A Capital Tour

A Capital Tour
Part 16

Another great Washington institution is the Hay-Adams Hotel. John Hay started out his government career as a 22-year old secretary to President Abraham Lincoln, and completed his service to the government more than 40 years later as secretary of state. At first I thought maybe he just couldn’t move up the ladder, but then someone told me that those two secretary positions weren’t really identical to each other. Henry Adams was a novelist, historian, and journalist, and was descended from John Adams, our second president.

Hay and Adams had beautiful homes next door to each other on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, back at the turn of the twentieth century. After they had both passed away, a hotel was erected on this site, and it was called the Hay-Adams Hotel in their honor. I don’t know how it was decided which of the individuals would be first in the hotel’s name, and which would be second. It obviously was not done in alphabetical order.

Here’s the exterior of the beautiful hotel, first from a distance in its early days (it was built in 1927), and and then closer up at the present time – you can see that a more grandiose entrance has been added:

http://www.gasolinealleyantiques.com.../mayadams1.jpg

http://www.hotelsoftherichandfamous....el-default.jpg

And here’s the view from the hotel’s rooftop terrace:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2135/...bdedb8b2_o.jpg

And the lobby:

http://images.johansens.com/cgi-bin/...1970_91532.jpg

A dining room:

http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI...k_182-3527.jpg

The Woodrow Wilson House is where our 28th president lived after his days in the White House, and it’s been preserved exactly as it was when he was still living there. Here’s a view of the house’s exterior:

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/woo...lson-house.jpg

And one of the living room:

http://www.preservationnation.org/as...n/WW-200ss.jpg

I can’t find too many other individual interior shots, but having toured the house, I know that there’s a lot worth seeing here. If you check out the House’s own website, it has lots of great pictures of the interior, along with explanations. Start with About Woodrow Wilson House and then go straight to Tour Preview at the following site:

http://www.woodrowwilsonhouse.org/

One of the primary features in Wilson’s kitchen is the wood-burning stove, which was found intact and in excellent condition, down in the basement, when the National Trust for Historical Preservation took over the house and spruced it up to give tours. For some reason, there are no pictures of the stove at the House’s site, nor is it even mentioned. But I can assure you that it is quite impressive.

At the time of writing this, The History Channel was filming a program on how presidential personal relationships have affected their administrations. The segment filmed at Wilson House is scheduled to air sometime before November 2008.

Decatur House is one of the oldest houses still standing in Washington. It was built in 1818 for Stephen Decatur, a hero of the U. S. Navy in their campaign against the Barbary pirates. These were the bad guys who were always capturing our merchant ships when they were operating in the Mediterranean, and then asking us for ‘ransom’ money to get the ships back unharmed. So Decatur led the effort to put a stop to that practice, and he was rewarded with a beautiful home near the White House, just across Lafayette Square from the presidential residence.

It’s a modest looking house, both inside and outside, but remember that it’s pretty old. It is kept in top-notch condition:

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/dec...hington-dc.jpg

The upstairs parlor:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2149/...d07946.jpg?v=0

I wish I could find a larger image of this beautiful sitting room:

http://www.eventsolution.com/images/wasdecatur.jpg

And of this hallway:

http://wedding.belfar.com/images/decatur_house.gif

Here’s the official website of Decatur House, where you can check out other interesting things, such as the recently-opened section of the house that was used as slave quarters:

http://www.decaturhouse.org/

Saint John’s Episcopal Church is also situated across Lafayette Square from the White House and continues to function as a church, which it has done since 1816. Abraham Lincoln used to attend services here when he was praying for a speedy end to the Civil War, as did all the other non-Jewish presidents:

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/st-...hington-dc.jpg

The sign out front which welcomes new worshipers:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...(89416949).jpg

The church is quite attractive inside, but I can’t find any interior photos on the internet.

Dupont Circle is home to one of the best concentrations in the city of private mansions dating from the turn of the twentieth century.

The Heurich Mansion was completed in 1894, the home of a beer magnate.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3256/...g?v=1212984679

http://www.victoriansociety.org/imag...rich house.gif

It is being preserved as a museum, through which tourists frequently pass, and some even rent the place out for special events.

Here’s the museum’s website, which gives additional information:

http://www.heurichhouse.org/

The next episode will be a visit to the Pentagon, the old Carnegie Library, and Washington Nationals Stadium, the home of our major league baseball team.

