This is indeed quite sad. The Woodward Building, home of The Washington Monthly, never struck me as a nasty place. Sure, the downstairs businesses were a bit sketchy, with the bikini store and its handscrawled offers for MTV gigs and modeling jobs clearly a front to recruit for seedier sexual enterprises and the little coffee/convenience shop staffed by an impressively surly woman with an admirable disinterest in actually selling me anything, but whatever. There was marble, the creeky elevators were stately, the staircases were wide and open. And say what you will about the AC, but there was AC. Let's keep our priorities straight, folks.
It was also the first place I worked in Washington, and I thought it heady and impressive. A slew of think tanks and marquee organizations maintained headquarters mere blocks away, while the walk from the metro always forced you to pass, and admire, the beautiful VA building ("To care for the widow..."). I loved it -- it seemed what Washington should be, a little dingy and drab, but simultaneously inspiring and exciting. Make it too nice and you're in a law firm, make it a well-located closet and you're fighting the good fight. Square footage, of course, is inversely proportionate to virtue. We'll see if The Monthly's newer, fancier digs go to their heads. I'd bet not, but I have trouble believing losing the Woodward and installing themselves in more respectable real estate won't, on some level, degrade the beloved atmosphere of shoestring intellectualism that currently prevails over there. But what do I know -- I thought the Woodward was nice!
