The Lincoln Memorial’s Mistake

The Lincoln Memorial

Abraham Lincoln was 55 years old when he was assassinated in April of 1865.  Less than two years after his death, in March of 1867, the Lincoln Monument Association was incorporated by the U.S. Congress to build a memorial to honor the 16th President.  After that, little progress was made for the next 44 years until 1901, when a site in a swamp next to the Potomac River was chosen as the location for the monument (MAP).  A decade later, Congress formally authorized the design of The Lincoln Memorial in February of 1911.  Three years after that, in 1914, actual construction began when the first stone was put into place on February 12th, Lincoln’s birthday.  It then took more than six additional years of work until the building of the monument was finished in 1922.  So 55 years after it initially began, the monument to the 55 year old President was finally completed.  Accordingly, in addition to the iconic landmark on the National Mall being a fitting tribute to President Abraham Lincoln, it is also symbolic of the pace at which our government gets things done.

When the building of the monument was finally completed, two of President Lincoln’s most important speeches could be found carved on the inner walls of the Memorial: the Gettysburg Address on the north wall, and his Second Inaugural Address on the south wall.  However, while carving the Second Inaugural Address, the engraver accidentally chiseled the letter ‘E’ instead of an ‘F’ in the word “future.”  An attempt to correct the mistake was made by filling in the extra line, but it is still quite visible.  This can also be seen as symbolic.  That regardless of the amount of time they take, the government often can’t get things done right.

Sonny Bono Memorial Park

Sonny Bono Memorial Park

In 1994 Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s 44th Congressional District.  A conservative Republican, Bono was swept into office as part of the Newt Gingrich-led Republican “revolution” that year, and was re-elected in 1996.  However, Bono’s Congressional career and life were tragically cut short when he died in January of 1998, of injuries sustained when he hit a tree while skiing in Lake Tahoe.

At the height of his musical career, if you had made a friendly wager as to which recent or current popular singer might go on to serve in Congress two decades later, you might have picked someone with an apparent political agenda, like Joan Baez, or at least one who was associated with some kind of cause, like nature-lover John Denver.  You almost certainly wouldn’t have placed your bet on Bono, a singer of arguably limited talents who appeared content to stand, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of his far more popular wife, Cherilyn Sarkisian, better known as, simply, Cher.

Two decades before being elected to Congress, Bono’s entertainment career was coming to an end, with the cancellation of the popular television variety show, The Sonny and Cher Show, which ran on CBS from 1971 to 1974.  As part of an attempted comeback, the couple returned to performing together and revived The Sonny and Cher Show in 1976, despite being divorced the previous year. That effort failed to generate strong ratings and was also cancelled.  Their last appearance together was on Late Night with David Letterman on November 14, 1987.

After parting ways with Cher, Bono’s music and acting career faded and he fell almost completely out of the public eye.  Bono soon found a new vocation after leaving show business, however, and became a very successful businessman and restaurateur. Later, he became interested in politics when he decided he wanted a bigger sign for a restaurant he’d opened and ran straight into bureaucratic red tape, dealing with the city government. Bono had never voted or registered before, but resolved to change things by running for mayor.  He won the election, served a successful four-year term, and wound up pursuing a whole new career as a politician.  Following a failed run in the California Republican Senatorial primary in 1992, Bono turned his attention to the 44th District’s Congressional seat, which he won in 1994.  After being elected, Bono was quoted as saying, “The last thing in the world I thought I would be is a U.S. Congressman, given all the bobcat vests and Eskimo boots I used to wear.”

During his time in office, Bono did not treat his fellow lawmakers to any singing performances, but the man behind the hits “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On” did trade on his public persona as a good-natured, non-threatening nice guy.   He had a reputation for being self-deprecating, and prided himself on not taking himself — or being taken — too seriously.  This served him well in his political career.  As The Washington Post noted in its obituary following his death, “Bono brought to Congress a rare skill: He could make lawmakers—even the most pompous among them—laugh at themselves.”  Or as President Bill Clinton said, “His joyful entertainment of millions earned him celebrity, but in Washington he earned respect by being a witty and wise participant in policymaking processes that often seem ponderous to the American people.”

In remembrance of Bono’s election to his first term in Congress, on one of my bike rides I went to Sonny Bono Memorial Park in Northwest D.C., located at the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue, 20th Street, and O Street (MAP) near DuPont Circle.  The small park was established in 1998 after Bono’s death by a friend named Geary Simon, who is a D.C. real estate developer.  Simon approached the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation’s Park Partners Program, and using his own money, revitalized an unused 800-square-foot triangle of grass.  His improvements included installing an underground sprinkler system, planting new Kentucky bluegrass and a Japanese maple, as well as benches and a wrought-iron fence.

