The Examiner reports on a $36,000 bill received by the organizers of the 2007 Capital Pride Festival from the D.C. police and the Emergency Management Agency, who say they need the money to pay for overtime and other costs for security incurred during the June festival. But the festival’s organizers and some members of the D.C. Council are questioning the charges, since the agencies waived these same fees last year and other annual parades, like…
Aug 02, 2007
Capitol Visitor Center to Open Fall 2008
It’s Washington’s own version of The Big Dig, but it’s much more secluded and (hopefully) isn’t filling up with water. It’s a multi-million dollar boondoggle that provides plenty of fodder for Congresscritters who wish to howl about federal spending. It’s the Capitol Visitor Center, which has been under construction since 2001, and has increased in cost from $265 million at that time to $573 million today—which isn’t too bad for a Federal project, right? The…
Aug 04, 2006
Vietnam Memorial Visitor Center Approved
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced yesterday that their proposed Visitor Center received the final go-ahead from the National Capitol Planning Commission, which oversees the approval and design of monuments and memorials in D.C. The privately funded, $100 million complex will supplement Maya Lin’s 1982 Memorial Wall, with exhibits and programs to tell the story of the Vietnam War and commemorate the soldiers who fought it. The Visitor Center will be built just west of…
Mar 20, 2006
Reader, Meet Author
MONDAY What a weekend of basketball! It’s going to be hard to come down from over the next few days, so step off gradually. Go check out Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody as they discuss Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball. It’ll help to augment your game IQ, which may be feeling a little shattered after all your Big 10 picks got spanked. Barnes & Noble,…
Jun 30, 2005
More ‘Midsummer’ this Summer
Editor’s Note: This preview of the Olney Theatre Center’s Summer Shakespeare Festival comes to us from Missy Frederick, who has joined our staff to write about theater. DCist appreciates, heck, even admires the egalitarian nature of the annual Shakespeare Theatre Free For All’s ticket giveaway madness that went down last month. The getting up early, the waiting in line for hours, then the returning to the amphitheater well in advance of curtain time only…
May 16, 2005
Brainiacs in the Capital
Damn D.C., we’re all smart. Today, the Post features our city’s burgeoning intellectual institutional base, which attracts the smartest folks from every corner of the globe to our “sausage factory for the opinions and ideas of the city’s internationalists” where “there can be nearly 200 … events on a given day …” Even The New York Times has acknowledged this “egghead quotient,” in a piece by Anne E. Kornblut, written around the time the Atlantic…