On this day in 1995, President Bill Clinton, acting on the advice of the Secret Service, closed Pennsylvania Avenue to all nonpedestrian traffic for a two-block stretch from the Treasury Building to the Eisenhower Office Building as a security measure to protect the White House against the threat of a possible car or truck bomb.
Clinton acted after a panel of security experts had begun a study in the fall of 1994. It was convened after a drunken pilot crashed his light plane onto the South Lawn in September. That October, a man fired a semiautomatic rifle at the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue. A passing tourist then tackled him.
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While a vehicle-free Pennsylvania Avenue would not have prevented either of these incidents, attacks at the World Trade Center in 1993 and in Oklahoma City in April 1995 had highlighted the potential danger.
Clinton announced the closing in his weekly radio address, calling it “a responsible security step necessary to preserve our freedom, not part of a long-term restriction of our freedom.”
Before dawn on the following day, the Secret Service ordered concrete barriers to be erected at each end, blocking a throughway that for nearly two centuries had been, as The New York Times put it on May 21, “the route of inaugural parades, protest marches and an untold number of bus tours.”
The area has since been remodeled into a pedestrian-friendly mall. Nevertheless, the closure, coupled with other blockages along the White House perimeter, has permanently disrupted traffic patterns in the nation’s capital.
Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, Clinton’s 1996 Republican opponent, pledged he would reopen Pennsylvania Avenue to vehicular traffic if he won the election. The Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, effectively put an end to any such reversal.