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In this article we’ll look at some places where Dippers historically have hung their hats, where real dippers today work, what and where diplomacy’s failure can lead to, and a couple of places that combine all three. Please note that there are a lot of links to various web sites in this article. You’ll enjoy reading it a lot more (I hope) if you take the time to look at them. Diplomacy Centers and "Dip Caves" In a hobby long, long ago and far, far away Dippers lived in real houses or apartments with real street addresses, real zip codes and real phone numbers. They sent their hand-written or typed communications by snail mail. Sometimes their games went on for years. How times have changed. Come with me down Dip Memory Lane: If you look into most Dipper’s Diplomacy Center or “Dip Cave” today you’ll find anything from a corner of a bedroom or dining room up to a full-scale “Dip Cave” in the garage, basement or attic. No matter the size; which could range from a few square feet to hundreds of square feet; the Dip Center usually includes a working area, a storage area and an entertainment area. Very active Dippers or Old Farts will also have an “icon wall” or display area, for their various trophies and awards from Dip events they’ve participated in. Dippers' “Dip Caves” In the hobby’s First Golden Age in the 1960s things weren’t so fancy. Here’s what a real estate agent would have told you then if you were looking for a property with a “Dip Cave” potential. Keep reading and you’ll find out who actually lived in the property in question. 234 E. 19th St., Brooklyn, NY 11226:This 3389 square foot, two-story and basement, single family house, is located in Brooklyn, NY. The lot is 5,000 square feet. The house was built in 1899 and last sold in May, 2011 for $655K. The current estimated value of this property is $1,523K. 4861 Broadway, 5-V, New York City: This 1,500 square foot apartment includes 3 or 4 bedrooms and 1.5 baths on fifth floor of a six story, 1929 building that was last renovated in 1985. There are 160 apartments and one elevator. The building is located at 204th St. and Broadway in the Inwood section of Manhattan, New York. The ground floor includes a number of small merchants : a taxi insurance company, several hair and nail salons, a tailor, and a deli. The value of the apartment is estimated at $712K with a monthly rent of $2,700. 1011 Barrett Ave., Chula Vista, CA 91911: In the post-WWII era this area was a middle-class trailer park in an industrial area in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, CA. The trailer on this lot was a 40 foot long by 10 foot wide trailer with a small living area, a dining area and kitchen, a bath and one bedroom. Estimated value was $10K. Today the entire area has been redeveloped and this address includes a 1,050 square foot single family house with 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths. The home has an estimated value of $382K and rental potential of $2,000 per month.My “Diplomacy Centers” Over the last fifty years my Dip Center has evolved from a single desk in my bedroom; to a front porch in a beach cottage; to a wall of a small living room; to a dedicated –to-Dip former bedroom; to a bedroom and a two-story garage; to a house with an office devoted to Dip affairs, a communications center, and a garage and a half archives. Then the down-sizing began with a move to into a large, 1,600 square foot mobile home with a family room, small bedroom, and sun room all devoted to Diplomacy, the down-sizing continued when I moved into a mid-sized condo where one bedroom and a large garage were devoted to Diplomacy. When I left there I also managed to dump nearly 130 boxes of Diplomacy Archives which went through a variety of hands (including Edi Birsan’s) and are now in the care of Doug Kent with an online version out there in etherland. Today my remaining “stuff” fills a bedroom and a single-car garage and part of a patio holding approximately 100 boxes of Diplomacy-related “stuff.” This was “my first place.” I lived in half of the ground floor in a 400 square apartment for a year in 1970. After years of living in various apartments I finally moved into a house (worth $13.5K in 1947, $460K today) This was “the family home” and Mike and I lived in it from 1988 – 2002. I sold it at a peak point in local estate prices. I only had 2 weeks to move and I found the above-mentioned mobile home in Santee, an eastern suburb of San Diego. I paid $45K for an almost-new mobile home, lived in it a year, and flipped it, selling it for $90K ($202K in 2002, $317K today) After selling the mobile home because of its location, I moved into this condo project located in La Costa, an up-scale coastal area north of San Diego. Noisy neighbors drove me out - $70K in 1987, $247K today. Finally, I ended-up in this 55+ community of some 800 homes on the coast in the far north of San Diego. I’ve been here for over ten years. I mention all this not because you’re interested