BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Columbia Heights -- Meridian Hill Park (Malcolm X Park)

DC -- Columbia Heights -- Meridian Hill Park (Malcolm X Park):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. MERID_970806_01.JPG: Meridian Hill Park; Joan Of Ark Mary Henderson, an important land owner in the 16th Street corridor, managed in 1911 to get the city to pay $490,000 for a twelve-acre slice of her land that became Meridian Hill Park. Construction took 19 years, beginning in 1917 and finishing in 1936. The main feature of the park is a cascading waterfall meant to denote the site as the fall line (meridian) of the nation's capital. The upper terrace of the park was the first campus of the George Washington University (then called Columbian College). It was also the site of an early black college, Wayland Seminary, which was established here in 1865 and moved 25 years later to Richmond. The park was renamed as the Malcolm X Park. This is a photograph of a statue of Joan of Ark that sits on the falls' side of the park. The park also features a memorial to James Buchanan. Apparently, the memorial was paid for by his child since no one else cared to do one and is the only memorial in existence to him.
2. MERID_970806_02.JPG: Meridian Hill Park; Waterfall These are the waterfalls at Meridian Hill (Malcolm X) Park. The figure of Joan Of Ark (previous picture) is barely seen in the opening at the top of the photo.
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Wikipedia Description: Meridian Hill Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Meridian Hill Park, also known unofficially as Malcolm X Park, is located in the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Columbia Heights. The 12 acres (49,000 m�) of landscaped grounds are maintained by the National Park Service as part of Rock Creek Park, but are not contiguous with the main part of that park. Meridian Hill Park is bordered by 15th, 16th, W, and Euclid Streets NW.

In 1819, John Porter erected a mansion on the grounds and called it "Meridian Hill" because it was on the exact longitude of the original District of Columbia milestone marker, set down on April 15, 1791 at Jones Point, Virginia by Major Andrew Ellicott assisted by Benjamin Banneker. During the 19th century the environs of Meridian Hill became host to Columbia College, precursor to George Washington University. Prior to the Civil War, the mansion grounds became a pleasure park for the area. During the war, Union troops encamped there.

Much of the impetus for creating a public park on this portion of 16th Street came from Mary Foote Henderson, wife of Missouri senator John Brooks Henderson and local resident. She lobbied Congress with several plans for the neighborhood before getting approval for the park. The land was originally part of Columbian College, now George Washington University. In 1910, after the school moved to its current location, the federal government bought the land, and in 1914 the Interior Department hired landscape architect George Burnap to design a grand urban park modeled on parks found in European capitals. His plans, later modified by Horace Peaslee, included an Italian Renaissance-style terraced fountain in the lower half and gardens in a French Baroque style in the upper half. The walls and fountains were built with concrete aggregate, a new building material consisting of concrete mixed with small pebbles. After two decades under construction, the grounds were given park status in 1936 and have been d ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- 2022_DC_Meridian: DC -- Columbia Heights -- Meridian Hill Park (Malcolm X Park) (43 photos from 2022)
- 2020_DC_Meridian: DC -- Columbia Heights -- Meridian Hill Park (Malcolm X Park) (30 photos from 2020)
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Memorials] [Park (National Park Service)]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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