{"id":34119,"date":"2026-09-05T21:34:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T21:34:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/?p=34119"},"modified":"2026-09-08T21:37:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T21:37:52","slug":"a-look-across-the-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/a-look-across-the-bridge\/","title":{"rendered":"A Look Across the Bridge…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Whew! The Flea Market concluded at one this afternoon, with the Socotra House Creative Section representatives rolling back across the River both hungry and thirsty.<\/p>\n

That naturally would have led to some of Deirdre’s FIFA-Cup mood adjusters, though it appears Rocket, Splash and Vic may already have started on the way back to Fairfax.<\/p>\n

That isn’t what brought us to the matter of the Arch, or at least not directly. The design of which structure had been a spark in our local Fifteen Minute County Round-Up this morning. That happened to coincide with the first taco rolls coming out of the Galley before the fleas came out for marketing over in Arlington.<\/p>\n

The other local construction news was about the collapse of part of the Kennedy Center roof during yesterday’s big storm. And spurred the consequent discussion about all the real estate here in town, as our current Chief Executive apparently attempts to do a century’s work in just a couple of years.<\/p>\n

Which, of course, invited the story of the civic plan that has never quite been completed in this 250th Anniversary season of unending celebrations of things we hadn’t thought about in a while.<\/p>\n

That would be the McMillan Plan, you know?<\/p>\n

It is funny how these things come up as “New Business” when they have been hanging around for more than a century.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThat is what Chairman Jim McMillan looked like when he was able to peer across the bridge from DC. Here is a look at what was going on a simple century ago.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nPhoto: Bushnell Park Foundation.<\/p>\n

This is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch up in Hartford, Connecticut. It was designed by local architect George Keller. His commitment was greater than ours, since his ashes are interred along with his wife\u2019s inside the arch.<\/p>\n

There was no Memorial Bridge then, and so it was first things first about how to celebrate the entrance to the Nation’s city. And we now have a perfectly good span across the river that should have an arch welcoming us into the symbolic center of our world.<\/p>\n

This American expression of monumental civic architecture being discussed today could be contemplated not as something new but something old. It could be justified as a means to complete Pierre L’Enfant’s design for the capital of a nation that would help define one possible course of species history.
\nOr not.<\/p>\n

You can see some of the problems with scope, scale and detail in this effort.<\/p>\n

The McMillan Plan is more than a hundred years past its prime. It was pushed along by the senior Senator from Michigan and presented in 1902 by the Senate Park Commission, popularly known as the McMillan Commission after its chairman, Senator James McMillan of Michigan.<\/p>\n

Its outlines reflected the City Beautiful movement that flourished around the turn of the twentieth century. The plan was never implemented in its entirety, but parts of its vision transformed Washington, and the unfinished pieces have a habit of popping back into conversation every few generations as somebody discovers there was once a plan to make this a world-class capital city.<\/p>\n

The McMillan conversation has popped up again today because there is red spray paint on the traffic circle at the Virginia end of Memorial Bridge.<\/p>\n

When the monumental city was being conceived, an architectural terminus was intended to help unify the heroic structures stretching west from Capitol Hill, across the Potomac and toward Arlington House, the former home of the Lee family in the Olde Dominion of Virginia.<\/p>\n

There is a certain amount of historical rearrangement going on over there as well. Virginia has spent the last few years removing statues erected by earlier generations to commemorate things viewed very differently now. So a certain uncertainty about monuments is probably to be expected.<\/p>\n

But here are some of the arches proposed over the years to complete the composition.<\/p>\n

We took a poll.<\/p>\n

Preliminary results indicate that those of us currently planning on being interred over there think an Arch would make a pretty cool view.<\/p>\n

For eternity.<\/p>\n

That last factor is what seems to have people a little concerned at the moment. We have decided not to worry about it. We will look at the arches and see if anything actually gets built.<\/p>\n

Which naturally took us somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Rome.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nIt would be interesting to find the minutes from whatever planning commission Emperor Domitian might have assembled to construct the Arch of Titus. Titus was already dead when the thing went up, which is an architectural planning horizon some of us around the Conference Table increasingly appreciate.<\/p>\n

Two thousand years later, the Arch is still standing.<\/p>\n

This image depicts what is left from the work of Imperial Rome, and what they thought about things two millennia ago. It comes from Britannica, via the blinking box at the end of the Conference Table we call TAHE \u2014 the Archive of the Human Enterprise.<\/p>\n

TAHE has apparently absorbed Britannica.<\/p>\n

The discussion today is whether it is absorbing us, too.<\/p>\n

These chains are funny. Look at arches that are both distant and very close.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe Romans built them as declarations of triumph and permanence. Centuries later, Napoleon’s France resurrected the idea on an enormous scale with the Arc de Triomphe, planting an ancient Roman architectural statement at the center of a modern capital and sending great avenues radiating away from it.<\/p>\n

Which brings us, eventually, back across the Atlantic and across the Memorial Bridge.<\/p>\n

We appreciate the solemn brick of Hartford’s Arch. We admire what remains of Titus’s. But standing conceptually in the shadow of the Roman arch resurrected by the French, some of us prefer something a little larger for that currently pastoral traffic circle in Virginia.<\/p>\n

A big chunk of masonry sitting on an otherwise unadorned circle of grass might be fun.<\/p>\n

Particularly if you’re going to be looking at it for a while.<\/p>\n

We apparently have all the time in the world to play with the idea of something triumphant, you know?<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra<\/p>\n

www.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whew! The Flea Market concluded at one this afternoon, with the Socotra House Creative Section representatives rolling back across the River both hungry and thirsty. That naturally would have led to some of Deirdre’s FIFA-Cup mood adjusters, though it appears Rocket, Splash and Vic may already have started on the way back to Fairfax. That […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-socotra"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34126,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34119\/revisions\/34126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}