A Capital Tour
Part 17

No visit to the nation’s capital would be complete without at least a quick stopover at the Pentagon, which I believe is still the world’s largest office building. During the 2008 Olympics broadcasts, discussion was made of a building under construction in Beijing which sounded like it would be larger, but it’s not finished yet. There are 23,000 employees working at the Pentagon, and there are 3.7 million square feet of office space. Planning began in July, 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor, and construction was completed in 1943, while World War II was still raging.

Here’s what the Pentagon looks like from the air – and it’s just four blocks from the apartment building where the nice lady and I live. It’s actually in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington proper.

http://www.triviaqueen.com/images/pentagon.gif

There was a singles square dance club – called the Bachelors and Bachelorettes – that used to dance in the concourse of the Pentagon every Thursday evening. Now if any of you think square dancing is some kind of childish activity like it was when you were forced to do it for a few days during your schooldays, you can stop snickering now. Square dancing today is very sophisticated and it’s taken very seriously by lots of folks, and there several levels of proficiency to which you can climb. You don’t climb very far unless you’re a pretty good dancer, and there are lots of fantastic dancers who are devoted to square dancing.

I used to go to the B&Bs, as we cleverly called this club so we didn’t have to use their entire name which took too long to say, as well as lots of other square dance clubs, but that’s another story for another day. However, with today’s security concerns being what they are as compared to what they used to be, there’s no more square dancing in the Pentagon, and the B&Bs have moved elsewhere.

The Carnegie Library was a favorite of mine back in the late 1960s – I was here for a Navy assignment from 1967-69, when the building was still a library. Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3090/...165a17.jpg?v=0

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3008/...6fbe04.jpg?v=0

However, this building closed in the early ‘70s, being replaced by the more modern Martin Luther King Library. By now you have a sense for how I feel about modern buildings replacing classical ones, so you won’t be expecting any pictures of the modern library. The Carnegie Library is now being used as the headquarters of the Historical Society of Washington, which keeps a small library in addition to a museum operating, but it is expensive to maintain the building, so it’s not certain how long this society can afford to stay there.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._museum_dc.jpg

Our Washington Nationals major league baseball team has been playing here since 2005, and I even wrote a story that took place in the team’s first home, RFK Stadium which was named for Robert Francis Kennedy. You probably don’t even remember that story, which was called My Baseball Scorecard, because it had so many diversions that had absolutely nothing to do with baseball – things like Hebrew National hotdogs and the lucky New Jersey quarter that I found at the park – that you probably gave up and quit reading it. Well, since that story was written during the Nationals’ first year back in Washington, the team has gotten a new home to replace RFK Stadium, which was about 45 years old and not really well-suited for baseball.

I was afraid that the Nationals were going to wind up with some strange name like Avodart Field or Viagra Park, just to stay in line with the current trend of naming a sports arena for some obnoxious product. But so far, it’s just called Washington Nationals Park, and I hope we can keep it that way for a long time.

Here’s what it looks like from above the field, but not too far away:

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/...8/IMG_7032.jpg

Here’s a more distant perspective, so you can see more of the stadium’s outer walls. Notice in this view that the curly W we see in the stadium’s outfield grass is identical to the one we saw over the Lincoln Memorial Bridge in one of the early episodes of this story:

http://www.extrememortman.com/wp-con...ls Stadium.jpg

And they don’t just have baseball games here. Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States in April, 2008, and when he came to Washington, he celebrated a mass at the Nationals Ballpark with 46,000 people in attendance. We rarely get as many as 30,000 fans to come to the baseball games in this park, so I hope the Pope knows he outdrew the team.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/200...AP_800x522.jpg

You might have noticed a small part of the Capitol Dome in the previous picture, out beyond the left field wall, but it’s partially hidden by some building under construction. I guess that there will be no monuments visible from the park, in a city chock full of monuments, when the building that now partially obscures the dome is finished, and the building then totally obscures the dome.

