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Visiting a D.C. You’ve Never Seen Before

Sherri Lang Weil

As a Catholic University student in the early 1970s, Sherri Lang Weil would ride the No. 80 bus with a friend down North Capitol Street to Union Station. From there, they’d walk to a Smithsonian museum, check out new exhibits and then find a spot, often in a park near the White House, for a picnic lunch.

Weil says she was particularly fond of the National Portrait Gallery, where the paintings of legendary figures “made history real” for her. While the exhibits held a certain magic, the Portrait Gallery’s National Historic Landmark building, located at 8th and F streets in Northwest, was badly in need of repair, she says. And the neighborhood around it — well, there really wasn’t much of one.

The Portrait Gallery was closed in 2000 for a $300 million renovation. By the time it reopened in 2006, Weil was working at the museum, whose surrounding neighborhood she no longer recognized. Hired as the Portrait Gallery’s director of development and external affairs, she found that the area, now known as Penn Quarter, was filled with new hotels, theaters, restaurants, art galleries and trendy shops.

Weil says she feels very lucky to be working in such a vibrant D.C. neighborhood, whose revitalization started after the MCI Center (now the Verizon Center) opened as the arena of basketball’s Washington Wizards and hockey’s Washington Capitals in 1997.

Catholic University graduates who haven’t been back to the city in a while will find that it has changed quite a bit in the past 10 or 15 years, says Rebecca Pawlowski, communications director for Destination DC, a nonprofit organization that markets Washington as a global convention and tourism destination.

“There’s been a lot of development in D.C. in recent years, which has caused a big shift in tourist attractions,” Pawlowski says. “The National Mall is still a great draw for tourists, but now visitors are popping off the Mall to check out neighborhoods where there’s a lot more to do and see these days.”

For example, the National Portrait Gallery’s Penn Quarter neighborhood has seen the opening of several new museums that, unlike the Smithsonian museums, charge admission:

• The International Spy Museum features the largest collection of spy-related artifacts ever placed on public display, plus interactive experiences in which visitors assume the roles of covert agents and are faced with puzzles, tasks and motion simulators as they work through a mission to intercept a secret arms deal involving a nuclear device.
  
  
• The Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences features exhibits that bring current science and scientific issues to life.
  
  
• The National Museum of Crime & Punishment is a “must-see for CSI fans” according to “Good Morning America,” and a site where visitors can check out a modern-day capital-punishment room, test their Wild West shooting skills, crack a safe, try to hack a computer and experience the high-speed car-chase simulator used in the training of policemen.
  
  
• Calling itself the world’s most interactive museum, the Newseum and its 15 theaters and 14 galleries is the place where five centuries of news history meet up-to-the-second technology. Not just for news junkies, the museum features a 4-D immersive cinema, a powerful display of Pulitzer Prize-winning photos, the actual Montana cabin of the Unabomber and a display of how journalists and G-men tracked him down, a theater showing the history of sports reporting, and a tribute to 9/11. The latter includes the twisted wreckage of the broadcast antenna that crowned the World Trade Center and newspaper headlines from around the world announcing news of the attack.

Alumni who are planning to visit the campus this summer, perhaps with their soon-to-be-college-age children, will find that the Columbia Heights neighborhood and the U Street corridor, both in Northwest, have also changed dramatically. U Street, a nexus for jazz and rock clubs, is “the newest and hottest place in town for getting out on weekends after dark,” according to The New York Times. In Columbia Heights, the refurbished Tivoli Theatre, a former movie palace built in 1924, reigns like a king over 14th Street. It is now the home of the GALA (Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos) Hispanic Theatre, a national center for Latino performing arts.

One of the city’s newest additions, the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, opened in December 2008. The center, which serves as the main entrance to the U.S. Capitol, is located underground on the east side of the famed white building with its stately dome. Designed to make the Capitol more accessible and secure for its millions of annual visitors, it reflects Washington’s status as a political powerhouse. In March 2009, Catholic University held a reception at the center for 300 alumni, and just before it started, CUA staffers spotted President Barack Obama at the end of a hallway on his way to another event.

In recent years the Smithsonian has expanded its free offerings with the opening of new museums and the renovation of existing spaces on the Mall. The Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art was unveiled in 1998; the National Museum of the American Indian opened in 2004; and the National Museum of American History reopened in November 2008 after a major renovation. The National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Fairfax County, Va., opened near Dulles Airport in 2003. Its huge collection includes rare World War II fighters, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, an Air France Concorde supersonic airliner and the Enola Gay B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian




The National World War II Memorial

Alumni with an interest in those who have defended the United States in time of war will enjoy visiting several monuments that have opened in the past 13 years. The Air Force Memorial adjacent to Virginia’s Arlington Cemetery, with its three stainless steel spires that soar 270 feet skyward, has become a landmark on the Washington skyline. The National World War II Memorial, located at the east end of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, honors the 16 million who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, the more than 400,000 who died, and the millions who supported the war effort from home.

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, located along the cherry tree walk on the edge of the Tidal Basin, traces the 12 years of FDR’s presidency by means of a series of waterfalls, outdoor rooms and sculptures capturing the harrowing days of the Great Depression and World War II and depicting the president in his wheelchair.

For Catholic University graduates who are theatergoers, the city offers a level of entertainment that is “on par with New York and Chicago,” says Ann Norton, B.A. 1975, executive director of the Washington Stage Guild.

The Washington area ranks as the national leader in diversity of theater productions, according to Linda Levy Grossman, president and CEO of the Helen Hayes Awards, the D.C. area’s version of the Tony Awards. The District features “an extraordinary range” of regional, classical, musical, contemporary and edgy theater, she notes.

Grossman says that in 2009, 76 theater companies were producing shows in the D.C. metropolitan area. Of those, more than half were started in the past 15 years. The city’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, which The Wall Street Journal has called “the nation’s foremost Shakespeare company,” completed its new 775-seat Sidney Harman Hall across from the Verizon Center in 2007 and in the past year has brought Academy Award winners Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” movies) and Helen Mirren (Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 movie “The Queen”) to its stage as performers. Newer D.C. companies include Solas Nua, part of the only contemporary Irish arts organization in the United States, and the progressive Jewish Theater J, both in D.C.’s DuPont Circle neighborhood, and the Washington Improv Theater in Penn Quarter.

Alumni whose interests lean more toward sports than the arts might want to take in a major-league baseball game at Nationals Park in Washington’s newest neighborhood: Capitol Riverfront. Opened in March 2008, the ballpark is located 1.5 miles south of the U.S. Capitol. For alums who are planning to visit D.C. this summer, Nationals Park is a great place to watch the hometown team.

For Marion Gosney, CUA director of alumni relations, the revitalization of D.C. mirrors the changes that have occurred on campus in the last decade. Newer buildings like Opus Hall and the Edward J. Pryzbyla University Center have helped to fill out the campus. “Alums who haven't been back in awhile will find that both Washington and Catholic University have expanded their offerings,” says Gosney, who graduated from CUA in 1975. “They’ve become a city and a campus that are in sync with each other.”