Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln Downtown

Christopher Columbus statue

Abraham Lincoln statue

As I go about the city on the way to meetings in various offices, I'm always surprised to stumble upon statues of famous people.  For instance, walking south on 3rd Street NW I saw this Christopher Columbus sculpture near the Italian community building. It's in a courtyard next to the Italian society building. Then, in front of the District of Columbia's own Supreme Court, the District Court of Appeals, on Indiana Ave NW, there's a wonderful sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. It's easy to miss these if you are in a hurry, in a cab or if you are too busy texting you don't see what's around you. Of course, I forgot to carry my digital camera with me so I took these photos using the miracle of my cell phone camera. Praise God for amazing devices!

Putting the Bloom in #BloomingdaleDC

Wandering about the streets in our sector of the city, there's lots of plants and flowers to see. And sometimes there's some extra special effects such as a staircase of herbs in front of an ivy wall, or pots of petunias on the fence or sunflowers in the parking lot.  You just know someone has gone out of their way with these flower displays. Despite the heat, it's worth while doing a walk-about and seeing the extra efforts everyone has done to make our spot of the city so pretty. I found these on Bryant, V and First streets and am sure to find more!

Summer Garden, BloomingdaleDC

June was a terrific month for flowers in my city garden this year. It seemed like everything bloomed profusely all at once. Not just the day lilies and the Asiatic lilies, but the pink and the white roses, as well as the biggest hydrangea heads in several years, not to mention the petite little orange nasturtiums that I am very happy about as this is the first year I really got them to flower after growing them from seeds. And now we are in July, many of them are deadheads or getting very wilted as the heat is so much for them.  But the flowers have been wonderful so far even though we are now only enjoying crepe myrtles and tube vine and some honeysuckle which I will photograph soon and add to this page.  I just love having tons of flowers in the garden. 

Just Gotta Love Those DC Trash Collection Guys!

Well, we actually had two big bulging bags of paper and cardboard trash left over after our July 4th fabulous firework party but I only had enough room on the photo chip for this one bulging TNT bag. I just think it's marvelous how trash is taken away and disposed of on our street. We bag it and bin it and they take it away! One morning I caught those hard-working DC trash collection guys doing their job and had to snap a few photos and thank them for a job well done. If you stop and think about it, those guys are totally essential to our well-being in the city.  I also appreciate the Recycle pick-up which seems to occur on a different day.  We are very good at filling our recycling bin too with bottles, plastic, magazines and paper and suchlike and it too just mysteriously disappears out of the blue bin and hopefully gets recycled. There's also something to be said for how the city residential neighborhoods mostly have alley ways so one doesn't really see the piles of trash very much and it helps keep the streets clean. I think this design really helps make Washington, DC a very livable city. Having regular trash pick up is very civilized too, as anyone who's been overseas where they have not organized this knows what happens if there is no regular organized trash pick-up.

McMillan Park as it is Now Before the Deal is Done

I learned recently that the city is moving forward with yet another plan to develop McMillan Park and fearing once again that I will forget to photograph it before the developers move in and wreck it I snapped these photos with my handy cell phone camera as I walked by last Sunday. There's just something about these strangely shaped towers, the vista with the manhole covers, the cobbled brick ramp and how we just don't recognize this sand filtration water cleaning technology anymore. That it was once powered by donkeys is also interesting. We hardly remember the number of lives that were saved by the clean water it produced. Of course, this new plan might be another plan that doesn't happen as there have been charges that the development office didn't follow procedures and once again the DC taxpayers are being bamboozled.  See this blog for the most recent challenge to the bureaucrats. I've lived nearby this site for over 25 years and remember when it was sold by the US government to DC in 1987. There's been years of talk and proposals and political grandstanding and everyone seems to forget that it was paid for by us taxpayers and we should have some say in what happens to it and it should be developed with open and transparent processes. After all, WE bought the site from the federal government in 1987 with $9.3 million of OUR money.
 

Here's  the history of McMillan Park taken from the BloomingdaleDC history site. The site is bounded by North Capitol Street, Channing Street, First Street and Michigan Avenue, NW.  The historic McMillan Park sand filtration site and McMillan Reservoir are part of a chain of public green spaces established in Senator James McMillan's 1901 plan for beautifying Washington. Following the death of Senator McMillan in 1902, the grounds of the site were renamed McMillan Park. In 1905 the sand filtration plant to purify the city's drinking water was built. The grounds of the site were designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. The site was designated a historic landmark by the DC Historic Preservation Review Board in 1991.

