I have been in this city many times, but only for a day or two. This time we have had the luxury of being able to walk its neighborhoods. We also got senior pass cards for the Metro and enjoyed half price fares for the longer trips. The Capital YC is in the Washington Channel, which runs parallel to the Potomac behind the Jefferson Memorial.
Here are the Washington monument and to its left the White House, from the Jefferson monument. We did not visit these.
The entire waterfront area, over half a mile long, is the site of a massive construction project. The new Clubhouse should be quite nice when it is completed in the fall of 2017. This club has a large percentage of its members who live aboard. It is about a twenty minute walk to the Mall. We walked to Jefferson and saw his words on the interior. Too bad that Justice Scalia and others on our Supreme Court have never been here or observed what he wrote. They claim to seek to interpret our Constitution in accordance with the original intent of the founding fathers, but give that document a diametrically different twist from Jefferson.
We lucked out to be here on the 70th anniversary of VE Day to see this program
at the World War II memorial on the Mall, hear a few speeches, and then the big event.
Next were the Viet Nam War,
Lincoln, and Korean War Memorials before hiking up through a bit of Georgetown to the Metro
for a ride to a movie at the Angelica Pop Up, a branch of the movie house on Houston Street back home. These are large modern stations and some are as deeply below ground, it seemed to me, as the St. Petersberg Metro. All escalator access at the stations we visited. We saw "Welcome To Me", about a narcissist with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and spends the money producing, writing, directing, and starring in a TV show about her favorite person, herself. Sad but funny. This was in the NE section, at Union Market, which has an eclectic assortment of non-branded food stores. We shared an Indian dish from one and fish and chips from another.
We spent two mornings at the Newseum, a large museum built in this century about the news, journalism and first amendment freedoms. There is more to see in this place but we have only so many days. One drawback is that unlike most government sponsored museums, they charge a fee. Another is a bit of redundancy, caused by the fact that many of the sections are sponsored by private news businesses; so many included clips of the same significant events in their shows. This is actual sections of the Berlin Wall, from the perspective of newscasting about its fall.
One great small exhibit showed how the NY Herald reported on the assassination of President Lincoln through seven different issues it published the next day, as the story unfolded. The Newseum is located on Pennsylvania Avenue, and has a terrace with a great view of the Capital, though it's beautiful dome is encapsulated in scaffolding.
Bob and Maria, picked us up, brought us back and treated us to a delicious dinner at their large lovely home in what I call the NW suburbs, though it is located in the District. We caught up on each others' lives, our kids, our activities and our mutual friends. The friendship started in the summer of 1969, when I invited them and three others of my colleagues and their wives to the suburban home of my parents in NJ for a simple barbecue. We were summer clerking at Kaye Scholler. Bob and maria cooked up a very elegant barbecue for us.
John, who was so welcoming and helpful in Cambridge, Maryland last October during our voyage south, came and spent two days with us. Again he was helpful, and one of the two new hatch screens is installed except for the wooden batten (diagonal hole upper left), which is down to be cut with an electric jigsaw to fit the larger frame. But first comes a picture of the old frame on the starboard side.
The stbd frame can't be installed yet because the box came with one of the four tiny but essential corner connecting pieces wrong, the one on the right.
We visited the National Gallery of Art, donated with its contents by a Mellon between the wars. Like a smaller Met in NY but loaded with great art that I had never seen before. Our expert docent is teaching us about a large early Manet.
The Gallery has a city block with an outdoor sculpture garden.
We dined with John in a fine Indian restaurant near the waterfront, Masala Art, and in Chinatown, after having lunch in the Gallery's cafe.
More about DC in my next post.
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