Day 31

Woodley Park (August 16, 2019)

We were back down in Woodley Park in the midday heat. We started off next to the Oyster-Adams Bilingual school. Oyster is a public school where students from pre-K through grade eight do all of their classes in both English and Spanish. The school was slated to be shut down in the early 1990s but a group of parents put together a plan under which part of the school grounds were given to a developer to build apartments. In return, the developer built a new school. The school is named after James Oyster, a former District school superintendent and Henry Adams, an American author and historian.

Further down Calvert Street, we passed by the Omni Shoreham hotel.

The Shoreham is a very large convention hotel that also includes apartments. It was built in 1930 and has been the site of every presidential inaugural ball from the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. A couple of fun facts about the hotel. First, the Beatles booked the entire seventh floor of the hotel while they were in Washington DC, playing their first concert of their first American concert in 1964. Second, the hotel has a haunted room. A maid died in an apartment in the hotel a few months after the family she worked for had moved in. Shortly after a daughter of the family also died in the apartment and the family moved out. The apartment was converted into a hotel suite. Suite 870 is now known as the Ghost Suite and guests and hotel staff tell stories of faint voices, cold breezes, doors slamming shut and opening of their own accord, and televisions and lights turning on and off on their own. Guests in adjoining suites have also complained about noises coming from the closed and empty Suite.

This Marilyn Monroe mural, painted in 1981 by John Bailey looks down over the shops and restaurants of Woodley Park. It has become a District landmark.

We walked down into Rock Creek Park briefly for a view of the Taft Bridge. The bridge was built between 1897 and 1907 and is 1341 feet long and 128 feet high. It spans Rock Creek gorge at Connecticut Avenue.

There are some beautiful tree lined streets in Woodley Park.

Finishing up the walk we passed by the Wardman Park Annex. The Annex is another of Washington’s classic apartment buildings. Built in 1928, it has had more than its share of prominent residents, including Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Herbert Hoover and actress Marlene Dietrich.