows at all). Such touches are appropriate for a store that will sell rugs and towels to residents of the new fake lofts constructed in D.C. over the last decade. But the faux-industrial look doesn’t suit this dowager building.

Still, the detailing on the interior columns remains, as does the ornate setting for the elevator bank (although the elevators themselves are new and crudely designed). The illusion that Woodies survives is easily shattered: Just look toward F Street and realize that more than half the department store’s grand hall is gone. (Part already went to H&M, which proved a much less fastidious custodian than West Elm.) But there’s still a bit of there there, which is more than can be said for most of Washington’s culturally and historically denatured downtown.

Today’s Reliable Source notes some of the geographical anomalies in The Invasion, the latest remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The paranoid thriller, which opens tomorrow, is set in Washington and Baltimore, and its exteriors were shot entirely in those cities (mostly the latter). Being the Reliable Source, the column’s comments emphasize upscale cuisine (the film’s caviar is supposedly too expensive) and suburban fixations (the Nicole Kidman character parks too easily in Georgetown).

The film includes lots of the usual Hollywood jumbling of locations, as when Kidman drives from one part of Northwest to another on a route that somehow takes her down Independence Avenue SW past the Agriculture Department. What’s more interesting, however, is how the movie blurs D.C. and B’more, suggesting an exceptional ease of transport between the two cities. If the movie’s geography were accurate, Barbara Mikulski’s pork-barrel maglev study would be irrelevant.

For example, Kidman works in a downtown in which, from block to block, Washington becomes Baltimore and then reverts. And in one scene, she escapes alien-possessed humans by running down a suburban Charm City street that leads very quickly to the Cleveland Park Metro station. In a rare action scene filmed on D.C.’s subway, she hops on a train. But when it stops in mid-tunnel and she must flee into the tunnel, the car she leaves has the markings of Baltimore’s MTA.

It seems that the even filmmakers lost track of what city the movie was in at any given moment. In the climactic action sequence, Kidman is driving through downtown Baltimore while communicating by cell phone with a potential rescuer. The voice at the other end of the call asks where she is, and Kidman blurts that she thinks she’s headed south on 13th Street.

Maybe director Oliver Hirschbiegel just needs to get out more. His last movie to get U.S. distribution, Downfall, was set mostly in Hitler’s bunker. Still, when the Fuhrer’s aides in that film reported the location of the advancing Russian troops, they never said they were on the Champs Elysées.

If everyone drives to a sold-out game at the new Nationals stadium, the result will be a mess.

That was the unstated message of the Aug. 2 “open house” held to brief D.C. residents on the Traffic Operations and Parking Plan (TOPP) for the stadium, which is scheduled to open for the 2008 baseball season. Representatives of Metro, D.C.’s transportation department, and consulting firm Grove/Slade Associates were on hand to explain the various TOPP maps and graphs. But none of them could say what will happen if most Nats fans drive, or if they ignore the complicated game-days scheme for traffic flow, street closings, color-coded parking sectors, and on-street parking restrictions.

Anyone who perused the maps, or walked the nearby streets, would have noticed that the site of the under-construction stadium is less accessible than RFK, the team’s current home. It’s served by one Metro line rather than two and can be reached by fewer major thoroughfares and bus routes.

At least there are some ideas about remedying the latter problem. The stadium’s opening might spur extensions of the N22 Union Station-Navy Yard shuttle (whose conversion to Circulator service is being considered) and the 7th Street Circulator line. Also possible, in theory, is a game-only express Circulator directly from Union Station to the stadium.

The N22 expansion makes sense, even if its roundabout route to the stadium, via 8th Street SE, might discourage baseball fans from riding. But the express line is dependent on the reopening of 1st Street SE alongside the Library of Congress’ Madison Building, which has been fortified since 9/11. That’s not gonna happen. And the extension of the 7th Street Circulator, which would also offer an indirect approach to Natsland, seems primarily designed to coerce a few more people onto a route that currently attracts almost no passengers. (At the TOPP event, even a Metro representative allowed that ridership on the 7th Street Circ is “light.”)

