This afternoon, while wondering city streets looking for a Scarlet Oak to hug in honor of Arbor Day, we snapped this shot of no less than three National Park Service vehicles driven onto the grass of the park on 22nd and P Streets. Aside from the towering statue of Ukrainian poet, painter, political philosopher and all around bad-ass Taras Shevchenko, there is a scruffy bit of grass in the square. Now we know one…

It would be tough to have missed the news that this week is the 20th anniversary of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly every major media outlet in the world has run some kind of story looking back at the accident and the devastation it caused in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and beyond. Members of the Ukrainian-American community wrote in to tell us they will be holding a candlelight vigil tonight at…

For today’s Monument feature, we thought we’d do another installment in our Embassy Row series, which so far has included the Letelier/Moffitt memorial and statues honoring Ukrainian icon Taras Shevchenko and Czecho-Slovak president Tomas Masaryk. This time, though, we decided to ease off the obscure figures for a moment and talk about the Mahatma himself, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Now, is it really necessary for DCist to summarize his life and accomplishments? Of all the foreign…

When Ukranian president Viktor Yuschenko visited Washington last week, there couldn’t have been much doubt as to whether he would mention the statue at 22nd and P streets NW. Of course he would. And so he did at before a joint session of Congress: “In your city, there is a monument to the father of the Ukrainian nation, the great poet Taras Shevchenko, whose prophecy of the emergence of Ukraine of its own Washington, with…

(Editor’s Note: Washington is home to countless monuments, memorials and statues. Every Monday, DCist will feature one of the more obscure, unknown or off-the-beaten path sites around the city. We’ll hit the big memorials too, but we find that smaller monuments, like to Taras Shevchenko, James Buchanan and Temperance, tend to be more interesting.) Journalists have faced untold dangers and continue to risk their lives around the world to cover the news. And the…