BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Southwest (L'Enfant Plaza area)

DC -- Southwest (L'Enfant Plaza area):

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: 3.142.98.108 -- 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] LENFAN_150815_01_STITCH.JPG

[2] LENFAN_150815_02_STITCH.JPG

[3] LENFAN_150815_03_STITCH.JPG

[4] LENFAN_150815_04_STITCH.JPG

[5] LENFAN_150815_05_STITCH.JPG

[6] LENFAN_150815_06_STITCH.JPG

[7] LENFAN_150815_07.JPG	[8] LENFAN_150815_09.JPG	[9] LENFAN_150815_13.JPG
[10] LENFAN_150815_19.JPG	[11] LENFAN_150815_22.JPG	[12] LENFAN_150815_25.JPG
[13] LENFAN_150815_27.JPG	[14] LENFAN_150815_33.JPG	[15] LENFAN_150815_35.JPG
[16] LENFAN_150815_39.JPG	[17] LENFAN_150815_44.JPG	[18] LENFAN_150815_47.JPG
[19] LENFAN_150815_50.JPG	[20] LENFAN_150815_53.JPG	[21] LENFAN_150815_57.JPG
[22] LENFAN_150815_59.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LENFAN_150815_27.JPG: Benjamin Banneker Park "... it is the indispensable duty of those, who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, ... to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race..." -– Benjamin Banneker, 1792 Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) was born a free black in Maryland near the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay. With very little formal schooling, he became America's first black man of science, an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, and producer of almanacs. In 1791 Major Andrew Ellicott selected Banneker to assist him in the survey of the ten-mile square that became the District of Columbia. Banneker's astronomical work contributed significantly to making the boundaries of the new capital of the United States exact. After returning to his farm in Maryland, Banneker completed calculations for an almanac for the year 1792. His almanacs continued to be published for the years 1792 through 1797. At least 28 editions were printed and were widely distributed in the United States and abroad. No contemporary portrait of Banneker is known to exist. This commemorative postage stamp issued on February 15, 1980, is based upon descriptions provided
2. LENFAN_150815_33.JPG: Banneker became intrigued by a pocket watch he had seen as a young man. Using a knife he intricately carved out the wheels and gears of a wooden timepiece. The remarkable clock he constructed from memory kept time and struck the hours for the next fifty years.
Wikipedia Description: L'Enfant Plaza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

L'Enfant Plaza is a complex of eight commercial and governmental buildings, as well as an underground shopping mall and Metro station, built along a traffic-and-pedestrian promenade in Southwest Washington, D.C.. It is named for Pierre L'Enfant, the architect and planner who designed the street layout of the capital city. It was dedicated in 1968 and remains the only paved public square in Washington. The plaza is located off of Independence Avenue SW, between 12th and 9th Streets--although 9th Street actually runs underneath the centers of the buildings on the easternmost side of the plaza.

L'Enfant Promenade, the main street on which the plaza is centered, ends at a large rotary and public overlook called Banneker Park (named for Benjamin Banneker, an 18th-century free black man who was an important surveyor of the city and early activist for black Americans). Banneker Park was designed by Daniel Urban Kiley and dedicated in 1970. It was the first public space in Washington to be dedicated to an African American.

As initially planned, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts would have stood at the end of L'Enfant Promenade where Banneker Circle currently stands. The Kennedy Center would then be the anchor for the development of a retail corridor along L'Enfant Promenade. However, the project's main developer, William Zeckendorf, filed for bankruptcy during the construction of the plaza, forcing the Kennedy Center's sponsors to find a new location. (They ultimately found a site in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, although the abrupt relocation delayed its planned opening by three years.)

The buildings in L'Enfant Plaza are in the brutalist style of modern architecture. Many of them, including the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, were designed by I.M. Pei.

On the east side of the promenade, in front of the hotel, is a large public garden.

Banneker Overlook was discussed at one time as the site of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of African American History. Instead, the museum will be built on the National Mall.

A formal memorial to Benjamin Banneker has been planned for Banneker Overlook; it is currently in the design phase.

The Virginia Railway Express has a station named "L'Enfant" a few blocks to the east, between 6th and 7th Sts. at C St.
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].