Alexandria

Today we felt like doing something a little different so we decided to travel outside of the district. We went down to the metro and grabbed a train to Alexandria. We really had not planned this out carefully, and we were thinking that we could combine this with a visit to Mount Vernon. We had read that there were boat cruises on the Potomac and some firm that allowed you to bike down to Mount Vernon and catch the boat back. 

It was a long subway ride and from the King Street Station we took one of those tacky motorized cable cars into the center of the Old Town area. Neither of us was taken with Alexandria at first. To me it looked like Georgetown … but with tee shirt and fudge shops. Things did not get better when we discovered that the river cruises do not start until next month and the firm that offered the combination bike and boat adventure had gone out of business. We could get a bike and ride down to Mount Vernon, but John was not up for 20 miles of bike riding, particularly with rain predicted for late afternoon. So we did what we always do in stressful situations like this. We had lunch. 

While having our meal at a reasonably good faux roadhouse. And while we were there, overhearing the legal gossip from the nearby tables, everyone one of which seemed to be populated with lawyers, John discovered that the City of Alexandria had a podcast tour of historic sites. We downloaded it and we were off to make the best of a lovely day. We discovered some almost hidden parks

and cobblestone streets. 

There were lots of interesting sites, but Christ Church was highlight.

We shared out visit with a large school group. 

And the reason we were all there was to sit in George Washington’s pew. 

We caught Uber back to the district because we knew if we took Metro we would never have time for a final museum visit and I wanted to go to the Smithsonian Museum of American History. 

In retrospect, maybe we should have skipped the museum. There were a few interesting exhibits, but the place was packed with obnoxious school groups, mostly comprised of middle school children. They all seemed to be wearing tee shirt specially designed for the class trip executed in shades on green and orange normally reserved for highway workers or convicts. By the time the wretched adolescents had cleared out and we started to be able to actually see the objects on display, the museum was closing. 

It was also raining by this time and so we just went back to the hotel. 

American Art and Life

Today we decided that we wanted to explore two of the Smithsonian’s less crowded museums, the Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery. This proved to be good choices. We we immediately taken with the first exhibit we saw, paintings from the Depression era. This was one of Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod pictures. 

Then we found two wonderful paintings of California we had never seen before. This one shows tenements at the base of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. 

And this one needs no particular explanation.

How had these failed to show up in California history texts?

Another fantastic exhibit was the collection of folk art there. We were immediately struck by this wonderful piece using bottle caps. It gave John an opportunity for a particularly artistic selfie. 

The real jewel of this collection is James Hampton’s extraordinary sculpture, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millenium General Assembly. He spent twenty years or more creating this in his garage where it was discovered only after his death. 

The National Portrait Gallery is joined to the American Art museum. The courtyard between the buildings was covered over with this stunning ceiling by the famous British artist Norman Foster. 

We took a tour here. The guide, a former federal lawyer, was decent enough, but he was more interested in giving us information about the historical figures than in the artistic creativity behind them. So we saw lots of pictures of presidents and heard a good number of stories that I already knew about them. Only the pictures of John Kennedy by Elaine de Kooning were interesting as art, and we were strictly forbidden to take pictures of them as all were on loan from private collectors. 

After the tour, we went off to explore on our own. The upper floor of the museum has some portraits of modern and somewhat unexpected people like filmmaker John Waters. 

The portraits are taken as well from popular sources like Time magazine covers or record jackets. 

After several hours of looking at art we were tired and hungry. We went to nearby Chinatown to look for something to eat. We had some good, if overpriced, dim sum. 

It was about five at this point, and all the museums were all about to close. So we decided to head down to the mall and to look at the monuments there. After a fairly long bus ride, we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial. While the steps and the interior were crowded, the rear of the monument provide me with this opportunity for my own moment of Edward Hopper inspired isolation.

John and Abe seemed to be staging a battle of the chins. 

The Washington Monument, probably the most iconic structure in the District, was not reflected in its usual reflecting pool. We figured that maybe this was drained for the winter. 

Not far from the Lincoln Memorial is the Vietnam War Memorial. The last time we were there this was new and it was moving to see people coming there for the first time. Today it seemed to be just another stop on the middle school field trip circuit. 

We were more drawn to the Korean War Memorial, not because it was as artistically satisfying at Maya LIn’s masterpiece, but simply because we had never seen it before. Somehow the pictures of the monument seemed to work better in black and white than in color. 

 

Our final stop of the evening was Ford’s Theater. We figured that we wanted to visit here particularly as we are almost at the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. John is standing here right next to the box, almost completely unchanged from that fateful evening of April 12, 1865.

