The view from Connecticut Avenue and L Sts, NW, early this afternoon

I did make it out of Baltimore, precisely on time, Monday morning, even though BWI had only one runway open. I arrived in Detroit at noon, 24 hours before the first significant snow of the year in southeast Michigan. Metro Detroit received 8 to 10 inches of snow overnight, so lots of schools got their first snow day. Here are some things that happened in the ensuing anarchy:

• Grocery stores remained stocked with foodstuffs ranging from apple juice to zucchini
• Wayne County had 100 snowplows salting and plowing the roads, so that all main highways and roads were dry by midday
• City buses kept running (at least to the extent that they usually run)
• The People Mover light rail system kept running. Well, it didn’t really have far to go, and it doesn’t really move that many people, but nevertheless …

Alas, my Wednesday afternoon flight to Baltimore was canceled, so I had to buy more clothes and toothpaste.

In the meantime, this just in from a desperate shopper in the mean streets of the District: “It’s grim here. Safeway is shut down. Sign on door says no milk. Police tape around entrance. Roads impassable. Garbage piling up along street…”

Pedestrian traffic only

The 17.4 inches of snowfall recorded at Reagan National Airport yesterday is was the fourth biggest snowstorm in DC’s history of officially recorded storms, the Washington Post says. That doesn’t count the 36 inches of snow the area received in 1722, recorded in the diaries of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, the District of Columbia wasn’t a district or the nation’s capital then, nor did the nation itself even exist. But our Founding Fathers were faithfully chronicling the Virginia weather with quill pens and sheepskin.

The worst officially recorded snowstorm was the 1922 Knickerbocker Storm, so named because it caused the collapse of the flat-roofed Knickerbocker Theater in Washington, killing 98 people.

From here in Capitol Hill, where the power lines are fortunately underground so that we still have power and heat, the 2010 Snowmageddon has been fun. Yesterday we ventured out on foot at midday. The streets had been plowed, somewhat, probably for the benefit of the firetrucks down the street. Everyone was walking in the street, even on Pennsylvania Avenue, as the sidewalks were impassable. An SUV would pass by only occasionally. Kids were sledding at the Capitol, and a lot of photographers were out. The Harris Teeter grocery store near Potomac Avenue was open, bless them. We didn’t make it to Dupont, but some 2,000 people celebrated there with a giant snowball fight.

The sunny weather today seems to have brought everyone out, digging out their cars and shoveling their sidewalks. We walked to Eastern Market, which was closed for the second day. It was a gorgeous day, perfect for skiing, if only you could get to a hill. It took Joe more than an hour to dig out our little car from the driveway, while I wisely opted to upload photos.

Tomorrow morning I’m scheduled to fly to Detroit, but BWI has cleared only one of its two runways as of this afternoon, so we shall see. The federal government is closed, so that should slow things down considerably. Besides that, more snow is possible Tuesday and Wednesday. Meanwhile, I hear Detroit is snow-deprived…

More of my photos on Flickr

The DC/MD/VA Snowpocalypse Flickr pool

It’s supposed to snow 16 to 24 inches Friday and Saturday, which would be the first time since 1986 that DC has received two snowstorms of 10 inches or more in a winter. (We got 16 inches on Dec. 19, which seem to have been enjoyed by everyone, as it brought Christmas vacation early. Except perhaps for that cop who pulled a gun in a snowball fight.)

And even though the first snowflake has yet to fall, and even though the 6 inches of snow we were supposed to get Wednesday turned into only 2 inches, yet schools were still canceled outside the district, PANIC is gripping the city. Our local Safeway was more insane than usual tonight, with people buying jugs of water and cases of beer. Tomorrow’s business meetings are being canceled, and federal government workers are on unscheduled leave, meaning, I guess, that they can have the day off if they can’t make it in. Channel 9 is teaching people how to shovel snow (You have to get under the snow with the shovel, apparently.)

The National Weather Service says, “A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET…AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE FRIDAY NIGHT.”

All right, we have our boots and coats, though we left the snow shovel in Michigan. We can walk to the grocery store. We have enough alcohol to last the weekend, or at least 48 hours. Good luck to all of you!

The Ypsilanti water tower

The famous Ypsilanti water tower embodies the spirit of the city: stand-up citizenship, hard work, and circumscribed living. But, you might wonder, how does it compare to the Washington Monument?

