Walking into the basement of 2020 O St. is like walking into a nightmare. The small basement foyer and proceeding hallway are narrow, dark and windowless, and packed to the rim with bizarre knick-knacks and memorabilia. To your left, a Chuckie-esque portrait of a cigar-smoking clown holds your hat and raincoat. From every direction it seems that a possessed hand-me-down, be it a stuffed Care Bear or an autographed poster of Simon and Garfunkel, is watching you, plotting your murder and laughing morosely at the prospect, making for an unintentionally terrifying experience for the Halloween season.
The Mansion on O Street, one of the attractions of this year’s 38th annual Dupont House Tour, is a venue of self-proclaimed madness and instability. Its flyer bills it as “Hotel, Private Club, Museum, Creative Services.” The place includes “two grand ballrooms, 12 separate dining areas, 21 conference rooms, 19 guestrooms, 16 fireplaces, 21 secret doors” and a whole lot of junk. As you ascend the staircase through each level of the mansion, you begin to feel more and more like a character in Labyrinth, with David Bowie shutting the secret doors in your face. The walls of “antiques” and “collectibles” are impenetrable, claustrophobic and repulsively overbearing.
If you step into the large industrial kitchen, the floor is painted to look like the surface of a pool, with two little children portrayed in their attempt to climb out onto the stairs. This seems pretty cool when you consider the ingenuity behind the design, but quite sickening when you consider the real nature of the painting. The kids, after all, can’t ever get out of the pool, and suddenly you realize that you have no idea how you’re going to surface from the depths of this kitsch-ridden hotel.
Things get better (or worse) when you discover that everything in the hotel is for sale. For a while, shopping made my fears of entrapment subside, as I tried on some d?coupaged tiger-face earrings, handled several vases and tea-sets and tried on a “Mr. Rogers” cardigan hanging in the closet of one of the bedrooms. I even thought about purchasing a liquor dispenser called “The Whizzer.”
As I took a right into another one of the hotel’s narrow passageways, I squeezed up against three men who had just emerged from a secret passage, relieved and unscathed. As they passed me one man shouted back to his friends, “This is probably what hell is like.”
The Mansion on O Street is located, unsurprisingly, at 2020 O St. NW. Information on tours can be found at www.omansion.com or at (202) 496-2000.
