The Good: Before the pandemic, I was a fairly regular attendee of the Tuesday lunch time classical concerts at The Church of the Epiphany on G Street, near Metro Center. When the pandemic hit, the concerts stopped and I didn’t go anywhere. Sometime last year, the church began the concerts, but I didn’t attend until today. My first one in three years.

A concert by Sahun Hong, piano, and Zachary Mowitz, cello. Beethoven, Chopin, Prokofiev. Hong and Mowitz are young, award winning artists connected with Peabody and Curtis music academies. In their bios, the most interesting things were that Hong graduated magna cum laude with a degree in music performance from Texas Christian University at the age of 16 (is that a misprint?) and that Mowitz is the son of composer Ira Mowitz (I never heard of him, either).

It felt good to be back.

The Bad: The main library of the DC library system was closed for several years for a major renovation, reopening a year ago or so. The original building was designed by Mies van der Rohe, originally opening about 50 years ago. In my opinion, the design never worked well, and I had hopes that a renovated building would work better. Perhaps it does, but I couldn’t tell so from my first time there.

Why not? My first impression is that each floor (there are 5) is just too big. The lobby is gargantuan and, except for an information desk, nothing really happens there. On either end of the lobby, there is a mammoth room – one housing computers only, and the other housing “new books” and a new cafe. Even here, the room is enormous (why couldn’t the cafe and the new books section be separated?), the ceilings are very high and all the furnishings very low and spaced out. Spaced out indeed. Space is all you see. And because the walls of the building are all glass, the space seems even bigger.

The main reading room is on an upper floor. I find that strange. There are two elevators (you have to know where they are) and two (maybe more) sets of hidden stairs. And the main reading room seemed very quiet – and not just because people weren’t talking. There is also the Washington history room on that floor, also very large and sparsely furnished. On another floor, you find the “accessible” room – I am not sure exactly what that is for, and the teen and children’s rooms. Each floor seems a clone of the others, and there is no sense of life, excitement or welcoming anywhere.

There are exhibits, however. Everywhere. It is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, of course, and there are exhibits about Dr. King. On the first floor there is a collage-type exhibit about Black Lives Matter. And on one of the upper floors, there is a very extensive exhibit on civil rights in DC. I don’t know if these are permanent or temporary exhibits. I didn’t ask.

But what was interesting about these exhibits is that everyone being pictured (outside of a few crowd scenes) is Black. Everyone. It looked like DC has no Whites, no Hispanics, no Anyone but Blacks. At all. I found this extraordinarily weird. And I admit that I didn’t read through every word on every exhibit (and there are a lot of words, often set up rather confusingly), but I did note that nothing bad seemed to be said about the people highlighted in the exhibits. Examples are Marion Barry (nothing said about his drug use or the unfortunate things he said or did during his last term as mayor) and Walter Fauntroy, initial DC Congressional delegate (nothing said about his disappearing, presumably to avoid creditors, and abandonment of his family). So I ask you, in this ultra-diverse and thriving city: what’s going on here?

The Ugly: I admit, it was a very drab day. Full cloud cover, misty air, temperature in the 40s. But downtown DC looked very ugly, something that it never has to me before. There was not the traffic there used to be, the sidewalks were relatively empty, there are many places for rent that used to house busy businesses. It just looked drab and ugly. Where was I? G Street and H Street between 9th and 14th Streets. The heart of old downtown.

I understand that Washington, more than other cities, has not seen office workers return to their offices. They are working from home more here than elsewhere, with – I last read – maybe only 1/3 coming into their office, and most of those not daily. The vacancy rate is at a all time high, businesses are renewing leases for smaller spaces. There is talk of converting excess office space to residential space. There is talk of pressuring the federal government to require more government workers to go to their offices. But all of this might take some time. And, perhaps, downtown Washington (widespread as it is) may never again look like it did.

For the overall area, that isn’t necessarily a problem. And anywhere outside of downtown, traffic is heavy, stores are open, people are milling around. But for downtown, for tourists, and the DC tax base, it is clearly a problem. I hope it can be solved.