Results tagged “washingtonmonument”

The elevator that goes to the top of the Washington Monument malfunctioned at about 1 p.m. this afternoon, with a number of tourists who had already reached the viewing area still inside the building.

Courtesy an anonymous tipster

Afraid you'll run out of time to show off our city's most prominent phallus to your out of town guests? The Washington Monument is making it easier by extending visiting hours for the rest of the summer.

The verdict on the D.C. Zombie Lurch on Saturday was sadly a little underwhelming ... we estimate there were maybe only two dozen people participating in the mass "Thriller" dance, another two dozen who were dressed as zombies but didn't dance, and then a slightly larger group of pure spectators and/or friends of zombies who didn't dress up. Still, everyone was having a great time, and we got some fun shots of zombies with...

FRIDAY: >> It's raining, and you've got some serious partying to do tomorrow night, so we'd recommend taking in a movie and saving your strength. Don't miss our movie picks for the weekend here, including special Halloween screenings of Nosferatu at the AFI Silver Theater. Also of note tonight, The American City Diner screens Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at 8:30 p.m. >> If you’re more in the mood for getting your eardrums absolutely destroyed, Japanese metal...

It's that time again, the best comments of the previous week. It was a bountiful week, with World Bank protests, Metro employees chowing down, and new dog park regulations Read on, and register if you haven't! ----- Everybody had something to say about D.C. switching to taxi meters. shawndc: I'm glad Fenty had the balls to stand up to the Taxi commission and move ahead with meters. Let's hope they can get it up and...

Written by DCist contributor Benjamin Schuman-Stoler Last week in our “revisiting sites we’ve walked by a hundred times" series we presented the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. This week, we’ll look at that huge phallus in the exact center of the original D.C. map -- the Washington Monument. Screaming nothing but glory and testament, it is the classic D.C. monument. But we know its background isn’t as simple as its geometric profile. The National Park Service commissioned...

It’s hard to say if Tapatini’s owner Jordan Cappolla should be commended for bringing sleek style and superior sushi to a neighborhood where it was previously impossible to get a decent raw fish fix, or if he should get 80 lashes with a wet noodle for everything else on the menu at Jordan’s 8.

FRIDAY: >> The city's free concert series follows MC Hammer with a rare appearance by salsa legend Willie Colon, 7-9 p.m. at Woodrow Wilson Center. >> President Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean will be at Politics and Prose to discuss his book, Broken Government, which examines "the institutional damage he believes the Republican Party has inflicted on the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government during the Bush administration." 7 p.m. He'll also be...

Oooh. We're suckers for shiny new takes on our nation's many marbled monuments. Relatively new contributor InnerDemon took this truly impressive shot of the Washington Monument with an infrared lens on his Nikon D40.

Flickr user randomduck imagines the Washington Monument as a stake in the world's largest game of horseshoes. Besides who could possibly be playing this game (giants, God?), the other question of course is what would be on the other end of the pitch. The Capitol Dome, perhaps? Send your touched up photos of D.C. through the end of August to sommer (at) dcist.com.

Hey, DCist, I like fireworks and celebrating the birth of our country. Where should I go, what should I do, help a sister out. -DCist reader Sarah The best (and entirely serious) tip we have for you is of course to avoid the National Mall like it's going to give you cancer. It's a sea of tourists and transit trauma every year down there, but this year it's shaping up to be even worse, with...

Oooh! This photo is actually from January, but was just added to the DCist pool yesterday (I have to wonder if philliefan_99 waited until I was back doing Photo of the Day, knowing what a sucker I am for astrophotography). He stood at the base of the Washington Monument to take this shot of Comet McNaught, the brightest comet most of us have seen in our lifetimes. So bright, in fact, that it was able to shine through the smog and light pollution that usually obscures views from city centers (but which contributed to the gorgeous orange sky). It's almost amazing to note this was only a 1/4 second exposure.

The first thing we noticed when City-State's first full-length, Monument, arrived is that it looked very professional. Often with local bands the CDs look (and usually are) homemade. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just something that stuck out as a good sign. The CD cover has a picture of Vladimir Tatlin's unbuilt sculpture "Monument to the Third International," one of those things that pops up in architecture books from time to time, superimposed over the Washington Monument in a night photo of D.C.

Good morning, Washington. International politics watchers will no doubt spend their day today assigning meaning to the resignation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They'll speculate about the future of the Labour party, and draw conclusions regarding the possible consequences to the war in Iraq. Here at DCist, we toil with no such weighty topics. Nay, we'll spend our day fantasizing about what it must be like to live in a country where a massively...

