On my last day in DC, I visited the Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, the most astonishing public space in the capital. It was built after the Civil War to house the pension offices for the veterans and civil servants. Now receiving a pension (probably from a computer system housed in some cubicle-laden dreary office complex), I feel a deeper affinity with this magnificent edifice...its gigantic columns lifting the roof skyward. Groups of school children come into the space and sit or lie on the floor with their teachers looking up, up, up.
One of the exhibits on display in the columned interior was on the history of the parking garage. And one of the statistics cited dealt with the period before the advent of the automobile when cities were filled with workhorses carrying people and goods. It is estimated that in New York in 1900, the city held about 100,000 horses which produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of, most of it probably dumped into the river. Now that was an environmental pollution problem. So the automobile was responsible for cleaning up the city, parking garages replacing stables.
Ahhh....magnificent museums...places for learning and gaining perspective in space and time.
