This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet. A quick stroll through Lafayette Square,

located just across the street from the White House.

Presidents have been able to see it from northern windows since it was formerly dedicated in 1824.

Before that, it was a racetrack, and we are told, a market where people bought and sold other people.

But then they made it a park. First, just a field in some apple trees,

then they put up a little fence, just high enough to keep cows from wandering in,

and to distinguish it as a park. A green place in which to walk or play or picnic.

An open space which folks were afraid to use as they saw fit, to fill with this stuff of life.

They put up its first statue in 1851. It is of Andrew Jackson on horseback. It was the first

equestrian public sculpture in America, and it established a trend of placing bronze racists on

bronze horses that was a time-honored tradition for a long time. They planted spreading oaks and

London plain trees, and black lamp posts along criss-crossing paths, room for benches and triangular

flower beds. The lamps used to be gaslit, used to cast flickering shadows in which lovers would

meet. And there is a story about the son of Francis Scott Key who used to meet up with the wife of

a congressman in those shadows. Until that congressman saw him sitting on a bench and shot him in

broad daylight. But I don't care about that story right now. I care on this June afternoon,

about the uses of this park over the years, and the freedom public parks can provide.

I care about how in the 1890s gay black men and transgender women held what they called an annual

drag race, when they would wear dresses and jewelry and beautiful hats and parade through the city

and dance in Lafayette Square. Washington, D.C. was one of the American cities most open to gay

people back then. As it was in the 1930s, when the federal bureaucracy expanded, and they needed

people to fill positions in the works progress administration and the social security administration

...