When trying to write my last Looking Back post, I couldn’t find an interesting, great building to write about — so I decided to do a Looking Back post on the last 8 months or some of Looking Back posts. Here are some of the most interesting, strange, fascinating, and intriguing Looking Back posts I wrote.
>> The Holt House is one of those intriguing, I want to learn more, mysterious buildings that you love to learn about (or at least I do). What is coolest about hard to find, curious places like this is learning more about what they actually were used for, the state they are in now, and how people are working to preserve them.
>> The Mary Surratt boarding house is an unexpected historic building, now a Chinese restaurant, that if you walked by it, you would likely have no idea what you were walking by. Yet, it’s where the plans to assassinate Abraham Linoln where hatched.
>> Adas Israel Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in the city, but the dramatic photos of it being moved through downtown Washington in 1969 is what drew me to learning more about this building. The preservation of this building shows a dedication to the history of the building, as it’s now Lillian & Albert Small Jewish Museum. Strangely enough, the building my have to be moved again in a few years because of redevelopment of the area.
>> The Toutorksy Mansion is just a grand old building that you walk by and are in awe of. Learning the history of the building and its namesake, Basil Peter Toutorsky, a concert pianist, made the home more fascinating. Toutorksy survived the explosion of the battleship Empress Maria in 1916 and fought for the White Russians who tried to overthrow the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He died at the age of 93 in 1989, bequeathed the house to Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory of Music. Now the building is set to become the Congo’s embassy.
>> The Castle Gatehouse was a building I’d never heard of, but seems a bit romantic, a medieval-like building hiding behind the trees at the Georgetown Reservoir. It hints at some mysterious past, but instead its existence is rather practical: the Castle Gatehouse was built between 1899 and 1901 by the Army Corps of Engineers, as a pump station.
>> This is perhaps my favorite Looking Back post, as we took a look at a bunch of historic movie theaters in the D.C. area, remembering when the independent movie theater reigned queen, and even if a theater was a bit dingy, it had something going for it. Now that the West End Cinema has opened, perhaps we’re returning to the nostalgic past of indie theaters.
>> Perhaps you’ve figured out that I’m intrigued with mysterious buildings that are located in remote places. The National War College building is certainly one of them. On the Fort McNair campus, the Roosevelt Building, housing the National War College, is only about a hundred years old – in comparison to the over 200 year history of Fort McNair. The building has housed the Army War College, the Headquarters of US Army Ground Forces, and now the National War College, since its inception in 1947.
