PHILADELPHIA — Some ideas are too difficult to wrap inside walls and cap under roofs. Architecture works best when it builds around concrete concepts — a courthouse, a football stadium, a church. It can be overwhelmed trying to define spaces for those traumatic topics whose meaning remains under construction.
How, for example, should a proper Holocaust museum be shaped? Many would ask: Why bother?
And so we, the people, didn’t much bother when re-creating The President’s House, a new attraction greeting its first throng of July Fourth tourists in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park this weekend.
George Washington, our nation’s father, slept there for eight years. So did nine of his slaves. They were held captive — cruelly and relentlessly — by the man who helped form our ideas about freedom. A recent excavation of the site, which unearthed slave quarters just 11 steps from the Liberty Bell Center, made this ironic truth self-evident.
So a project that might have simply Disney-fied the site that served as the country’s first White House from 1790-1800 morphed — with much public outcry — into a memorial to the captive people on whose whipped and broken backs this country was born. And its design evolved into a public monument that is inescapably moving.
Conceptually, the design acknowledges defeat at the start, mapping out the house’s plan, but eschewing those problematic walls and roofs. It is simply open-air floors, frames and fireplaces that tourists wander through. As a building, it is the opposite of architecture; it offers no shelter for the problematic notions it presents. It contains everything yet conceals nothing.
That our early national heroes held slaves has long been an embarrassing fact of life here, though one we’ve never known how to process. There has been, to put it lightly, a lot of denial. Even a savvy congresswoman can get it wrong as presidential candidate Michele Bachmann did this year in Iowa, praising our founding fathers who “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more.” Tell that to the descendents of the 200 blacks once held in bondage at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
House makes bold statement
The President’s House, developed and operated by the National Park Service, doesn’t have that problem. Designed by the Philadelphia firm Kelly/Maiello, it is bold if not downright revolutionary. Philadelphia gets more than 30 million visitors each year, and its main attraction is the Spirit of ’76. Tourists gaze at the bell, stumble through the narrow doorways of the Betsy Ross House, tramp reverently through Independence Hall where the declaration was signed.
It is an orgy of American do-right, and introducing Washington’s grave error into the mix threatens a case of libertas interruptus. This is supposed to be the feel-good moment.
It is not. Instead visitors are confronted with this odd notion of a building. Knee- high rails of red-brick, set at ground level, explain where the house’s entrances and exits were, where the kitchen and stables stood. Door and window casings — just the casings and their pediments — in colonial white, communicate the human flow.
Not everything is symbolic. In the center of things is a greenhouse-like glass box protecting a hole in the ground and revealing the actual excavation a story below. Ancient bricks outline the old foundation structure, which fell into disrepair and was slowly demolished as Independence Park developed. There’s real cultural history to be learned: how the classes got by.
But the most obvious feature is what’s not there. The site is exposed to the elements, Philly’s relentless humidity and messy slush. Washington is exposed, too.
Again and again, visitors learn of his misdeed. He wasn’t just a slave owner but one who brought his captives to live among the freed blacks of Philadelphia. He made speeches on freedom, yet signed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793, guaranteeing the right of slaveholders to pursue escapees across state borders. To get around Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act, a decree that slaves held in the state for six months could go free, Washington shipped his human properties back to Virginia, beating the deadline.
The exhibit refuses any relief to those who want to write off Washington’s behavior as that of another time and place. Words and images make clear that the abolition movement was in full swing; most Americans knew better. The only other president to occupy the house — John Adams, who lived there for four years — chose affirmatively not to own slaves.
Slaves’ story is told
These points are delivered on every platform. Speakers sprinkled throughout the grounds murmur with the sounds of a house where all was not right. Video screens recreate the stories of the unfortunate, slaves ripped from their families and shipped off thoughtlessly. The most moving video tells the story of Oney Judge, Martha’s maid, shoved around like livestock until she escaped to New England. Washington, a wealthy man with many other slaves, pursued her for years.
The place gives up every fact that fits. The first president’s reputation is savaged while the names of the held nine are inscribed in stone: Hercules, Richmond, Austin, Giles, Christopher, Joe, Paris, Moll and Oney.
For those who take the time to experience it, The President’s House provides both sadness and revulsion. We are forced to question our collective character. It will change some, anger others.
But its most quantifiable success comes through its efforts to end the ambiguity once and for all, to make our founding father’s bad habit something more than difficult. There is no ambiguity in evil. Washington was mean and selfish and “worked tirelessly” to defend slavery.
As a package deal, Philadelphia gives Washington a broader shake. The city is full of monuments to the man both physical and spiritual. Other attractions remind us that he was a brave, virtuous leader who could have been king but invented a better way for all of humanity by refusing the crown.
But The President’s House, just one place out of many, really, reveals him most generously as a man who freed his slaves — in his will. The meaning of such an act is no longer under construction.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540 or rrinaldi@denverpost.com
