The Big Dig Downtown DC at H and 9th Streets NW

big hole at 11th and H st NW

Just one of the concrete trucks

I've been in awe of the big dig going on at the site downtown at the block between 9th and 11th and H and I streets NW for the past year. I've been watching the action as I take a bus by this site often. First it was a demolition of the old DC convention center with literally tons of debris and dust created and trucked out. Then they started digging the ground out with literally tons and tons of brown clayey earth being taken out in those larger Mack trucks. This then became a huge brown hole that I kept meaning to photo but missed it. Then they drove piles around the whole perimeter, framing the huge pit with wooden planks. That pile driving noise must have annoyed many of the people working in the buildings overlooking the site, or at the nearby hotel. It's now at the stage where they are putting down the concrete floor and hundreds of tons of concrete seem to be going in there. There are at least five cranes looming over the site.  Hundreds of men are working in the pit site, and now they are building the floors and whatever it takes to put up a new construction. I've been meaning to photograph this for a while but it's only now that I got to it. And I'm amazed by how fast the work goes!

Toilet on the Street

This is what the corner of our street looks like for the past eight weeks as the workmen have been replacing some gas pipes. A big bright blue plastic toilet is the first thing you see when you turn into the road.  Not the tree, not the nice stone wall but a big you-can't-miss-this white-roofed Jiffy John. And it's a very nice street corner, overlooked by a cemetery filled with crosses and dead bodies. Of course, the workmen have to have a facility, but did it have to be situated right on the corner? And did they have to litter all the sidewalk with orange safety cones and leave curling yellow pipes scattered about. I suppose I should stop griping about this as at least they have stopped drilling and excavating in the morning and no longer wake me up as I mentioned in my previous post called "get me out of the drilling and digging noises" where I grinched about the machinery, dirt and noise but this street work is just going on too long.