 

Although there are tours available of the theater, we wanted to see it used as a theater. That also meant that we would probably NOT have to deal with school groups. That evening was a performance of Freedom’s Song, a musical mixing songs from an earlier Broadway show by the composer of Jekyll and Hyde with words by Lincoln himself. It was not exactly the most riveting 90 minutes of theater I have seen, but it was relatively well-done. 

 

 

We took the subway back to DuPont Circle and then walked back to our hotel The Taft Bridge Inn. 

 

Sunday, Cold and Clear

Today was our last day in Georgetown. John and I will remain in Washington for a couple more days, but Ellen and Mike returned to Charlottesville. Today was also Palm Sunday. I decided that I would go to Mass today as I usually do. I left the rest of the group to finish cleaning up and packing up while I walked down along Rock Creek to Saint Paul’s Parish on K Street in Foggy Bottom. I met up with members of the parish in Washington Circle. They were having a joint Palm Sunday procession with the members of Saint Stephen’s Roman Catholic church.

There was a good brass quartet to accompany the singing. 

Because we stopped first at the other parish, it was a particularly long procession and it took us a full six hymns to get into the church. The service was moving and the music was good, if not quite as superb as my home parish. I met some some people there, and I think if I were a resident of the District this might likely be my church community.

On my way to the Foggy Bottom/GWU metro station I admired some of the lovely townhouses in the area. I suppose these were once fairly modest homes, but they must sell for a small fortune now.

NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

While I was at Mass, the rest of the group packed up and went to the Natural History Museum. Apparently this was so crowded they could barely stand it. But they did see the Hope Diamond

and this peculiarly-shaped piece of Pyrite. 

 

I met up with the rest of the group as outside the museum. There was this rather startling protest going on outside, but there always seems to be some group protesting something in Washington. 

Inside the National Gallery we saw some pictures by John’s dad’s favorite artist

as well as by some of his own.

Outside the museum was this remarkable piece of sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein. The house is actually concave, but the lines the proportions trick the eye into thinking it is convex. 

On our way back to the parking garage John was able to indulge his passion for 1930’s neorealism. 

We met some old friends of Ellen’s for dinner. It was a lovely meal even if this picture is not flattering to anybody present at the table. 

We are staying for the next three nights at the Taft Bridge Inn in the Kalorama area north of DuPont Circle. It is a lovely old mansion that has been transformed into a bed and breakfast. 

Arctic Georgetown

Our second day in Georgetown started remarkably bright and early. John had made arrangement for us to have breakfast at the Tabard Inn, supposedly the most trendy spot in Dupont Circle for breakfast. 

What this picture doesn’t show that well is just how cold it was! The temperature was hovering just about freezing, and there was a sharp wind that plunged the temperature significantly lower. 

We drove over to breakfast. It was decent, but nothing particularly astonishing. After that John, had planned out a walking tour of Georgetown for us. We drove and parked on the waterfront there. But as the wind whipped particularly hard in our faces everybody agreed that is was far too cold for walking.  We had to do something inside. Our first choice was the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian’s museum of furniture and decorative arts. Unfortunately, we figured out when we were looking up the address that it is currently closed for major renovations. So we decided that our second choice would be the National Building Museum. 

Housed in the former Pension Building, the National Building Museum is not public or part of the Smithsonian Institution. When we entered the building, the docents told us that a free tour of the building was about to begin. We had an informative tour guide who explained all about the history of the the Pension Building. Designed by General Montgomery C. Meigs, it was designed to provide a central and accessible location for the government office that paid Civil War pensions to injured soldiers and their widows. As there were nearly a million of these after the war, a staggering percentage of the population of the country in those days, there needed to be a large structure for the records and the clerks. Meigs created not only one of the largest buildings in the world at that time, but also ingeniously designed cutting edge ventilation and cooling systems for it. 

Entrance to this cavernous structure is free, but you have to buy a ticket to get into any of the many exhibits housed there. This was not particularly expensive, and many of the exhibits were really quite fascinating. There were exhibits on the different ways to build houses, on designing against natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes. There was another on historic preservation and it had pieces of now lost buildings like the one below. 

Still, the building itself is sort of the most interesting thing there.

We had a bit of lunch for the people before we left. Our next stop was the Tudor Place mansion back in Georgetown. This is certainly a historic estate, though not that interesting otherwise. It was originally the home of Thomas Peter and his wife, Martha Parke Custis Peter, a granddaughter of Martha Washington. Because of this connection, there are a few pieces of furniture and china that were originally at Mount Vernon. But it was never more than a sort of squire’s residence. 

Originally the estate sloped down to the Potomac where tobacco and other farm products were shipped down to other states and Europe. 