There is a lot of great jazz coming up in the D.C. area throughout the next week, much of which is FREE, an important word here at DCist. Of course, the big news for jazz aficionados is the annual Big Band Jam, which began on April 20 and runs through April 29. We already told you about the service bands playing at Blues Alley, but there are many other shows to check out. Here are...

No offense to Mary Steingesser, the artist who attempted to capture the spirit of the District of Columbia for our official 2007 "State Easter Egg" this year. It's a perfectly lovely rendering of the White House on an egg, we suppose. But we just wouldn't be us if we didn't take a moment to point out that a) Using the White House as the symbol for D.C. is so 2004 (2005's egg was the Washington...

FRIDAY:

Now this is a killer photo. Flickr user zachstern's infrared filter and choice cropping gives this whole scene a surreal look, turning the Washington Monument from a washed out obelisk to an interestingly marbled and massive backdrop for the characters meandering somewhat strangely down below. EXIF.

What would D.C. look like if Congress took away the restrictions on building height? We’ve pondered this question before, and so have a lot of others. It’s one of the favorite parlor games of D.C.’s professional (and amateur) urban planners. The subject arose again in yesterday’s Post, when business columnist Dana Hedgpeth noted the recent comments of a land use expert questioning the wisdom and necessity of D.C.'s height limit. The expert cautioned that the...

Whoa. You know how we said we weren't looking for three hundred versions of the Washington Monument, unless you've got a really sweet one? This is a really sweet one. Flickr user dimples453 got serious on this obelisk. EXIF.

Okay, DCist readers, we give you the highly-anticipated and long-awaited winner of the First Annual DCist Halloween Costume Contest: Nacho Libre! Well done, sir. Nacho had a commanding lead from the start, and ended up with over 30% of the vote. Not terribly far behind Mr. Libre were the two adorable pandas from Georgetown with 25%, and Miss. E. Coli Spinach came in a respectable third, with 18% of the readership vote.

Last Sunday, Michael Grunwald took to the pages of the Post to discuss, and malign, the District's building height restrictions. His piece is an interesting read, but Grunwald's analysis of how the restriction has affected the city is fairly spotty, as Mark Jenkins notes in a City Desk post from yesterday. For one thing, it's difficult to say that height restrictions have created a space crunch in the city, when for so long so much...

Arguments over where to put new monuments on the National Mall have grown increasingly frequent and divisive as the front lawn has filled up. In 2003, Congress banned new construction on the Mall's cross-axis, beyond what had already been approved. In 2004, the National Museum of the American Indian and the World War II Memorial opened, and recently, a trapezoidal spot just northeast of the Washington Monument was chosen as the location for the National...

Today's photo is from Sunday's Darfur Protest and was taken by Flickr user JamesCalder. There is no camera or EXIF data for the photo. I spent a few hours lazing about in the sun in the area around the Washington Monument on Sunday, and I was surprised I didn't see or hear much from the march in that area. But there are plenty of photos in the DCist tag stream over at Flickr if you want to see more from the protest.

The little mustachioed Monopoly guy (Alfonso?) didn't get where he is today by making one little board game and selling it until folks got tired of seedy Atlantic City landmarks and quaint anachronisms (railroads!). No, the little robber baron knows people are suckers for the new, so he's made and sold version after version of the classic pasttime, from the celebrated original to GenericStateUniversityopoly, to the perennial chick magnet Lord of the Rings Trilogy Monopoly, which is a DCist favorite.

Courtesy of the Post's Metro columnist Marc Fisher, today we discover that there are any number of myths about the District that seem to be communicated from generation to generation without anyone interjecting to speak truth to them. Along with the myth that Georgetown residents stopped a Metro station from being built in the neighborhood in order to keep the poor and dirty masses out, Fisher points to these interesting D.C. myths: - Built on...

Mayor Returns Smoking Ban Unsigned: An unsigned-by-Mayor-Williams smoking ban now heads to the U.S. Congress, which has 30 days to review the legislation. Read: he didn't veto it, but he's allowing it to be enacted sans his signature. Williams stated in a Post article that he fears the ban would go "too far in restricting the freedom for individuals to dine and work where they please." Actually, we think it's smoking that does that, not...

A friend is getting a Dubya mask for Halloween, but I feel like there's so many other D.C. characters and entities that would make for better costumes. Any DC-themed costumes you can suggest? (Please help, otherwise I'm doomed to show up on the 31st as either Jessica Cutler or the Metro!) DCist was staring vacantly into our computer screen thinking of taking the week off of Ask. But when this question came in, we knew...

Well, at least it's not the Washington Monument again.