Possible supplemental transit strategies include a bicycle “valet” to encourage gamegoers to cycle to the stadium and a water taxi to the area. The latter seems a long shot, however, even if four companies have reportedly expressed interest in a 18-month pilot program. After all, a water taxi could only ferry people from other sites that have mediocre transit access and limited parking, like Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria.

The principal revelation of the TOPP event had nothing to do with transportation, however. The open house was held on the unoccupied top floor of 20 M Street SE, which turned out to be a new office building developed by the Lerner family, who also own the Nats. The 10-story building was appointed with baseball-related art, an outdoor video screen that showed stylized images of the game, and an electronic signboard that welcomed attendees in the name of the Lerners. Inside, each person who entered the session was offered a soft-sided mini-cooler branded with the Nats’ logo.

From the 10th floor, there was an unencumbered vista of the stadium but also a view of the new official plan for Washington: Block after block of bland office cubes, with no public structures, few shops or restaurants, and little public space. And those blocks that haven’t been ceded to private developers will be the province of the security-crazed feds. So enjoy that soft-sided mini-cooler, Mr. and Ms. D.C. It’s all you’re getting.

As September’s first school bell approaches, two neighboring jurisdictions are putting the finishes on remade high schools. Arlington’s Washington-Lee, just a few blocks from Ballston Metro, and Alexandria’s T.C. Williams, which is near the vague center of that amorphous city, follow (slightly) different fads in contemporary mega-building architecture. Neither approach successfully hides the structure’s awkward bulk.

Washington-Lee is predominantly brick, but with jutting glass-clad protrusions of the sort that have become all too common in downtown office buildings:

Although more horizontally oriented than most structures in the medium-rise Ballston commercial district, the ungainly new W-L is tall for a suburban school. It looks squashed into its site, jostling the curb on its tighter-fitting sides. Its glassy towers project upwards as if forced out when someone gave the building a hard squeeze.

Also mostly brick, T.C. Williams takes the postmodern historicist approach, presenting an almost-symmetrical face to King Street:

The building’s backside is blank except for a series of loading docks—they must be planning to sell tractor-loads of Pepsi and Cheetos—and looks like the equivalent aspect of Wal-Mart. But the more prominent exteriors use quasi-classical detailing, including columns, pilasters, peaked rooflets, and a rounded, semi-detached entrance pavilion on the incredibly long facade that runs roughly perpendicular to King Street.

It’s tempting to suggest that Arlington is trying to look all-business, while Alexandria hoped to create a building that more closely resembles the backwater neoclassical pile that impersonated T.C. in Remember the Titans. But Alexandria has long had a taste for “colonial” architecture that’s hopelessly outscale, like the hulking Old Town Holiday Inn that would probably shock a reanimated George Washington as much as the latest follies in Dubai.

If the new T.C. is way too big for the 18th century, the true expression of its late-20th-century aesthetic is yet to come. Once the city tears down the old building, a merely functional brick shed that opened in 1965, its land will used for the successor’s massive new parking garage.

Last year, Metro proposed radical surgery on D.C.’s longest, most-used bus route, the 30 line, which runs from the Montgomery County line in Northwest to the Prince George’s County border in Southeast. The procedure the agency recommended was one of its current favorites: cutting the route in half. The buses now designated 30, 32, 34, 35, or 36 would terminate at 10th and Pennsylvania NW, and riders who wanted to go further in either direction would have been forced to transfer to a renumbered service covering the other half of the journey.

Metro recently performed a similar bisection on the 90 line, which travels from various points in Southeast to Adams Morgan and McLean Gardens. But after a June 27 ridership survey, bus planners backed away from the proposal to sunder the 30, which is 15 miles long and carries almost 20,000 riders every weekday. “Reaction to that plan was negative,” James Hamre, Metro’s planning manager for bus and corridor projects, told a group of about 30 bus users who attended a “listening session” Tuesday night at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in Tenleytown.

