It’s an effective comparison, yes, but I wonder at what hour the second photo was taken. It looks like early morning. Columbus Circle has been cleaned up and that’s great. The graffiti is gone, the tents are gone, the derelicts and panhandlers are much reduced, etc., but it’s still a lot busier than that picture suggests.
Union Station still has occasional incidents (fewer than before). While I haven’t paid close enough attention to be confident in judging this, my impression is that the incidents that come to public attention are mostly in the afternoon when swarms of public school kids are passing through. It does, after all, remain a major Metro stop and transfer point to busses because the blue, orange and silver lines are all on a shared track until they cross the Anacostia and diverge again. Metro was designed to get suburban commuters into downtown jobs, and only incidentally to serve the residents of D.C. Large swaths of DC to the north and east are very poorly served by Metrorail and Union Station is a logical subway to bus hub.
Most of the high school students are fine, well behaved and orderly. Some aren’t. Trouble ensues. The area around the Navy Yard-Stadium metro stop has some of the same problems with regular rowdiness in the late evening hours, especially on weekends. Most of the troublemakers don’t live anywhere near there. They are imported talent from the rougher areas in Anacostia whose own neighborhoods are pretty barren, so they come into a lively nightlife area on the green line.
Everyone knows where these problem spots are. Post George Floyd, our feckless mayor and city council had chosen to pull back the police because policing is oppressive. There’s nothing wrong in these areas that effective policing wouldn’t fix. The surrounding areas themselves are attractive. That makes them a magnet for some of the undesirables.
I had occasion a few weeks ago to take Amtrak at Union Station in the wee hours. I hadn’t done that for years and was apprehensive given the reports over the years. But flying wouldn’t work, the express busses were cheaper but slower, and I had the same concerns about the crime situation at the bus terminal. Union Station was fine at 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., as was Penn Station (now renamed for Senator Moynihan) in NYC at slightly more civilized hours. Both were clean, bright, well lit, and surprisingly busy at the hours I was passing through, and no criminal element was visible anywhere.
Of course, at those hours there were no swarms of high school students passing through, just early bird commuters and long distance travellers. If I were travelling solo to NYC, I would take the train again rather than drive. (Depending on my arrival and departure times, I might even consider a bus just to see what the Port Authority Bus Terminal is like these days — and it would be nice to check out the High Line and Hudson Yards, all now redeveloped since my NY days.) Of course, I’m not buying a business class ticket on the Acela. I checked on a possible upcoming date yesterday. The cheapest fare up on Amtrak would be $20, but the timing is probably better on the $45 train. That’s cheaper than driving.
In the picture on the cleaned up version, it’s clear that the figure on the right is a bearded male. In that same spot on the Hamas version of the statue, you can’t even make out the facial features. This is probably AI. I cleaned up one looks like beautiful marble. The Hamas one doesn’t look like dirty marble looks like a completely different Stone.
That picture of the clean fountain was taken by Andrew Leyden. You can find more pics at his X account or watch his video of it at his YouTube account. Andrew does a lot of behind the scenes stuff in D.C. and now has a White House press pass so you can see some behind the scenes stuff there also
Are you thinking the photos are propaganda? I don’t think they are.
LOL!