Last week, we looked at the first school on Capitol Hill – the Eastern Free School – and how it opened in a rented building next to the Capitol. Today, we look at how a purpose-built school replaced it, and the state of public education in the early years of Washington D.C.
If you have a couple of hours to kill, I can highly recommend the website Shorpy. Filled with pictures from bygone eras, it captures everything from the earth-shaking to the mundane. I was happily paging through it the other day when I came across a picture of a rather ordinary wooden building with two men […]
I was researching some of the infill developments on the Hill recently, and discovered that one of them was built on the former site of a Catholic school. I wanted to know more about it, but struck out in my usual sources. Fortunately, the church connected with the school had done the research, and posted […]
Demonstrations have become a routine on Capitol Hill, to the point where we barely notice them any more. And today, demonstrations usually mean a bunch of people waving signs and chanting. In the old days, things were actually, well, demonstrated.
After I published last week’s column, a friend pointed out an egregious error that I had made in writing it: I had entirely failed to mention the name of the sculptor of the piece. This was particularly painful in that he had truly put his life into the work. So, today I will rectify my […]