The park also features a buried vault of Sonny Bono memorabilia that was donated by family and friends.  Items in the vault included his official Congressional cufflinks, and a coffee mug from his string of Bono’s Restaurants.  Adding a little mystery to the vault, it is reported that two sealed envelopes that were given to Simon were included in the vault and buried without being opened.  The vault also includes the sheet music for “The Beat Goes On.”  And so it does.

         
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Department of Parking Enforcement Adds Insult to Injury

Sometimes you come across some unexpected things while riding in D.C.  One day on a bike ride in Georgetown I came across this car.   As if having part of a tree fall on it was not bad enough, I noticed that under the tree and under one of the windshield wipers was a parking ticket.  God told him not to park there by dropping a tree on the car, and the D.C. Department of Public Works Parking Enforcement added insult to injury by telling the owner not to park there by issuing a ticket.  File this under “It’s funny as long as it isn’t not happening to you.”

    
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Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory

Volta Laboratory

In 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for a revolutionary new invention – the telephone.  On one of my recent bike rides I went to the Volta Laboratory, which he founded using money he received for his invention  The laboratory is located at 1537 35th Street (MAP) in northwest D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood of D.C

As early as 1865, Bell conceived the idea of transmitting speech by electric waves. By March 7, 1876, his apparatus was so far developed that he received a patent. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message – the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you” – from Bell to his assistant.

Bell’s patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell’s patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

Bell subsequently received the Volta Prize for inventing the telephone. The Volta Prize was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to honor Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist noted for developing the battery. Since that time, the French government has awarded the prize for scientific achievement in electricity. Bell received the third Grand Volta Prize in 1880, with its purse of 50,000 francs (approximately $10,000 at that time, about $250,000 in current dollars). Mr. Bell used the prize money to create institutions in and around D.C., including the Volta Laboratory Association (in 1880, also known as the ‘Volta Laboratory’ and as the ‘Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory’), with his endowment fund (the ‘Volta Fund’), and then in 1887 the ‘Volta Bureau’, which later became the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf.

Considering the above, I found it interesting that the photos I took while on this ride I took with my phone.  I wonder what Mr. Bell would have thought.

The Washington Coliseum and The Beatles

The Washington Coliseum

The Washington Coliseum, originally known as The Uline Arena, is an indoor arena located at 1132 3rd Street (MAP) in the NoMa neighborhood of northeast D.C.  It is just north of Union Station, directly adjacent to the railroad tracks, and bounded by L and M Streets.  The venue once hosted the Basketball Association of America’s Washington Capitols, coached by Red Auerbach from 1946 to 1949, and the American Basketball Association’s Washington Caps in 1969-70. Over the years it also was host to many performances and athletic events of varying types, including ice skating, hockey, martial arts, ballet, music, circuses, speeches, as well as a couple of Presidential inaugural balls.  At one time, it was even used as a makeshift jail for up to 1,200 male and female prisoners arrested during protests against the war in Vietnam.  But it is perhaps most famously remembered as the venue for the first concert in the United States by The Beatles.

On February 11, 1964, less than 48 hours after their now famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles arrived by train in D.C., where they were to later play before a sold-out crowd at the Washington Coliseum.  In fact, despite the fact that only a few months earlier the group had been largely unknown in the United States, the concert was actually over capacity by approximately 1,000 people according to estimates.

Before the concert, the group clowned it up during a televised press interview in the cavernous Coliseum.  When asked, “Where did you get the idea for the haircuts?” Ringo Starr responded, “Where did you get the idea for yours?”  And later, when asked what they thought of then-President Lyndon Johnson, Paul McCartney quipped: “We don’t know. We’ve never met the man.”  After a pause, he then asked, “Does he buy our records?”  Interestingly, the interview ended with John Lennon being asked if The Beatles were a fad.  He replied, “Obviously. Anything in this business is a fad. We don’t think we’re going to last forever. We’re just going to have a good time while it lasts.”

The concert was supposed to be opened by The Chiffons and Tommy Roe, but they were prevented from getting to D.C. by an East Coast snow storm that blanketed the area in over eight inches of snow that day.  Instead, the replacement acts that night were Jay and the Americans and The Righteous Brothers.  The Beatles then played for approximately 40 minutes, opening with “Roll Over Beethoven.”  Tickets to the show at the Coliseum ranged from $2 to $4. The performance was filmed and later shown in American theatres in March of 1964 as a closed-circuit video feed.  The film, entitled “Live at the Washington Coliseum, 1964,” has recently been released on DVD.

