There Ain’t Much Down East Flavah on Maine Avenue
WASHINGTON, Feb. 21-You might think that the juicy crab cake sandwich you were taking a bite out of was made at the Cod End fish market in Tenants Harbor if it were not for the noisy rushing of cars on the overpass, the lack of salt smell in the air and the occasional buzzing of the President’s Marine One helicopter flying overhead.
Instead of being on the Maine coast, you are at the Maine Avenue Fish Market in the nation’s capital.
Captain White’s Seafood City, where that crab cake sandwich was fried up for you, has been on Maine Avenue for a long time. Jesse White started the business with his father more than 30 years ago; he has worked there since he was a teenager. White’s, one of a half-dozen vendors at the seafood market, gets a lot of its goods from the Chesapeake Bay, but it also gets lobsters and mussels from Maine. It takes less than a day for a lobster brought into port in Maine to be flown down to Washington and arrive at White’s.
Maine, like every other state in the union, has a street named after it in Washington. There is Pennsylvania Avenue, with the Commander in Chief in residence at 1600, and Connecticut Avenue, which is one of the main thoroughfares in town, and Massachusetts Avenue, home to a lot of embassies. All this is according to city planner Pierre L’Enfant’s original design.
Maine Avenue is in the southwest quadrant of the city and runs along the Washington Channel and the Tidal Basin, which are separated from the Potomac River by an island park. Across the Potomac is Virginia.
According to Captain Eric Slaughter of Capital Yacht Charters at the Washington Marina, foreign heads of state were meant to arrive in the city on the avenue after coming up the Potomac on their royal yachts.
“The Southwest became Washington’s official port soon after the Washington Channel was completed,” Slaughter said. “But the city plans as they had been developed over the life of the city have all included various wharfs and plans and public access for the Southwest Washington Waterfront because that was Washington’s Waterfront.”
The seafood market is usually busy around the lunchtime hour. One local customer, 65-year-old George Imes, regularly visits the market. He gets “a little bit of everything,” from shrimp to crab to Maine lobsters. When asked about Maine, Imes said his first thought was “lobsters, of course.”
In addition to selling raw seafood, Captain White’s offers many cooked-food options. You can get a steamed lobster or fried trout or a crab cake sandwich, which is full of fresh crab fried to cakey perfection. It comes on a cheap bun, which you could buy an eight-pack of for 99 cents at Hannaford’s in Bangor, and do-it-yourself ketchup and tartar sauce. Eating it on a bench along the Potomac waterway might make you think you’re sitting at a seafood shack in Stoneham.
But looming across the street is the cavernous Mandarin Oriental Hotel. A footbridge gives hotel guests access to the waterfront and the Tidal Basin, with its famous Japanese cherry trees. A spokeswoman for the hotel, which opened in March 2004, said it has 400 guest rooms, two restaurants, a bar and thousands of square feet of ballroom and meeting room space. Weekday room rates range from $395 to $8,000 a night. But there will be special deals during the Cherry Blossom Festival at the end of March, the spokeswoman said.
Workers trot across four-lane Maine Avenue, dodging BMWs and delivery trucks, from the Oriental to the Washington Marina. The marina, which Slaughter said was started in 1939 under an order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, rents out boats, including the Celebrity Yacht
After the seafood wharf, Maine Avenue leaves the water’s side and is replaced with Water Street. Along Water Street are a few seafood restaurants and more marinas, including the Capital Yacht Club, the oldest marina in Washington, and the Gangplank Marina. Both serve super yachts that come up the Potomac to visit town.
About 100 people also call these marinas home. There are two-story house boats painted gray that moor alongside 50-foot sailing vessels and motorized pleasure ships.
Along with the boats, there is fishing in the waters along Maine Avenue, although there are no smelt fishing shacks because there is no ice. Signs warn not to eat any catfish, carp or eels from these waters. There is also even some wildlife: the ubiquitous gray squirrels are frequent visitors, and even cranes sometimes fly above these waters.
I f you wa lk further west on Maine Avenue you’ll pass under the Route 1 overpass that occasionally provides shelter for homeless people. The Washington Monument, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and the Jefferson Memorial are past the overpass.
The avenue crosses 14th and 15th streets, where you might see an official limousine accompanied by the standard SUV full of guys with machine guns.
At the west end of Maine Avenue is the Tidal Basin ringed with the famous cherry trees. The snowstorm in mid February blanketed the city with half a foot of snow, which led to the erection of snowmen that looked back at Thomas Jefferson in his memorial across the basin.
A few days later, the snowmen were a fraction of their former glory. Their stick arms sat lifeless in the mud and dead leaves. These snowmen sat at one end of Maine Avenue, until they met their final melt
At the other end of Maine Avenue, just before it flows into M Street, lies the State of Maine’s most visible imprint on its namesake avenue. The Lobsterman Statue looks out over the Potomac toward East Potomac Park.
According to Jane Radcliffe of the Maine State Museum (which has the original plaster cast in its collection), the statue is an exact match of one that kneels near Congress Square in Portland and one on Bailey Island in Casco Bay as well. The Washington copy was put up in 1983 thanks to the efforts of the Cundys Harbor Campfire Girls. The original lobsterman statue is modeled after Elroy Johnson of Bailey Island and was made by the artist Victor Kahill for the Maine State Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair.
The statue is of a simple working man, crouching on a coil of rope. His thigh-high fisherman’s boots are bent in half and don’t come above his knees. He is wearing a thick collared shirt that is rolled up close to the elbows so he can work with the un-banded lobster that he is grasping with his right hand. His eyes glance down his prominent and shapely nose, with a look that either glories in the efforts of his labor or is worried about getting pinched by that left claw.
####