in Diplomatic Monopoly (a game I invented in the early 1970s, by the way) but to illustrate the trials and tribulations of collecting a lot of “Diplomacy stuff.” From a few boxes in the early 1970s to two moving vans full (one just for the boards and bricks to hold all that paper) in 2002; I had collected some 7 tons of Diplomacy related “stuff.” Today I’m down to 1.5 tons and still down-sizing. Diplomacy at the Foreign Ministry or the State Department Now, imagine if you were a real Foreign Minister or Secretary of State? What kind of Diplomacy Center do you have or would you have? France Let’s begin where the Art of Diplomacy was perfected, France. At the moment there is only one museum in the world devoted to diplomacy: the so-called Museum of Diplomacy in Paris, which is actually the “treaty room” in the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’orsay where the originals or copies of all of France’s international agreements are kept. Normally the room is used for meetings of one kind or another. It’s located in the French Foreign Ministry and, as I learned the hard way, even the security guards at the front entrance of the building don’t know what or where the “Museum of Diplomacy” is, although if you call it the “treaty room” they will know what you mean. The main French Diplomatic Archives isn’t even in Paris, it’s in Nantes is a large, modern office building that I suspect is a back-up facility to the Quai d’Orsay. Nantes is where all diplomatic materials from overseas are stored. In addition, there’s even a separate Diplomatic Archives in Colmar devoted to records from the French occupation of part of Germany after World War II. England In London, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) is located on King Charles Street. If you’ve ever visited the War Cabinet underground offices of Winston Churchill it was the large building on your left as you entered. The building’s design reminds me of that of the US State Department in Washington, although the construction is very different. Note the lack of photos and other information about the interior of the building. Whether that’s for security reasons or because they don’t want the commoners to see how palatial it is; I don’t know. China In Beijing the Foreign Affairs Ministry building contains some 1,300,000 square feet of space in a 1990s concave shaped building that could easily be mistaken for a high-rise hotel. The Hall for Negotiation The Hall for Negotiation sits on the ground floor. As its name goes, the hall is a place for diplomatic talks and the activities of the like. On the front wall of the hall, hangs a huge Chinese painting "the Beautiful Scenery of Yangshou, a work by the late well-known painter Li Keran.
Russia In Moscow the Foreign Ministry is located in its own 27-story high-rise building in the Arbat section of the city. The building is one of the “seven sisters” that Stalin had built in the post-WWII years. The exterior does, sort of, look like a wedding cake, a common element to all seven buildings. The interior, according to reports, is done in rich woods and quality stonework. The building contains 650,000 square feet, 200 offices, and 28 elevators, but many additions over the years have enlarged the building considerably. USA By contrast the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC is 8 stories high, was built just prior to the start of WWII in a quasi-modern style, and was originally intended to be the War Department, but it was too small for that so the Pentagon was built for the military and the State Department moved into Foggy Bottom, as the Truman Building is known because of its location. The building contains 1,400,000 square feet (and growing), eight floors, 43 elevators, and thousands of offices. It has been expanded and up-graded over the past number of years. The situation in Washington, DC is much the same as it is in other world capitals, only more so. The Harry S. Truman State Department Building contains an impressive suite of formal diplomatic reception rooms available for formal events, VIP events, banquets, etc. They are quite palatial and very historical; and well they should be since they contain several hundreds of millions of dollars of priceless American historical and artistic memorabilia --- including the most lavish public rest rooms in Washington according to some. These eighth floor rooms were added in 1985. Down the hall is the Secretary of State’s working office and his or her “crisis management operations center.” . The Secretary of State’s personal working office, right next door, looked like what you’d expect a SVP of a mid-sized bank to have. These are located on the building’s seventh floor. In addition, the State Department Building’s seventh floor contains a dedicated Treaty Room right next to the Secretary of State’s Ceremonial Office; which looked hardly used when I was there years ago. A review of the Secretary of State’s schedule shows these two rooms are used for ceremonial visits and meetings with lesser