Several months ago my daughter, knowing I'm perpetually poised somewhere between eager and desperate for story ideas, suggested I do a piece about the Washington Square Arch. She'd heard there was a room inside the arch and thought it might make an interesting article.

I don't think I laughed in her face and told her she was a damn fool—I come from that generation of parenting, unlike my own parents, that believes our children are so emotionally fragile they need relentless moral and intellectual support, lest they break into a million little pieces—or maybe I did laugh in her face, because I thought the idea too ridiculous to pursue.

I'd visited Washington Square dozens of times (indeed, one of my favorite warm-weather pastimes, when I'm not spending the evening in Central Park with a good friend and a well-disguised bottle of elixir, is to do the same on a series of benches on the eastern side of Washington Square Park; its interminable landscape renovation last summer put a decided crimp in my style) and never noticed any door in the arch.

But Friday morning I indeed found myself inside the arch, and not just inside it, having entered through a small side door in the arch's western leg, but climbing a 102-step spiral staircase toward its summit. My guide was John Krawchuk, the New York City Parks Department's director of historic preservation, and the project manager for the arch's 1997-98 and 2001-04 renovations. Mr. Krawchuk preferred to play down the Parks Department's herculean efforts to cleanse the structure of graffiti, and its success at keeping it off using anti-graffiti coating, for fear that spotlighting their exertions might tempt vandals to deface it afresh.

"We want to be a little careful," he said. "We don't want people to say, 'Let's go tag the arch!'" But I'm reasonably confident that the intersection of folks with a passion for defiling public property and readers of this page is relatively small, and I think the city deserves applause for successfully removing the crap (and perhaps kudos also should go to the general populace for resisting the urge to deface it anew). As goes the Washington Square Arch (which, Mr. Krawchuk cautioned me, is officially known as "the Washington Arch"), so goes the city. "The messages were fascinating as we were taking off layers of paint," he recalled, referring to the graffiti removal, as we ascended the claustrophobic staircase. "Vietnam-era stuff."