I spent some time last week walking around the White House and thinking about how it’s become a militarized island in the middle of D.C. https://bit.ly/2DyECzy 

this was as close a view as I could get from the north, taken through the anti-climb fence around Lafayette Square

here’s as close as you can get from the south (and the path to that view was cut off the second time I walked around)

that white wall isn’t a security measure from the demonstrations, it’s part of a WH fence-replacement project that’s been in the works since before Trump was the Republican nominee. But the optics are suboptimal!

From a pedestrian POV, I’m most concerned about the shuttering of the Pennsylvania Avenue plaza. The Secret Service said in June the barriers were because of the protests. Now they say they’re necessary for the fence project.

That fence project started in July 2019, and Pennsylvania stayed open.

Anyway, it took me about 30 minutes to walk around the WH one day and about 45 minutes on another.

The history of the White House cutting itself off from Washington is quite long, and I wrote about it last year: https://bit.ly/2NV8Ph0 

And yet.