DC -- Federal Triangle -- John A. Wilson Building:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Description of Pictures: From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11203-2005Feb9.html
A statue of Alexander Robey "Boss" Shepherd, a former governor of the District, was recently returned to its former place of honor outside the John A. Wilson Building, the District's city hall. Shepherd, a D.C. Council member from 1861 to 1871 who then served as D.C. governor from 1872 to 1874, was best known for his public works projects and civil rights record. The statue was removed in 1979 during the development of Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue and eventually lay in mud near the Blue Plains sewage plant.
The Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia, which works to honor the city's heritage, pushed for more than a decade to return Shepherd's statue to a place of prominence.
From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27830-2005Jan21.html
Alexander "Boss" Shepherd, in the form of an eight-foot bronze statue of the former governor, is returning to the District Building [Metro, Jan. 2]. But I ran into him in the village of Batopilas, at the bottom of the 7,000-foot-deep La Barranca del Cobre in Mexico's rugged Sierra Madre.
Shepherd went there in 1879 on behalf of investors to look into silver mines after Congress promised to buy $2 million to $4 million in silver a month for coinage. At Batopilas, Shepherd built up the richest silver mine ever known. Its only link with the outside was a five-day ride over a narrow, winding path. Over that same path, Shepherd brought railroad engines, a piece at a time. Millions in silver soon left on the backs of mules.
Shepherd built mills and reduction plants for the ore from the network of mines that eventually covered underground workings of more than 70 miles. He also reinvested profits in bridges, aqueducts and even electrification for the mines and, on occasion, for the town. The company employed as many as 1,500 men.
I visited the remains of Shepherd's magnificent home, Hacienda San Miguel. The ruin is festooned by bougainvillea and grapevines grown wild. Its high stone walls, built as protection from bandits and the flooding river, are intact.
Shepherd died in Mexico in 1902. His casket was carried 185 miles on the backs of five sets of eight men, who relieved one another every 20 minutes. It took them five days to reach the train that then carried Shepherd back to Washington. His mausoleum is in Rock Creek Cemetery.
Shepherd transformed Washington by improving more than 150 miles of roads, laying more than 120 miles of sewers and planting 60,000 trees. But he was a poor recordkeeper, and his free spending angered Congress. Two congressional investigations failed to prove corruption, but by 1876 Shepherd was out of office and in disgrace. Still, he was a remarkable man, and I will be delighted to visit him in front of the District Building.
BARBARA BICK
Washington
- 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: 3.17.74.227 -- 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]
- Wikipedia Description: John A. Wilson Building
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The John A. Wilson Building, popularly known simply as the Wilson Building, is the building in downtown Washington, D.C. that houses the offices and chambers of the Council and the Mayor of the District of Columbia. It is located at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
It was built in 1904 - 1908 as the District Building, which remained its name until 1994, when it was changed to honor John A. Wilson — the Chair of the D.C. Council who committed suicide in May 1993.
In 1995, two-thirds of the Wilson Building was leased to the Federal Government for 20 years, because it was severely deteriorated and the bankrupt city could not afford repairs. However, after Congress approved a major renovation for the building, the city was able to regain use of the entire building. However, the repair work necessitated the mayor and council to relocate temporarily to the building at One Judiciary Square until they were able to reoccupy the Wilson Building in September 2001.
In October 2006, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities opened The City Hall Arts Collection at the Wilson Building. Pieces from a diverse body of DC area artists are on public display, hung throughout the halls.
Works include a glass casting by Michael Janis of The Washington Glass School, paintings by Felrath Hines, former chief conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum, Sylvia Snowden and Mark Cameron Boyd, photographs by Alexandra Silverthorne, Harlee Little, and Max Hirshfeld, and sculpture by Jae Ko. The portrait of John A. Wilson is by renowned portrait painter Simmie Knox.
- 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].