Practically Bucolic

Mark Twain once quipped that you couldn't throw a stone in Quebec without hitting a stained glass window. To my knowledge, he never visited Chevy Chase. On a single roundabout--Chevy Chase Circle--there are three churches. I'm used to those numbers. I'm from the south, and, even in DC, I pass 4 churches on my 3 block walk to the metro. Really. But nothing in Shaw comes close to resembling the Chevy Chase Presbyterian Church. With it's stone edifice and sculpted gardens, it reminds me of those old English manor houses that have their own adjoining church. This would be a great place to sit and read, but the picture looks deceptively warm. I took this on Sunday, after the morning snow had thawed.

The Chevy Chase Arcade

The Chevy Chase Arcade, like many of the buildings in the town center, is from the mid-1920s. It was one of several arcades that were built around DC, but most, if not all, of the others have since been demolished. The arcades were part of a trend to make DC more European, particularly more Parisian, since arcades were constructed all over Paris throughout the nineteenth century. These passages became the subject of Walter Benjamin's ambitious The Arcades Project, which was never completed due to his death. The remnants and fragments make up an enormous tome that theorizes the roles of arcades in the life of the flaneur, one of the most significant, yet elusive, figures of Modernism.

Untapped Paris has, among its other beautiful, waste-your-day-wistfully-longing features, a few pictures of one of my favorite arcades, the Passage du Grand Cerf. But, please, admire the charming modesty of little Chevy Chase before inevitably and absolutely blanching it with comparison.

And here's the Passage from the other, even more whimsical, entrance.

Just a Little Reminder

...to keep looking up. Beauty is in the details.

So much of the great architecture in DC is disappearing, so it always makes me really, very happy when historic buildings are preserved, even if they are turned into things like Ruby Tuesdays and Fudruckers. If you're a regular reader, you might recognize the building on the right from an earlier post about Looking Up. I can't help but think that these buildings, all in a row like this, look like a movie set, but that always strikes me as an odd thing to say, since it's actually the movie set that looks like these buildings.

At Sixth & I

At the corner where 6th St. NW meets I St. NW, just at the edge of Chinatown, stands the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue. DC has had a thriving Jewish community since at least the mid-19th Century when the first official Hebrew congregation was founded. In 1906, construction began on a new synagogue for the Adas Israel congregation. Less than half a century later, the congregation had outgrown the synagogue and sold the building to the Turner African Methodist Episcopal church in 1951. The AME church stripped the inside--though apparently not the outside--of most of the Jewish iconography and replaced it with their own. In 2002, the AME church moved out to Maryland, and the Jewish Historical Society purchased the building and rededicated it as a synagogue. What's left now is an unexpectedly beautiful syncretism of faiths and cultures. It is used for traditional services, but around Washington, it's better known as a community center of sorts. The auditorium, which seats only 300, is used as a venue for small shows by artists like KT Tunstall and Joshua Radin. In conjunction with the iconic DC bookstore Politics and Prose, the Sixth & I also hosts book signings by Toni Morrison and Jodi Picoult.

The Well Now It's Old Post Office

At 315 feet, the Old Post Office is one of the tallest buildings in DC. Opened in 1899, it's not really that old, even by DC standards. But it has always been surrounded with local legend and lore. The day the building opened, the Postmaster of the District of Columbia fell to his death down an elevator shaft. After that auspicious start, it didn't serve as a post office for very long. In 1914, the main post office was relocated, and, at only 15 years of age, it was suddenly the Old Post Office. As the building fell to disuse and disrepair, it was scheduled for demolition. At least one good thing came of the Great Depression--Congress didn't have the money to tear it down. It was used for federal offices for a while, then scheduled for demolition again in the early 70s, when a campaign of local citizens managed to save, restore, and get the building listed on the historic registry. And in 1976, when Great Britain gave replicas of the Westminster Bells to Congress to mark the bicentennial, they were installed in the tower. Now you can visit The Old Post Office museum, tour it's tower, and even eat in perhaps the worst food court in DC.

Happy President's Day!

On the Inside

I love taking pictures of the US Capitol Building. It's so intricately detailed that it's gorgeous in any lighting. It was a marvel of modern architecture and, of course, still is an icon in international politics. It also helps that it's conveniently located.

The inside of the massive dome is just as stunning. In the center of the great rotunda is "The Apotheosis of Washington," which is literally about the deification of George Washington, the first President of the United States. I think the fresco epitomizes the intersection between Enlightenment ideals and the government, a tradition that is often overlooked by those that argue for Christianity as the basis of government. Right there, in the very core of our democracy, is a symbolic image of pagan idolatry.