Park View (October 8, 2020)
It’s hard to describe exactly why, but there is something about Park View that distinguishes it from the surrounding neighborhoods. Maybe, it’s that we definitely felt as though we were on an elevated point in the City as we walked through the neighborhood. Maybe it’s that the row houses that constitute most of the neighborhood are more varied than usual. Particularly on Warder Street, which was wide and unusually bare of trees, it was almost as if we weren’t in Washington at all.
The other day, we posted photos of green houses. Today we are going with blue.
However, we couldn’t resist just one more green house.
As we have walked through Columbia Heights and Park View we have noticed many of the row houses are being renovated. You can usually tell these because they are inevitably painted some combination of grey and off-white.
We really liked this modern and simple brick home with its dark trim.
For a small neighborhood, Park View has more than its fair share of corner groceries.
It’s been a while since we have seen a community garden. You can’t tell from the photos, but this one, called Wangari Gardens, seemed particularly urban tucked in between busy roads, with Washington Hospital Center looming over it. The gardens are named for Professor Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Among other things, she founded the Greenbelt Movement which planted over 51 million trees in her home country. Sadly, she died in 2001 from ovarian cancer.
Here are a couple of examples of the public art that we enjoyed in the neighborhood.
We also walked by the most formidable elementary school that we have seen so far during our travels.
Bruce-Monroe Elementary School is a bilingual (English/Spanish) public school with approximately 450 students. It is named for Blanche Bruce and James Monroe. Bruce was born into slavery in Virginia in 1841 but went on to become a politician who represented Mississippi in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1881. Monroe was the fifth president of the United States. The gothic school was designed by Snowden Ashford and built in 1916.
Walking The District 