DC -- Supreme Court Building -- Interior:
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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.
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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:
- SCI_051221_002.JPG: Oliver Wendell Holmes
- SCI_051221_007.JPG: Thurgood Marshall
- SCI_051221_016.JPG: Felix Frankfurter
- SCI_051221_022.JPG: Arthur Goldberg
- SCI_051221_056.JPG: Spiral Staircase.
The Court building includes two self-supporting, elliptical spiral staircases. They were designed for the building by Cass Gilbert (1859-1934), who had incorporated similar staircases into one of his first major projects, the Minnesota State House (1902). It is unclear whether Gilbert chose to use this rare form in the Supreme Court for practical reasons or simply for its exceptional visual beauty.
The Moretti-Harrah Marble Company quarried the marble for the staircases in Alabama. The blocks were transported to Knoxville, Tennessee, where the Gray-Knox Marble Company finished the rough stone in its mill. The steps were cut and the staircase assembled upside down at the mill to assure that each step was cut to an exact fit with the one above and below. In a few places, a run of several steps is cut from one piece of marble. After numbering each piece, the staircases were disassembled and shipped to the site for installation.
Each of the staircases has 136 steps that complete seven spirals while ascending five stories from the basement. The cantilevered design of the staircases alleviated the need for a central support. Each step is anchored into the marble wall on one end and rests upon the step below it. The steps, therefore, are held in place by fit and pressure.
The entrance doorframe and staircase railings are made of bronze and decorated with neoclassical motifs including leaves, urns, anthemions and swags. The design of the left doorframe contains an oil lamp representing knowledge and a book inscribed with the Latin word "LEX" (law). The right doorjamb, an owl symbolizing wisdom and the scales of justice indicating impartiality are incorporated. Some of the supports for the handrail are adorned with oval medallions containing an eagle, one of the symbols of the United States of America.
- SCI_051221_085.JPG: William Howard Taft, Chief Justice
- SCI_051221_089.JPG: Earl Warren, Chief Justice
- SCI_051221_122.JPG: Warren Burger, Chief Justice
- 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.
- 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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- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].