Jan and John Maggs Antiques

Greetings from Camelot

J. Edgar Hoover Building. Washington, DC

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

On our recent trip to Virginia we took the Metro into Washington, DC for a day, primarily to visit the National Gallery, where we'd not been for a number of years. We spent several enjoyable hours immersing ourselves in the museum's rich collection of early European paintings, then went for a brief walk on the National Mall, which looked more like a construction site than a national treasure. As we headed back towards our Metro station, we passed the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. The massive concrete structure looks more like a fortification than an office building and was named by The Washingtonian as one of the "Buildings I'd Tear Down".

Although we had seen photographs of the building, we were unaware that, in keeping with the paranoia of the Nixon era, the building is surrounded by a moat. On the day we visited, the water in the moat consisted of a few puddles, left by the morning's rain showers.

Seeing a public building so emphatically isolated from the people it was meant to serve seemed so patently medieval that we felt we had to take a picture. With camera in hand we found a good location for a shot and were just about to click when a large, humorless man, in a uniform identifying him as a member of the FBI Police, stepped out of nowhere and informed us that, while we were free to photograph the building, photographing the moat was not allowed. The words "And why not?" came to mind, but reason prevailed, and we put our camera away and headed for the Metro.

Here at home we found that it's quite easy to find photographs of the moat on the Internet. Click here, if you doubt us. But remember, the FBI may be watching us, and you might become suspect as well!

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