Here’s a small thing you can do to help the homeless if you live in metro Detroit. Take your gently used or new boots for men or women and give them to the Detroit homeless. The PBJ Outreach team from Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Plymouth is collecting them and distributing them frequently directly to the homeless they see every Saturday morning.

Deacon Tim Sullivan writes, “You cannot imagine until you see with your own eyes the creative footwear the homeless fashion in an attempt to keep frostbite from taking their toes. Detroit has the highest incidence of gangrene due to frostbite in the United States, and some of our guests downtown have actually lost their toes.” If you have decent boots that will help, please consider dropping them off at the Gathering Space in the church. (Go in the main door and turn right. The Gathering Space is the seating area behind the sanctuary.) The boots are being collected in the lefthand corner of the Gathering Space. If you’d like more information, email me [laurie (at) thedistrictandthed (dot) com] and I can give you Tim’s phone number. In the meantime, here’s a map to the church:

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Please don't ask her if she comes with the car

The public days of the Detroit auto show extravaganza (formally named the North American International Auto Show) are well underway. More than a million people are expected to pour through the doors of Detroit’s Cobo Hall and ogle and touch the cars and trucks that are still the lifeblood of the city and the state.

Last week’s crush of press preview days are over, the executives have gone back into hibernation in their corner offices, and countless cases of California sparkling wine have been poured into plastic cups and consumed by the tuxedoed masses at the Charity Preview on Friday.

I love the auto show. Yes, the outdoor temperature is frigid and the indoor temperature is saunalike. Yes, by the time you see the whole show, your feet ache and you desperately need a drink, for which you have to brave the afore-mentioned freezing weather and walk several blocks. Yes, you are paying a lot at the Charity Preview for cheap wine and no food. Yes, the spouse is very likely grumpy about the tuxedo and the lack of food.

But it’s our CES, our SXSW. It’s where you can see all the cars you might personally be involved in designing, engineering, building, advertising or promoting, along with all the other cars you would otherwise not get to see without a salesman shadowing you. You can examine the interiors and the wheels and see what the competition is up to. You can think about your next vehicle purchase. At the Charity Preview, you can compile your own worst-dressed list.

This is the first time in a decade I haven’t cruised the press preview days and run into old journalist friends and old flacks. I missed it. Some of my favorite memories from auto shows past are watching Jason Vines do his standup PR shtick, talking to Bob Lutz when he was selling the Cunningham car and not surrounded by an entourage, and enjoying several of Hyundai’s Detroit Rocks parties, where the hacks and flacks of the Exhaust Tones show what they do when they’re not writing about cars.

Anyway, it’s fun. If you live in metro Detroit and still have a job, take a day off and go.

Recent posts and columns about NAIAS I enjoyed reading:

• WSJ Joe White’s review (full disclosure: he’s my spouse) Can You Imagine Driving These? Also, vote on six concept cars: build it or bag it?
• Jalopnik: An auto show model lets you know what she really thinks. She also has her own blog, Do You Come with the Car?, quite entertaining.
• Mitch Albom, the hardest-working man in Detroit with an ego to match, writes that the auto show demonstrates the pluckiness and grit that is Detroit.
• Detroit Fashion Pages’ Worst Dressed List from the Charity Preview. This could have been a much longer list, in my opinion.
• More of my NAIAS photos on Flickr

Fountain at the McNamara Terminal at DTW

Chances are you’ve seen Fuller’s work, in fountains where jets of water appear solid and ropelike. The secret is creating zero-turbulence water streams, called laminars. Some of their most popular fountains are at the Bellagio casino (see YouTube videos) in Las Vegas, which dance to music, and the leaping streams at EPCOT (one of Fuller’s early works, as a Disney Imagineer).

In Michigan, you can see work by WET at the McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metro Airport (see Youtube videos), at Campus Martius and the Compuware headquarters in downtown Detroit, and at the Somerset Collection (don’t call it a mall!) in Troy. I can attest that the fountain at DTW is a calming presence conveniently located near a Starbucks stand, a nice place to stop for a few moments and watch the travelers rushing by. In Washington, WET Design created the fountain at the International Monetary Fund Headquarters, installed in 2005.

WET Design has a highly experiential web site, with photos and videos of their creations. Click on Creations, then navigate either through the map or the timeline. Take a look at the huge Dubai fountains, completed in April 2009, and the Revson Fountain at the Lincoln Center, subject of the New Yorker piece.