DC -- Pershing Park (became National World War I Memorial in 2021):
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- 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 including AI scrapers 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.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 34.201.122.150 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
PERSH_970413_01.JPG
|
[2]
PERSH_970413_02.JPG
|
[3] PERSH_970413_03.JPG
|
[4] PERSH_970413_04.JPG
|
[5] PERSH_970413_06.JPG
|
[6] PERSH_970413_09.JPG
|
[7] PERSH_970413_11.JPG
|
[8] PERSH_970413_13.JPG
|
[9] PERSH_970413_15.JPG
|
[10] PERSH_970413_17.JPG
|
[11] PERSH_970413_19.JPG
|
[12]
PERSH_970507_01.JPG
|
[13] PERSH_970507_02.JPG
|
[14] PERSH_970507_03.JPG
|
[15] PERSH_970507_05.JPG
|
[16] PERSH_970507_07.JPG
|
[17] PERSH_970507_09.JPG
|
[18] PERSH_970810_02.JPG
|
[19] PERSH_970810_04.JPG
|
[20] PERSH_970810_07.JPG
|
[21] PERSH_970810_10.JPG
|
[22] PERSH_970810_13.JPG
|
[23] PERSH_970810_15.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- PERSH_970413_01.JPG: Willard Hotel; Pershing statue
The park in front is a memorial park to General John J. Pershing, who led the US forces during World War I and led one of the city's great victory parades in 1919. He later died at the Walter Reed Medical Center. You can see the back of the Pershing statue, with a pair of binoculars in his hands. The park also includes an ice-skating rink.
Behind the park, though, are three buildings. See the WILLARD2.GIF file for a description of the three including the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel.
- PERSH_970413_02.JPG: Willard Hotel; front view
Behind Pershing Park in the front are three buildings. The one on the left is the Hotel Washington. Next to it, the smaller building with interesting green covers on its windows, is an office building used by Oliver Carr, the company that rebuilt the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel as well as does much of the construction in Washington DC. The building on the right is the Willard Inter-Continental Hotel.
This hotel is 12 stories tall and was built built in 1901. The hotel was closed in 1968 but the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation took over the property and rebuilt it, reopening it in 1986. It is an amazing place to look at now, incredibly ornate. And not inexpensive either...
On the same site have been extravagent hotels since 1816. The Willard is where the president-elect traditionally slept on the eve of his inauguration. Abraham Lincoln slept here before his inauguration in 1861, having been snuck into the city because of fears that he would be assassinated as the Civil War began. The president and his family of five spent ten days at the hotel and the bill was $773.75. He left for the Capitol and his inauguration in a rushed manner and didn't have time or apparently the money to pay his bill. He paid it after he got his first paycheck as president. A copy of the bill is on display at the Willard.
(Just FYI, as of 1996, rates at the hotel vary but the one-person rate during the week is $149/night. If Lincoln crammed his entire family into one room with two beds for ten days, the bill would be $2170 not including food or tax or any tips. Suites are $550 to $2700 per night.)
The hotel brochure mentions that the first group of Japanese ever to leave their island kingdom stayed at The Willard in 1860, being in town to sign the first trade and friendship treaties between Japan and the US.
Due to the rich and important people who stayed at the hotel, the lobby of the Willard swarmed with hangers-on and hangers-around. They annoyed Ulysses Grant so much that he coined the term "lobbyists" to describe the office- and favor-seekers in constant attendance.
The Willard was also the site where Julia Ward Howe penned the famous lines that became the words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." According to The Willard, Ward was inspired to write the song while staying at the hotel when Union soldiers walked by her window singing "John Brown's Body." Another source said that she actually saw the troops passing at Bailey's Crossroads in Virginia and then came back to the hotel to write the song.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson held the meetings of the League to Enforce Peace, the predecessor to the League of Nations, at The Willard. Wilson's vice president, Thomas Marshall, in criticizing the price of cigars at the hotel news stand said, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Oddly enough, The Willard brochures publicize this.
Martin Luther King finished up his "I Have A Dream" speech and delivered it at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 while staying at The Willard.
- PERSH_970507_01.JPG: Willard Hotel; Pershing Park
Another view of the Willard Hotel and the water area of Pershing Park. This becomes an ice skating rink in the winter.
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Wikipedia Description: National World War I Memorial (Washington, D.C.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The National World War I Memorial is a national memorial commemorating the service rendered by members of the United States Armed Forces in World War I. The 2015 National Defense Authorization Act authorized the World War I Centennial Commission to build the memorial in Pershing Park, located at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. The park, which has existed since 1981, also contains the John J. Pershing General of the Armies commemorative work. In January 2016, the design commission selected the submission "The Weight of Sacrifice", by a team consisting of Joseph Weishaar, Sabin Howard, Phoebe Lickwar, and GWWO Architects, as the winning design, which is expected to be completed by 2024.
On April 16, 2021, the flag was raised at the memorial and President Biden spoke at a virtual ceremony opening it to the public.
- 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.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].