We had a one bedroom, wood paneled garret apartment with carved figures on the doors and a fascinating small stone fireplace which featured a charming gargoyle. It did take a lot of roach killer to rid the place of pests, but it was a delightful apartment. The wrought iron balcony linked us on one side to another apartment next door and via a circular staircase to the ground apartments below.

People living there were friendly and did enjoy cocktails but back then, drugs were not in evidence. It is sad to see that all the charm of the place was destroyed with updates to the buildings and some were demolished. It was indeed a bit of a wonderland in the midst of Old Georgetown with the likes of the Kennedy family and other notable names living nearby only a block or so distant.

Instead, as breezes & Agee’s blue dew moved through the small piazza of sorts that gently declared itself the center of this curiously nameless world, one’s mind & heart & eyes feasted in every direction: the remarkable colours of the little buildings, the wrought iron balconies, the handpainted tiles depicting scenes having absolutely nothing to do with any facet of what Official Washington mistakes for life. The various brick flats & duplexes stood in a graceful jumble of different heights, painted in shades straight from the Paris of Dufy & Bemelmans: periwinkle, red violet, ochre, rose — their twin windows opening outward just like the little French doors everywhere also did; & all of these apertures, too, wore the gayest of hues: lamb’s-ear silvery green, gentian, coral, turquoise. Masses of flowers spilled out of window boxes wherever one looked; & a little fountain plashed merrily to itself in the cobbled centre of it all — – while voices called out now & then to one another from windows up there, down here, across from that, over in this.

And then most surprising of all, once one’s eyes refocused again: for here before one, almost like a symbolic capstone of sorts in the slowly deepening twilight, every single front door — – those guardians of every single petite, jewel-like abode — – stood absolutely, and quietly, and unguardedly — peacefully — open. WIDE open. So completely & unapologetically open, in fact, that rather than being startling or worry-making in that shockingly violent era, they instead Somehow added — – in fact, added immeasurably — – to one’s sense of being somewhere very much Other than Here; indeed, somewhere wonderfully other than here. For such unabashedly wide open front doors of houses were something that ordinary Common Sense absolutely — & yes, understandably — had forbidden the luxury of, all throughout Washington D.C. and for several years already, by the time I was 17 and fell down the rabbit hole into the Hamilton Arms.

Thus utterly lovely it was, too, this witness in the Hamilton Arms — – and through those wide open doors one heard & smelled suppers cooking, happy laughter, a piano spilling out this jade green archway, a cello from that carnelian-trimmed window. People sitting in their homes waved pleasantly to me, a stranger, when I walked by their open doors. You will understand me when I say I never wanted to leave.

And that I had to return as often as possible.

I even stood & stared at the bulldozers tearing it all down a few years later, while a city official told me that all that life & history & beauty he simply knew as a name — the “Something Arms” — had to make way for the long-awaited joy of a tiny but needed parking lot in Georgetown.

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I’d like to think that “back issues” of the Georgetown Metropolitan will still be around on some dusty old server by 2200, so those archeologists will have some explanation of the ceramic tiles and Dickens characters.