Divided into four subgroups, the participants were asked to discuss problems with the notoriously unreliable 30s, and suggest fixes. When the conversations were summarized for the entire assembly, it turned out that at least some of the riders had a familiar idea: cutting the line in half.

Read More “A Split Decision on Metro’s 30 Line” »

The biggest new wedgie in town is on the northeast corner of this new 12-story office building, whose one-from-column-A name is “Columbia Center.” (A better tag than “Center Centre,” I suppose.) The Monument Realty–developed structure, which is supposed to be completed by “3Q 2007,” is rising on 15th Street NW, just north of the Washington Post building on the site of the paper’s former parking garage. That corner’s angled extremity stretches all the way to the top floor, suggesting that the structure is some sort of aborted pyramid. Look around the side, however, and you’ll see that this is just another downtown office box.

The front facade is mostly glass, with a transparent four-story entryway at the southwest corner that’s the focus of the development’s marketing effort. If Hickock Cole Architects, who designed the building, devised this unusual off-center entrance to maximize the retail space, they deserve credit for good intentions. Too bad the ground-floor shops will be overshadowed by the odd horizontal shield that appears to float at the second-floor level.

That large piece, which stretches across most of the building’s front, resembles some oversized bit of clear plastic detritus, perhaps left over after unpacking a high-tech gizmo. (A 12-story iMac, perhaps?) It looks cheap, as does the entire affair. The term of art for these glassed-in white-collar corrals is “jewel box,” but no one with real valuables would put them in such a graceless container. Instead, the building suggests an acrylic chest that a six-year-old girl might fill with costume jewelry. Moderately radical geometry aside, Columbia Center is just another low-style attempt to dress up the old midtown-D.C. box.

As the Foggy Bottom/West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting was about to conclude Wednesday evening, Eastbanc President Anthony Lanier asked hopefully if the crowd wanted to see his company’s plans to remake two blocks in the West End. Derisive laughter provided the answer: No, the community did want to hear anything about development plans for Squares 37 and 50. What it wanted was for Lanier and the evening’s other guest, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, to explain why public property on those blocks was approved for sale to Eastbanc in emergency legislation passed July 10 without a public hearing.

Evans took much of the heat and responded by being reasonably contrite. Although he insisted that the process was legal, he conceded that “notice should have been given” of the D.C. Council’s intent to vote on the proposal, which would convey the neighborhood’s library and fire station and a police department building to Eastbanc without a competitive-bidding process.

The councilmember suggested several times that the community might come to like Eastbanc’s scheme to incorporate a new library and fire station into two large structures that would include housing and perhaps some retail. But he vowed in the future to vote on the issue strictly as instructed by the area’s ANC and the Foggy Bottom Citizens’ Association. He even offered to support reconvening the city council in a special session to reconsider the land sale, although he cautioned that such a session was unlikely.

“I would not have done this today,” Evans said. “I don’t want to get myself in this mess again. This is the last thing I expected to happen.” (That seems disingenuous, especially since West End residents recently battled a bid to upzone Square 37, preventing much the sort of large-scale development the Eastbanc deal would bring.)

Read More “Emergency Fallout: No Shelter for Evans and Eastbanc” »

On Tuesday, during its last session of the summer, the D.C. Council quickly passed dozens of resolutions and laws, including two “emergency” bills designed to resuscitate major real-estate developments: a Center-Leg Freeway air-rights project that was originally approved almost two decades ago, and a West End project that involves the city selling fire, police, and library property to a private developer. Neither proposal is by any measure an emergency, but treating them as such allowed the Council to skip the messy public-hearing phase of representative government.

The West End bill came as a shock to many in that community. At the Tuesday session, members of the Council congratulated themselves on having held “public roundtables” on the two bills last week, but those meetings were scheduled so quickly and publicized so poorly that few citizens knew they had occurred. The Friends of the West End Library scheduled a public meeting with the potential redeveloper, Georgetown-based Eastbanc, for 10 a.m., Saturday, July 14—unaware that the project would be a done deal by then.

