Category: Local News and Views

An increasingly rare sight in downtown D.C.: a conventional exterior fire escape. (It only offers escape from the third floor to the street. Trapped on an upper floor? Too bad for you, I guess.) This one is mounted on the E Street side of the Hotel Harrington. The hotel has achieved its centenary, but how much longer will this safety device last?

Why does the fire control panel in the lobby of 5225 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W. (where the D.C. Learning Ally studio is located) show “Girard Street” in place of Ingomar Street? “Girard” is a sore thumb in the sequence of the 3-syllable names for streets in this neighborhood (Ingomar is between Harrison and Jenifer).

There is a Girard Street in Washington, but it’s down in Columbia Heights, where it should be.

A bit alarming, but nothing much to worry about. The county is starting work on a restoration project for the small stream valley that separates the high school campus from our townhouse cluster. They’ll be commandeering some of our parking lot as a staging area for the work. Hence, the ominous orange signs warning us that trucks will be in the neighborhood. I guess the sundry fire engines, garbage trucks, UPS vans, and various movers’ lorries that visit us from time to time don’t count.

The word “highway” on the sign, positioned as it is, right next to a speed bump, is perhaps the most incongruous bit.

But I will say this: I don’t envy the guys that had to dig post holes for these signs into the frozen ground.

A former bus station being demolished like this one—and especially an empty and abandoned one—is one of the saddest sights to me. Think of all the trips that will never happen.

A simple demonstration, in this photo taken from the fourth floor terrace of my current workplace, that the Washington Monument must remain the tallest structure in the city.

My job as volunteer assistant on my two WalkingTown DC tours today called for logistics, crowd control, and passing out evaluation forms—and it kept me busy, but I did grab two quick snaps of inside Washington.

First, Steve Livengood pointed out the communications equipment that TV people use for their standups outside the Senate side of the Capitol, nicely concealed by a low barrier wall, and out of frame when the cameras are rolling.

Carolyn Crouch took us through the good, the bad, and the dismal of the 1960s-era L’Enfant Plaza urban renewal project. Perhaps the low point of the dismal is this stairway that connects D Street, S.W. to the elevated L’Enfant Promenade. As we ascended the weirdly-treaded steps, vague noises of something like sandblasting could be heard from the behind the tarps that you see. Or perhaps they’re concealing a hellmouth.

On my way to visit one of my clients last week, I stopped to snap a pic of the entrance plaza for their new building on North Capitol Street. Spiffy!

I was driving back from my dentist’s office and I found one of the old wayfinding signs directing drivers to what it now called Washington Dulles International Airport. I don’t know how old these signs are—perhaps they are of the same vintage as the original access road that was built to the airport, but probably not. I remember seeing one or two to the west of the airport, out U.S. Route 50, but I think that they are gone now. This one, on a relatively sleepy stretch of Little River Turnpike, perhaps has survived because it’s been a while since the road required widening.

So it took me two tries to get a serviceable image of the sign. And on my way home, I continued farther west, not following my usual path, and I found another one! Less sun-faded, but a little more scuffed up.

The Supreme Court’s building on 1st Street, N.E., gets a temporary wrapper.