figures. From the pictures it looks like a perfect place for a DipCon, don’t you think? The Truman Building is currently being renovated under a 12-year plan to modernize the structure. In May 2014, the General Services Administration (GSA) awarded a $25 million contract to build a new public entrance on the east side of the Truman Building. The glass and steel structure will act not only as a high-security entrance to the building but also as a museum about American diplomacy. The 20,000-square-foot (1,900 m2) addition, called the U.S. Diplomacy Center, was designed by the firm Beyer Binder Belle, and is being constructed by Gilbane Construction. The addition is being privately funded by the Diplomacy Center Foundation, a nonprofit established by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 to honor American diplomats. The National Capital Planning Commission approved the design in 2011. Construction should be complete in 2016. Something like this is what the Diplomacy needs, I think; preferably outside Washington, D.C. Perhaps Truth or Consequences, NM? If things get too hot to handle in Foggy Bottom the Secretary of State and his senior staff also have a bunker type facility located in, would you believe it, a near-by “tilt-up” office-industrial park; a suite at the FEMA Mt. Weather complex, an underground alternative national command center suite at Site R, and probably more rabbit holes in the Camp David Compound. And you can be sure that every foreign minister or secretary in the world of any importance has a somewhat similar set-up. However, these are all “working” facilities where diplomats do their jobs. War Museums “There are over 400 museums in this country that commemorate the achievements of our armed forces—but not one devoted to American diplomacy.” And the situation isn’t much better world-wide. Around the world there are hundreds if not thousands of museums devoted to the achievements of armed forces and the number goes into the thousands if we add memorials; and into the tens of thousands if we add military cemeteries. I know, I’ve visited a lot of them over the years. Even travel guru Rick Steve’s has realized that military museums are popular with travelers. One of his shows includes some of the major military museums in Europe. I’ve added a few more I’ve enjoyed but there are many, many more to be seen. In fact, I can’t think of a country that doesn’t have a military museum of some kind. Even San Marino has a display of crossbows!
Oddities My original purpose in this article was to write about museums devoted to diplomacy, but the selection was limited, so I expanded it to include “Dip Caves” and War Museums that feature materials that might be of interest to Diplomacy players or at least students of World War I. The Elliott Avedon Museum and Archives of Games Mr. Avedon donated his large collection of games and gaming materials to the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada in 1971. In 1993 the University established a website devoted to the collection which includes a page on Diplomacy. In 2009 the physical collection was transferred to the Canadian Museum of History in Hull, across the river from Ottawa.
The Tekniskamuseet The Tekniskamuseet in Stockholm, Sweden is very definitely a hands-on museum designed for kids and the young at heart; and includes both board games and computer games of all kinds. Many of the Swedish hobby’s Diplomacy players have donated their zine collections to the museum over the years. The collection includes a vast number of publications dating back to the First Golden Age of Diplomacy. Museum of Diplomatic Corps This unusual two-room museum in Vologda, Russia chronicles a little-known blip in World War I history. In February 1918, with the Germans approaching Petrograd (formerly and subsequently Saint Petersburg), Allied ambassadors were ordered to evacuate. US ambassador David Francis suggested simply relocating. Studying a map, he chose Vologda. Other embassies followed his lead, with the French, Italian and Serbian ministries sharing a luxury rail carriage parked in Vologda station. That proved handy given that, come July, all the embassies decamped again to Arkhangelsk. The eclectic and impressively researched exhibit has some notes in English and is housed in the former US embassy, a tired if once-grand timber house. Unfortunately, the links to the Museum’s site don’t work and I fear it may have closed. If anybody gets to Vologda, Russia, please check it out and let me know. Conlusion And there you have it: a romp through some Dippers’ “Dip Caves,” a look at the places were real dippers ply their wares, a look at what happens when diplomacy fails and a couple of places that belong here but just don’t fit. Oh, the four Dippers whose “Dip Caves” featured were John Boardman, Robert Sacks, Hal Naus and myself. I looked at a lot of others from the hobby’s First Golden Age but either the hobbyist or the “Dip Cave” have disappeared.
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