Technically, neither deal is complete. Both proposals, which were sent to the Council by Mayor Adrian Fenty, are planned unit developments, which means the final designs will require Zoning Commission approval. They’ll also need a second Council vote. And in the West End case, the price of the three city parcels (at 24th and L, 23rd and L, and 23rd and M NW), minus Eastbanc’s cost of building a new fire station and library, must be negotiated and submitted to the Council for final approval.

The inaccuracy of the Council members’ remarks on Tuesday, however, didn’t offer much hope that the legislators will be informed or vigilant when the projects require further review.

Read More “Rushing Development to the ER” »

Last fall, I immodestly proposed a remake of the square that includes the Q Street entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. One reason the time was right, I noted, was that Riggs Bank had been absorbed by PNC, a Pittsburgh institution. That meant less need for local office space for the bank, so that the retail buildings on the west side of the 1500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, which Riggs converted to office space in 1997, could return to their previous use.

None of my more extravagant ideas for the square are on anyone’s public agenda, but the shops on that block are coming back. According to the Washington Business Journal, local retail broker John Asadoorian has been hired to lease the space that was once home to Kemp Mill Records, Beadazzled, Burrito Brothers, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, various ice cream parlors, and Rascals (a gay bar). There’s 20,000 square feet of available space, most of it behind façades clearly designed for retail use.

At $100 per square foot, the shops won’t rent to small, independent, or start-up businesses. But however corporate the block’s new retailers, they’ll create activity that will enliven the area. It never made sense to have a retail dead zone at the center of the one of the city’s liveliest neighborhoods, and next to one of its busiest Metro stations.

Of course, the original flip to office space didn’t have to happen. If the city had instituted the sort of retail requirements that exist in most well-planned cities, Riggs would never have been able to convert the Connecticut Avenue frontage to offices. So the return of shops to one side of one block doesn’t say anything about the larger issue of lively retail corridors. Citywide, D.C.’s retail strategy is still based on wishful thinking and the kindness of strangers.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Washington experienced an architectural counterrevolution. Many of the city’s new office buildings were designed in a style—variously termed “postmodern,” “historicist,” or “contextual”—that drew on 19th and early-20th-century models. Glass curtain walls and poured concrete were out. But architecture schools still instill reverence for the “new,” even if most of what they prize as novel is now almost a century old. So it was inevitable that the vogue for huge glass boxes would return, and recently it has. But D.C.’s latest examples of the new appear oddly antique.

The recently completed office building called 1101 New York Avenue NW (which actually fronts on I Street) shows how the mid-20th-century “International Style” has degenerated. Although the 12-story structure is clad entirely in glass, it lacks the bold, simple geometry essential to the work of such Bauhaus masters as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The bulk of the box is reduced by dividing the frontage into two large protruding bays, with the center of the facade recessed. The corners have a series of shallow notches, designed to facilitate more window offices. In short, 1101 New York has the massing of a old masonry (or recent historicist) structure. Designed by old-school modernist Kevin Roche, the building is a neoclassical edifice in unconvincing Bauhaus drag.

Like most contemporary Washington white-collar palaces, 1101 New York shortchanges the street level, and provides a hostile environment for retail businesses. But perhaps the worst thing about the place is its stripped-down portico. This crude shelter over the main entrance is the architectural equivalent of a cheap plastic sun visor you might buy on the boardwalk in Ocean City. Ironically, such an overhang could have been integrated much more elegantly into a neotraditional design. It was the decision to go “sleek” that made this feature turn out so gawky.

The D.C. government is considering two big projects to increase retail businesses in two very different neighborhoods: Georgetown and H Street NE. Yet neither plan addresses basic retail-boosting strategies that the city should have adopted decade ago.

In Georgetown, developer Herb Miller is looking for at least $20 million in tax increment financing (TIF) to redo Georgetown Park, the mall his former company developed and that his current firm recently bought back. This remake might include a Nordstrom’s, which would be the first new department store to locate in D.C. since Neiman Marcus opened in Friendship Heights in 1977.