As a slight aside, on a related topic, we’re going to take a quick view of the Bromo Selzer Tower that used to hover over Baltimore’s Camden Yards in a beautiful backdrop. Here’s the tower as shown in a very old postcard:

http://blogs.nationaltrust.org/prese...8/02/bromo.jpg

For many years at Camden Yards in Baltimore you could see the tower out beyond the left field fence:

http://mcgonnigle.files.wordpress.co...07/cybromo.jpg

However, if you noticed all that empty ground between the ballpark and the tower in the picture above, you’ll be glad to know that they have now completed construction on a new high-rise hotel on that empty ground, so that the empty ground wouldn’t go to waste. Now you can’t even see the Bromo Selzer Tower anymore. What you can see is some sleazy hotel that’s all glass and steel, and which somehow doesn’t have the same cachè as the old tower.

Now let’s get back to Nationals Park. Here’s an in-progress view of the Presidents’ Race, which takes place at every home game. I hope you can identify these presidents, but if you can’t, we’ll go over them individually.

http://www.mentalfloss.com/wp-conten...nts-racing.jpg

Here they are on the South Lawn of the White House, right after the Easter Egg Roll. I’m sure you remember in the White House discussion that I mentioned the nice lady and I were excluded from the Easter Egg Roll because we didn’t make the age cutoff. Well, these guys are even older than we are, so I don’t know why they are allowed to roll Easter eggs. They are, from left to right in the picture BELOW: George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...-0093-384h.jpg

Teddy Roosevelt has never won a single race since the team’s inception in 2005. I don’t know when he is expected to win one, nor do I know of any particular reason for his failure to win thus far.

The next episode will be two side trips, one to Mount Vernon (George Washington’s home) and another to Monticello (Thomas Jefferson’s home). Neither of these is in Washington, DC, but they aren’t all that far away either.

What makes this thread so special are the funny comments
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A Capital Tour
Part 18

George Washington’s mansion was called Mount Vernon, on the Potomac River and just a few minutes from where the nice lady and I live. It’s still a popular site for visitors today. The entire estate was 8,000 acres when Washington still lived there and worked the place as a farm. Now it’s a lot less.

Here’s what the Mansion looks like from the front:

http://postcardwars.files.wordpress....t-vernon-2.jpg

And here’s the view of the Eastern Façade (a fancy way of saying the back), as seen from the Potomac:

http://www.visitingdc.com/images/mou...on-picture.jpg

A very nice and maybe too colorful dining room, which you can see better in the virtual tour I’ll point out later:

http://intelligenttravel.typepad.com...unt_vernon.jpg

There are lots of other great rooms in the mansion, but it’s best to view them all in the virtual tour.

Both George and Martha Washington are buried here. First, here’s a painting of the Prince of Wales and President Buchanan visiting the tomb in 1860 – the painting is from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (remember that this museum shares the building with the National Portrait Gallery that we visited in Part 9). The painting has a title that’s a few lines long, but it depicts a visit by the Prince of Wales, President Buchanan, and various dignitaries.

http://americanart.si.edu/images/1906/1906.9.18_1a.jpg

And here’s what the tomb looks like today, which is the same but without the Prince of Wales and all the others:

http://z.about.com/d/dc/1/0/v/3/gwtomb.jpg

You can get a little more info, if you want, on the above painting at this site of the American Art Museum, listed below. It’s pretty interesting – I think – especially the part about Washington’s head in the clouds. Besides, I feel guilty about skipping over the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and this in a way will atone for that.

http://eyelevel.si.edu/2006/08/george_washingt.html

If you want to check out the entire mansion, you can get a virtual tour that’s almost like actually being there. But check out the Virtual Tour Instructions (lower right corner) before you start, so you’ll know what you’re doing. Don’t assume you can figure it out on the fly. For example, when you’re in the large dining room on the first floor, there are a number of buttons you can click to see detailed features of the room. Ditto for other rooms. It’s also important to know how to move from room to room, and from floor to floor:

http://www.mountvernon.org/virtual/index.cfm/ss/29/

And here’s what’s called the Mansion House Farm virtual tour, for which you can check out separately such things as the stables, the coachouse, the smokehouse, slaves quarters, and lots of other things listed on the LEFT side of your screen:

http://www.mountvernon.org/learn/explore_mv/index.cfm/

The Mount Vernon official website has lots more than I could ever tell you, including a movie about the estate:

http://www.mountvernon.org/

And as long as we’re doing the President’s homes, we should also cover Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson lived. Now don’t worry – we’re not going to do the homes of all the presidents because there are 43 of them, and you would get very tired after about 20 or so.