Even with a small stage about the size of a boxing ring, both the audience and the performers were delighted to be there. Every few songs, in fact, the band oriented their setup to face a new part of the crowd. In return, audience members squealed, screamed, and threw jelly beans onto the stage. (Earlier in the week, the Beatles mentioned their fondness for the candy in a New York interview.)

Unfortunately, The Washington Coliseum has seen better days. It was most recently used as a waste management site, and with the building falling into disrepair, the site today is used only for parking.  Despite being listed on the National Register of Historic Places in May of 2007, renovation plans for the graffiti covered building continue to languish.  But 50 years ago, the historic site hosted one of world’s best musical acts ever.

    
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UPDATE:  Renovations were recently completed on the former coliseum building, which had been sitting empty and abandoned for years.  It reopened on 10/21/2016 as an REI sporting goods store.

The Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address at the Library of Congress

The Gettysburg Address is a speech that was given by President Abraham Lincoln, and one of the best-known speeches in American history.  It was delivered by President Lincoln in 1863, at the dedication ceremony of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; just four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.  On the 150th anniversary of the speech, a rare copy of The Gettysburg Address, which is written in the former President’s own handwriting and is thought to have been with him when he delivered the famous civil war speech, was on display in The Library of Congress (MAP).  So that’s where I went on one of my bike rides.

President Lincoln’s speech, which he made four months after the bloody Civil War battle at Gettysburg that left tens of thousands of men wounded, dead or missing, is considered a seminal moment in the history of the United States.  However, it was not immediately recognized as a towering literary achievement.  And President Lincoln was not even the keynote speaker at that day’s ceremony.  The dignitary who spoke before Lincoln, Edward Everett, delivered what was scheduled as the main speech of the day.  The former Massachusetts governor and onetime Secretary of State was the best-known orator of the time, and took two hours navigating through his 13,607-word speech.  President Lincoln’s speech, a mere 271 words if you go by the version that’s attributed to Lincoln, took just over two minutes.

The speech was well-received by the public attending the event. They clapped politely, a few cheered.  But not everyone at the time agreed.  The Chicago Times called it “silly, dishwatery utterances.”  Journalist Gabor Boritt, who was present, said of other journalists that “they could not find much good to say about it.”  Lincoln himself said, “It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.”  However, on the day following the ceremony, Everett wrote to Lincoln, and said, “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”  History would eventually side with Everett’s opinion.

There are five known manuscripts of President Lincoln’s now-famous speech, and the most widely quoted one is the oldest.  The earliest versions were given to his two secretaries, John George Nicholay and John Hay.  Three were written after the address was delivered, and then donated to charities.  The Library of Congress owns both the Nicholay and Hay copies.  The five copies of the speech contain differences in text and emphasis.  Noticeably, the Nicolay version does not contain the phrase “under God”, which was later added to other copies Lincoln made of the speech – and appeared in contemporaneous newspaper reports.  The one I was fortunate enough to see at the Library of Congress is the Nicolay version, which is also referred to as the “first draft” because some historians contend that it was the copy that Lincoln read out at Gettysburg.

Interestingly, although one of the world’s best-remembered speeches, it includes the line, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.”  So in the end, at least that portion of the famous speech was yet another example of a statement by a President that turned out to be wrong.

    
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Dark Star Park

Dark Star Park

Across the Potomac River from D.C., in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, is Dark Star Park (MAP).  Both a park and a commissioned art project by Nancy Holt, it contains large spherical stones that are designed to resemble fallen, extinguished stars.  In additional to the spheres of varying sizes, the park also contains shadow-images inset in the ground, two reflecting pools, four steel poles extending upward some 15 feet, and two cylindrical tunnels, all scattered across the small park situated amidst numerous high rise buildings and the rush of several intersections.  Each year on August 1, the day (in 1860) when William Henry Ross originally deeded the land that would become the thriving urban village that is his namesake, the actual shadows align with the inset shadow-images at precisely 9:32 am.  This day is known as Dark Star Park Day, and is an annual celebration of all of Arlington’s public art efforts.

    
[Click on the photos to view the full-size versions]

A Warm Ride to a Colorful Church

The Old Friendship Baptist Church in southwest D.C.

As I’ve ridden bikes around the city over the past few years, I have taken notice of a number of D.C. churches for a various reasons – their architecture, their history, or their role in the community. I’ve also come across some churches that caught my attention because of the church’s unusual name. But on a recent ride I found a church that is unlike any other I’ve seen before.

