ABSTRACT
The 1969 renovation of Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, seemed to take forever. The contractor wasn’t doing all that much—just repaving the walks in the block-square park, and adding a fountain, doing some fresh planting around the statues of Von Steuben, Kosciusko, Rochambeau, and Lafayette (all foreigners who had helped George Washington) and Andrew Jackson (an afterthought), and shining up the plaque on the Bernard M. Baruch Bench of Inspiration, where I often went to speculate—but the park was fenced around in plywood, and contests were held to see which elementary school class could paint the fence most creatively. Nobody complained about how slowly the work was going.
