Admiral George Dewey held court at his estate at 16th and K, where the Capital Hilton now stands, and District Gov. In the mid-1800s, K was a ritzy address on the edge of town. The rest is four-story mansions and heavy-hanging boughs of greenery. camp has been the most significant form of housing on the corridor besides the hotels. There’s no real peace to disturb, though. some nights, Cauffman says, drunks fight in the streets outside nearby K Street clubs. Peacoats and blazers pass by, eastward and westward. Like they have no idea where they’re going. Pedestrians here “seem depressed,” Cauffman says, reclining in the winter sun, his feet propped on an iron post. An average of 23,796 riders disappears daily down the escalators at the Farragut North Metro station at Connecticut and K.įor half of January, Dallas resident Rich Cauffman, 42, made K Street his front yard as part of Occupy D.C. on weekdays, 100 different city and regional buses lumber back and forth, spiriting workers from crowded medians to more pastoral realms such as Charlotte Hall in southern Maryland. Every day an average of 30,600 vehicles traverses K between 19th and 21st streets. That intersection sits on the busiest stretch of the city’s busiest transit corridor - the 1.5 miles of K between 22nd Street, where it burrows toward Georgetown, and Ninth Street, where it jogs at Mount Vernon Square before setting a course for I-395, Union Station and Northeast D.C. A car jumped over to the right lane to make a turn. ![]() “He was on one of those Kawasaki Ninja joints. “I saw a guy die over at 20th,” Daudu says, pausing on his bike next to the American Legion building. K Street, for the courier, is the road to which all roads lead, a grid of access inlets and service entrances, a freeway of danger. The couriers own the street in a way that eludes cars (which are hampered by buses and ill-timed traffic lights) and pedestrians (forced to cross three separate roadways to get from one side to the other). “If I’m going to be chilling between runs, I’ll be on K Street.” ![]() “You can get anywhere from it,” says Daniel Daudu, 32, a bike courier who lives in Takoma Park. K Street is unavoidable, in multiple ways. Think of K Street as the medulla oblongata of Washington - the reptilian part of the brain stem that automates circulation and breathing, contributes to overall sentience and, when malfunctioning, causes imbalance, dizziness and vomiting. The inelegance of trying to have it all while stuck at a desk under a rectangle of fluorescence. Grand vision obscured by quotidian economics. So to what should “K Street” refer, if not to a corridor of influence? ![]() To the outside world, “K Street” means “lobbying” or “ influence-peddling.”Įxcept only one of the 20 highest-earning lobbying firms has a K Street address (and its main entrance is, in fact, on 16th Street), and total spending on lobbying last year ($3.27 billion) decreased for the first time since 1998, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. “We need people from outside Washington, outside K Street,” Mitt Romney said in December, as if K were the heart of the heart of darkness. It’s the symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington, the front line where the Occupiers dug their anti-authoritarian trenches, the boulevard that has been shorthand for capital corruption during recent Republican debates.
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