How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by Sue William Silverman

Author:Sue William Silverman [Silverman, Sue William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Nebraska

The Janet Leigh Variations

aceldama: site or scene of violence or bloodshed

For example: “Aceldamas, especially for women, are all around us whether we see and recognize them or not.”

In 1898 John Roll McLean, a wealthy businessman who owned the Washington Post, commissioned John Russell Pope to design a grand Georgian Revival summer home in DC. Later, an 18-hole golf course, cast-iron swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, Italian gardens, and fountains were added, along with an iron fence surrounding the complex. After McLean died, his son, Edward, inherited it. However, Edward and his wife blew through their inheritance on one thing or another, including the pear-shaped “Star of the East” diamond and the supposedly cursed Hope Diamond. In 1942 the federal government bought the property to build housing for defense workers during World War II. After the war the Hartford Insurance Company bought it to be used as rental property.1

Which is where I enter the picture, albeit a few decades later. . . .

. . . when McLean Gardens, as it’s now called, is transformed into a women’s residence complex. I rent a room here one summer between college semesters while working as a Capitol Hill intern. It’s located at 3600 Wisconsin Avenue, but if you drive by today (circa 2015), the entrance is on Porter Street, where you’ll see elegant condominiums. In short, it has gone upscale since my summer when tastefully shabby rooms are rented to people holding on to one of the bottom rungs of the rickety limited-opportunities-for-women ladder.

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