The old Friendship Baptist Church building, located at 700 Delaware Avenue (MAP) in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of D.C., is an abandoned church building built in the late 1800s by James A. Boyce, which has recently been used as a canvas for a contemporary street art exhibition. Created by an Atlanta-based artist known as HENSE, the large scale composition features all sorts of sprayed elements, large dots, stripes and a wide array of colors. The end result is a mixture of color and pattern with a mural style all on the exterior of the building. The mural installation was a private commission by an arts club named Blind Whino, and is located directly across the street from a planned museum for emerging artists, a hotel, and other hot spots in this up and coming area of D.C.

The day I found this church was a near perfect day for a ride, especially for the middle of winter, with temperatures reaching almost 70 degrees. It felt good to get out and enjoy the unseasonably pleasant weather, particularly in light of the fact that it has been an otherwise harsh winter.

The church, the unusual weather and the ride itself made me think about how you should enjoy what you have while you have it, because often it will be gone too soon.

    
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Note:  The colorful church building is now the home of Blind Whino, a non-profit arts club and event space dedicated to the principal that art is a catalyst for change in a community, and providing inspiration and motivation for those that encounter its power.

A Capital Place to Ride

The eastern font of the U.S. Capitol Building

The United States Capitol Building is a visually stunning building and almost uniformly recognized as a symbolic representation of the legislative branch of our Federal government. When people see its image, they think of our nation’s seat of government – Washington, D.C. So I thought it would be a good place to start off this blog.

The Capitol Building is located atop Capitol Hill facing the eastern end of the National Mall, and serves as a non-geographic center of the city and the origin by which the four quadrants of the District are divided. But what most people don’t know is that the Capitol is part of a complex which comprised of much more than the just the building itself. It includes a group of about a dozen buildings and facilities that are used by the Federal government. The grounds on which the Capitol Complex is located cover approximately 274 acres, with the grounds proper consisting mostly of lawns, walkways, streets, drives, statues, fountains, and planting areas. People from all over the country and all over the world visit the Capitol when they come to Washington, but few see all that it has to offer beyond the building’s facade.

Much like the Capitol Building, the city is also comprised of more than what is apparent at first glance. It is a vastly complex city which offers much more than just the capital district where many Federal government facilities are located.

D.C. is a vibrant city where people work, live and play.  It has a wide diversity of colorful neighborhoods – from urban communities bustling with activity to family-friendly suburban communities to quiet rural areas with lots of green space and natural areas. The city is full of parks, monuments, museums, national landmarks, cultural events, musical and theatrical entertainment, sporting events, and other attractions.  And the D.C. metro area is a very bike-friendly place, with a number of bike lanes and trails throughout the city and surrounding suburbs that make it easy to explore all that the area has to offer.

One of the things I will attempt to do in this blog is help readers see more than what is apparent at first glance.  I will look beyond the well-known tourist destinations and address all aspects of the city, including the small and often overlooked things.  Because it is as true about D.C. as it is with most things, including life – it’s important to look for the little things.  As Robert Brault said, “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”

An Introduction to Me and My Blog

Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown D.C.

As I begin this blog entitled “The DC Bike Blogger,” I want to confess up front that I am not a cyclist. I’m just a guy who rides a bike.  And I don’t have fast, lightweight, expensive road or racing bikes.  I bought most of my older, used bikes from Craigslist or eBay.  Also, I don’t wear brightly colored, skin tight cycling jerseys and spandex bike shorts.  I wear T-shirts and comfortable shorts during warmer weather, and layers of sweatpants and hoodies when it gets cold.

I’m also not a professional writer.  I’m just a guy who works for an agency of the Federal government in downtown Washington, D.C., where I have been employed for over twenty-six years.  I have a good job and enjoy what I do, but it involves working in a windowless, bunker-like office surrounded by eight-foot thick concrete walls and no physical connection to the world outside.

So in an attempt to offset the isolating and otherwise negative effects of spending long periods of time in such a work environment, a few years ago I started keeping a bicycle at the office and going out for rides on my lunch hour during the middle of the day.  I wasn’t an avid bike rider before then, but something just clicked when I started riding around D.C.  A few years and thousands of miles later, I am still riding almost every day.

Each day I bike throughout the city and explore the sites in and around our nation’s capitol.  I will then use this blog to share what I see, what I learn, and what I think about during my rides.  Whether or not you are from this area, I hope this blog will enable you to see D.C. in a way that you might not have otherwise.