Interesting buildings in Bloomingdale neighborhood

on RI Ave NW

on First St at T & RI Ave NW

on  First St NW

There's lots of interesting looking buildings in our section of the city since all the houses are built of brick and most built in the late 19th and early 20th century. They've also variegated a bit with bright colored paint and add-ons and things. I took one photo while I was at Boundary Stone Public House on RI Ave and another while looking at Rustik Tavern at the corner of three streets since I'm so pleased we now have two decent bars in walking distance of my house. The overall effect of the old neighborhood transforming makes it a very pleasant place to live..

DC Chinatown is Fine

I was sitting on the corner of H Street and 7th NW waiting for a bus to take me back to work and I looked up and saw the old and the new buildings and the marvelous painted archway in Chinatown. Although it was cold, I enjoyed the view of the new buildings and the fresh paint which is a big change from how it looked about ten years ago. All of a sudden this intersection and the area around it look like New York city. It's all because they built the MCI center, whoops, now called Verizon center and that became a magnet for a lot of great development in what was becoming a decaying section of the city. My bus finally came and I found myself glad for the resurrection of this part of the city.  

No Windmills or Canals in DC

Typical canal houses

View of windmill from canal

Bicycles on bridge

Last windmill in Amsterdam

While looking at my photos from our recent trip to Amsterdam, Holland, I realized how unique that city was compared to Washington, D.C. We had ridden around that city on giant cruiser boats on the canals and saw things like windmills out the window. No such things in DC, for sure! I learned that Amsterdam was also the most densely populated city in Europe, even though there's only about 750,000 people living in that city. However, the living spaces are all small, the streets are narrower and they mostly travel around on bikes and trams. The landlady of the basement studio apartment that we stayed in said that a whole family used to live in there and the nook in the corner was the parent's bedroom and the closet in the back wall was the children's bedroom! That and climbing up the ladder stairs to the street everyday must have made life quite different than what we experience in 21st century D.C. Thank God for the New World!

Related articles

• Amsterdam - Sex, drugs, windmills and bicycles - Amsterdam, Netherlands (travelpod.com)

Trams and Bikes Rule in Amsterdam

While there are cars in Amsterdam the 740,000 city residents pedal around on bikes or take trams to get around.but it seems like bikes dominate. You can't go down any street or alley or go over any canal bridge without practically tripping over a bike locked to a fence or pole. While you're avoiding these, at least a dozen bikes will whiz by you, the users pedalling madly over the cobblestones or transporting any type of good on a front or back bike rack, or on both ends. We saw more than a few parents with children perched on the handlebars and great loads of books and boxes and other material carried along on the back of the bike.  There is even a parking lot for about 9,000 bikes at the train station since commuters leave their bike at the station when they leave Amsterdam to work elsewhere. It turns out that at their destination they may have another bike that they use to go from the train station to the job. It was certainly eye opening to see so much day to day business carried on by bike. And it didn't look one bit like DC at all!

Image via Wikipedia

Keeping City WIndows Open

One of the nice things about having the windows and doors open, as a result of our foregoing air conditioning the whole house, is that you hear the neighborhood. For instance, there are a surprising number of tweetie and singing birds, even though we are essentially in a busy city neighborhood. This is because the city finally trapped all the feral cats that were decimating the birds so I think the bird population is up a bit beyond the pigeons and sparrows. Also the rat population was nicely assassinated by the city and I think that helped though I'm not sure rats eat birds (?). We did spy a very tiny little humming bird sized tweetie on a neighbor's tree at dinner tonight when we ate on the porch. Earlier in the spring every morning there were cardinals flashing about the front garden and I swore there was a blue jay or two hiding in the privet hedge. We also hear the children play, cars going by with rap or gospel or talk radio or pop music. And we hear snatches of conversations from passersby or people talking to themselves (on their cell phones, most likely). In fact, sometimes our conversations drift out the window and someone will join in. Hubster in the kitchen was calling out to me in the living room about how cute the home grown tomato was and a neighbor outside heard him and she called from her back yard saying "ooh that tomato is so cute;" very funny! Sometimes of course there are some dratted dogs in the neighborhood that set up a barking cacaphony but heck, with the windows open, you can just yell "SHUDDUP" real loud a few times and it seems to work. What an interesting world God has given us~