Not Your Typical Watergate

It took me 45 minutes on the bus this morning to get to work because of some tie-up along H Street NW just before Chinatown, but it did give me time to look out the window and notice how the building height limitation in D.C. (less than 10-21 storeys?) means that the streets haven't become canyons and you don't get the sense of being in a "downtown" area. That is, since all the buildings for the several square miles of DC are about the same height, there is no concentration of sky-scrapers. By the way I love the french word for skyscrapers (les gratte-ciels). All the streets have the about the same height and the a rchitecture is quite varied. The Kennedy Center and the Watergate apartment buildings are examples of older styles of "modern" architecture subject to the same limitation and I snapped them together recently using the miracle of a cell phone camera.. However, now there's a lot more glass and modern buildings than when I first came to DC 25 years ago. There's still  lots of older brick and stone buildings and quite a few churches scattered about downtown but it's changing. Apparently, at one time, the churches were the tallest buildings in town! Chinatown is always interesting as that corner is looking more and more like New York City with the live video screens and huge crowds crossing the road and the general hurly-burly there. I do remember when that section of the city was quite run-down and bedraggled, that is, before they built Verizon (used to be MCI) Center and restored some of the buildings on 7th street. Growth and change is not so strange when its incremental!