Meade in front of Prettyman

Stumbling along near the Mall recently, I noticed this sculpture of General  George Meade in front of the District of Columbia district court house, the Prettyman building.  Such sculptures and their locations often give me an excuse to delve into history and local development, an exercise that the Internet has made very easy and that allows me to tank up my personal knowledge database.  Apparently, Meade was an American Civil War Union general who commanded the Army of the Potomac and defeated Confederate General Robert Lee at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, the largest land war in the western world. I was less aware of who E. Barrett Prettyman was but it turns out he was a longtime Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which meets in that building. Prettyman was also a tax expert teaching at Georgetown University and acted as the District of Columbia's tax attorney at one time.  This Prettyman building is the site of many historic legal arguments in cases such as involving the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate trials, the Francis Gary Powers U-2 spy plane and thousands more cases heard in the US District court. In fact, you can see news media camped out on the forecourt of the building -- "on the beach" -- their vans bristling with antennas and made-up news announcers staring into cameras during these major proceedings. Who knew that such a plain looking building and figurative sculpture would give me such keys into American history? Amazing!

Kennedy Center : Interesting Views and Tasty Lunch

View from rooftop terrace to the Watergate

Hall of Flags is the full height of the building

One of my son's favorite activities when he is home from Pennsylvania is to take the Route 80 bus downtown to the Kennedy Center. Amazingly, we are on a direct bus line that goes right past our street and all the way to this International Style building. There are great views of the infamous Watergate building from the rooftop terrace as well as opportunities to watch planes fly into National Airport and boats going by on the Potomac. The Hall of Flags is also kind of interesting, although in need of a carpet cleaning, INMHO. We also go there for lunch in the KC Cafe on the top floor where you can have very good and interesting sandwiches, snacks and dinner food, and drinks (beer and wine), at very interesting high prices. The staff at the KC Cafe are notorious for their lack of friendliness but we never let that get in the way of a delicious lunch in a quiet restaurant with great views. Also, the site is wheelchair accessible, although I understand the theaters are not as good.

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!