The odds might seem to be against this deal. Former Mayors Marion Barry and Tony Williams, as well as erstwhile Pennsylvania Avenue Development Commission director M.J. Brodie, all tried to lure department stores into the city, preferably into the “retail core” around Metro Center. When their campaigns began more than 25 years ago, there were three department stores downtown. Now there’s one.

Yet Miller has a successful record. In addition to developing Georgetown Park, he built (with TIF money) the architecturally gruesome but impressively lively Gallery Place complex. And it’s possible that Nordstrom, having saturated the suburbs, is finally ready to expand into a major East Coast city. (It does have downtown stores in the West, but on this side of the country, it’s avoided cities, save for little Providence, R.I.) Now that Georgetown has been upscaled to the point of tedium—which may explain why Georgetown Park is struggling—perhaps prissy Nordstrom can feel comfortable there.

The department store chain certainly wouldn’t take to scruffy H Street NE, where the city plans a $27 million fix-up in hopes of attracting some 300,000 additional square feet of retail. The idea is to build on the “Atlas District,” with its arts center and nearby bars and live-music venues.

Interestingly, both Georgetown and H Street NE would be along the route of the long-touted crosstown Metro line, which could link in Rosslyn to the Silver Line to Tysons Corner and Dulles. Building that Metro extension—which no one is seriously discussing these days—would cost a lot more than $27 million, but it would make both Georgetown and H Street NE more attractive to shoppers and shop-keepers alike.

There are simpler things the city can do, of course. Retail requirements and street-frontage regulations for major streets should have been instituted back in the 1970s, at the dawn of Home Rule. Parking lots that separate streets from shops—as at the dreary H Street Connection strip mall—should never have been allowed. City officials now say that $1 billion in annual sales tax revenue is lost to the suburbs because D.C. is—in the retail-biz parlance—”understored.” A lot of that cash would have been retained if the city hadn’t permitted large new buildings with minimal or no retail space to be erected on prominent sites.

Such urban essentials as maintaining and improving infrastructure, establishing zoning regulations that require effective retail spaces, and improving law enforcement—an issue on H Street NE, but also in Georgetown—would do more to transform D.C. than any Nordstrom’s. Yet city officials still have a lottery mentality. They continue to behave as if they can fix everything with one big score, rather than doing the slow, hard work of providing the basic services and consistent planning that would allow the city to mend itself.

Today’s the day the annual Fête de la Musique fills parks, streets, and plazas all over town with a cornucopia of sound. Or rather, that was the idea when the Fête concept, which began in France in 1982, was transplanted to D.C. in 2003. This year, however, the entire event will be confined to the grounds of the French Embassy at 4101 Reservoir Road NW.

The Embassy’s cultural arm, known as La Maison Française, promises 30 local acts, dance classes, instrument-building workshops for kids, and food and drink. The $15 celebration’s live music runs from 5 to 10 p.m., and a DJ will spin until 11:30. But where’s the rest of the fest?

The D.C. government apparently lost interest in the event after its second year. There’s a press release about the festival on the Web page of the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, underneath of a photo of Mayor Adrian Fenty. Its most recent reference, however, is to 2004.

Perhaps the Fête isn’t the greatest idea the D.C. government ever had (or borrowed). But its fate is all too typical of the city’s stewardship of events, concepts, and proposals meant to enliven our town. Compared to such metropolises as New York and Paris, Washington has a bad case of urban ADD.

In 1985, for example, then-Mayor Marion Barry presented a New Year’s Eve street party at the Pavilion at the Old Post Office. The concept was nothing less grand than creating a rival to New York’s Times Square tradition. Five years later, the idea was dropped—as was, essentially, the Old Post Office. That “festival marketplace’s” centrality to the “living downtown” was supplanted by the Shops of National Place. And when that shopping mall foundered a few years later, the D.C. government just watched it sink.

So perhaps it’s just as well that the fête has been ceded to the French. They may not do it bigger, but they’ll probably do it better. At the very least, they won’t simply lose interest and walk away, which has become the paradigmatic D.C. government response to problems and parties alike.