The front of the mansion is patterned after the building that is on our old nickels. Here’s what it looks like today:

http://www.artfuldiner.com/monticello.jpg

And here’s what it looked like back in Jefferson’s day:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Monticello.jpg

And here’s a nice view of the house today from afar highlighting the changing foliage around it:

http://www.monticello.org/gallery/ae...arlyspring.jpg

Some interior shots follow, but you’re better off checking out the virtual tour pointed out later.

Here’s the entrance hall, sporting antlers brought back by Lewis and Clark:

http://www.voyageofrediscovery.com/p...onticello2.jpg

And a few others:

http://www.richardsalinas.info/image...Interior_1.jpg

http://www.richardsalinas.info/image...Interior_2.jpg

http://www.caed.kent.edu//History/Ni...ticelloint.jpg

http://www.monticello.org/gallery/ho...or/tearoom.jpg

And the official website, which includes the Monticello Explorer, a virtual tour of everything there, if you have the time and the inclination to do some exploring on your own:

http://www.monticello.org/

The next episode will be another side trip, to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

A Capital Tour
Part 19

The city of Annapolis is the capital of Maryland, but I like it even more as the home of the U.S. Naval Academy. The nice lady and I visited the place not too long ago, and here’s a little bit of what we saw.

The core buildings were designed by Ernest Flagg, the same architect who designed the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Bancroft Hall is the dormitory which houses the entire Brigade of Midshipmen, which is about 4,400. It was built from 1901-06, starting with a central rotunda flanked by two wings in which the midshipmen lived. It has since been expanded to eight wings. Here’s the front of Bancroft Hall, viewed from a distance:

http://www.baltimorecontractors.com/bancroft.jpg

And a little closer:

http://www.usna.com/parents/alabama/...croft Hall.JPG

And part of the Rotunda, showing the staircase which goes up to Memorial Hall:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...tunda_View.JPG

A closer view of the staircase to Memorial Hall:

http://www.ericpageusmc.com/Photos/N...orial Hall.jpg

And high in the Rotunda, a painting of the battleship USS SOUTH DAKOTA (BB-57) of World War II vintage, shown in action:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...nda_Fresco.JPG

And the inner dome of the Rotunda:

http://www.ericpageusmc.com/Photos/N...my/Rotunda.jpg

Memorial Hall is at the top of the staircase we saw earlier, and is dedicated to the memory of all graduates who have given their lives in the line of duty.

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/...97fYn/610x.jpg

As you can see in that view above, the floor is ideal for dancing, and we also had our ballroom dancing lessons right here in Memorial Hall back in the 1960s, but I don’t know where they learn now.

Some of the names of the graduates we mentioned above, who gave their lives in the line of duty:

http://www.navytimes.com/xml/news/20...al_500_287.jpg

On November 27, 2007, Memorial Hall was the site of a conference between Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and several other Middle Eastern countries:

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/...4r4wh/610x.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/...TO8PD/610x.jpg

The academic building complex is centered on Mahan Hall, with its majestic clock tower.

http://www.goodyclancy.com/media/ima...1-Exterior.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2339/...1d7ce3.jpg?v=0

It was in the building just to the right of Mahan Hall that on November 22, 1963, I walked out of an afternoon economics class and was told that President Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas.

Mahan Hall housed an auditorium and the library during my earlier days – here’s the library’s reading room back then:

http://www.usna.edu/LibExhibits/Anni...ages/n1949.jpg

The library has since been modernized and moved to a place with more room, but I can’t find a picture of it. The auditorium is still used – just as it was back in the olden days.

When we came trudging back from classes to Bancroft Hall, here’s one of the red-bricked routes we could take:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Bancroft_1.JPG

And off to the right of this walk, sits the glorious Chapel:

http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x...-NA-chapel.jpg

Since I went to synagogue out in town, I only came into the Chapel as a visitor. The view up the aisle to the altar:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...emy_chapel.jpg

And a little closer to the altar:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_jMCwnFMIH6g/R0...c/DSC00195.JPG

And from the side:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._side_view.jpg

In the basement of the Chapel, we honor naval hero John Paul Jones, whose crypt is there:

http://weibel-lines.typepad.com/phot...2/img_0112.jpg

http://www.uss-rangerguy.com/images/...ul_Jones_1.JPG

Well, folks, we’ve reached the end of the tour - everybody out of the bus. And thanks for coming along.

THE END

I deleted this message which has been overtaken by events.