The interior is just like it was when the last owner died in 1983. It’s a hodge-podge of furniture from various periods. Not much of it is particularly good although the guides pointed out how the different pieces illustrated the history of the country. 

We walked home. It got even colder as the evening progressed!

In the evening went to 1789 restaurant. It was quite good but very expensive. We then went to jazz club to see Kevin Eubanks, the former music director for Jay Leno. It was that kind of jazz - I suppose it’s fusion - where there’s little evidence of any particular melody, just a great deal of sort of contrapuntal flow of notes. I did not dislike it, but I found it somewhat less than engaging.  

Things Found and Lost

John and I left Los Angeles Thursday night, not long after Open House was over. We flew United to Dulles, and arrived a few minutes on either side of six o’clock in the morning. We peered out through the windows of the Eero Saarinen terminal at a cold, gray, drizzly day. We had some coffee in a restaurant in the terminal, and then picked up our luggage. Determined to avoid an overpriced taxi ride into the District, John jumped aboard a random hotel shuttle bus. It took us a few miles away to a Hilton. We had uninspiring but filling breakfast there and then called an Uber to take us to Washington. 

After a long ride, we arrived at our townhouse. We are staying at a small house in the east village area of Georgetown that we found on VRBO. We decided to rent this instead of a hotel room because we were meeting Ellen and Mike here for a few days and it seemed a little more fun than two hotel rooms. It took quite a bit of work to get the lockbox to open, but finally found the key to the door. Not long after we arrived, however, so did the man who was supposed to clean the place for us. So, we let him into the house and took off for the DuPont Circle Metro stop. John decided to put the key in his wallet where he knew it would be safe. In retrospect, we wish we had put it back in the lock box. 

Our first destination, this morning, was Capitol Hill. But John had less interest in seeing the House and the Senate than in returning to the Library of Congress, a building that we had only briefly glimpsed at our last visit to Washington in 1986.

On that visit, we had only briefly walked into the building, knowing nothing about it, to be stunned by its ornate interior. This time John was determined to learn more about it. The information desk ladies cheerfully told us that a tour was about to begin, and we joined a large group watching a movie about the library. After the film, which had different people repeating the phrase “It’s your library” over and over again, ended, we were split into several groups. John and I were assigned to an older white man, and I’m glad we were. He was an excellent guide. A former English professor from Dartmouth, he was not only a wealth of information about the library and its building but was also incredibly entertaining. 

Most of our tour focused on the astonishingly ornate lobby. Our guide pointed out how this was a consciously triumphal statement by a confident new industrial power. It quite consciously borrows - pillages might be a more accurate term - from almost every style of art and architecture in European history and forges a new hybrid style out of them. In that sense, it is the architectural answer to the much-maligned melting pot. 

The other glorious portion of the library is its reading room. This is off-limits to tours, though visitors can been into it from behind a thick plexiglass wall. 

After the tour, we were both feeling our lack of sleep, so we asked the helpful women at the information desk about a nearby place to have coffee. They told us that they all liked a tiny little shop in the basement of the library complex. We went down a flight of stair and took a long walk through the winding basement corridors. This seemed like an area that should be off-limits to visitors, but nobody stopped us and we finally did find this little shop.

On our way over to the Capitol, we stopped by the Folger Shakespeare Library. As a high school student, I had always read my Shakespeare from Folger library editions, so it was a natural for us to stop there. We looked at the first editions

and its Elizabethan theater, the first of its kind in the United States. 

We walked passed the Supreme Court, but it hardly seemed worth going on the tour there for such a dull 1930’s structure. 

We finally made it over to the Capitol. There were some some changes since last time we were here twenty nine years ago. One obvious one is the repair work on the dome. The scaffolding will be us there for a couple more years while they repair the many cracks in the cast iron. A more important change is that you just walk in any more like we did before. There is a large underground visitor center and you have to be taken into the building by certified tour guides. I suppose this is a response to the September 11 attacks, but it seems like unnecessary security theater.

Also we were now forbidden from taking any kind of picture on the tour now as if a few selfies were somehow a threat to national security. Our tour guide was a personable young man who reminded me a lot of the character of Kenneth on Thirty Rock. 

During this tour, we discovered that John had lost the house key. We retraced all of our footsteps to see if we had dropped it while entering any of the various security points of the different public buildings. We finally texted owner who agreed to come by and get us a new key. But by this time John’s phone was completely dead. John figured that Union Station would probably be a good place to find a charger. He proved to be right, and in fact the helpful Indian lady offered to allow it to charge at her shop. So, we went to the lobby - covered, of course, in scaffolding - a mediocre meal there. We then caught subway back to DuPont Circle. Ellen and Mike arrived not long after.