DELAWARE (Wilmington, Dover, Rehoboth Beach)
Rehoboth Beach (pop 1,327). On the Atlantic Ocean, it is a popular regional vacation destination. Rehoboth Beach’s seasonal population expands to over 25,000 within the city limits and thousands more in the surrounding area in the summer. Of the 30 states with coastlines, the Delaware Beaches ranked number one for water quality in 2011.
Milton (pop 575). A manufacturing, resort and residential town, the town was settled in 1760. The high concentration of water-powered industries in Milton resulted in a concentration of leatherboard and vulcanized fibre mills. The town contains some distinctive architecture, particularly the Milton Town House, built in 1808, and the Milton Free Public Library, a Second Empire former schoolhouse built at Milton Mills in 1875. The Salmon Falls River drains Milton. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (Washington, DC) (pop 703,000)
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as D.C., is the capital of the United States. Founded after the American Revolution as the seat of government of the newly independent country, Washington was named after George Washington, the first president of the United States and a Founding Father. As the seat of the United States federal government and several international organizations, Washington is a significant world political capital. The city, located on the Potomac River bordering Maryland and Virginia, is one of the most visited cities in the world, with more than 20 million tourists annually.
The signing of the Residence Act on July 16, 1790, approved the creation of a capital district located along the Potomac River on the country’s East Coast. The U.S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress, and the District is therefore not a part of any U.S. state. The states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, which included the pre-existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria. The City of Washington was founded in 1791 as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land originally ceded by Virginia, including the city of Alexandria; in 1871, it created a single municipal government for the remaining portion of the District.
Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs increase the city’s daytime population to more than one million during the workweek. Washington’s metropolitan area, the country’s sixth largest (including parts of Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia), had an estimated population of 6.2 million in 2017.
All three branches of the U.S. federal government are centred in the District: Congress (legislative), the president (executive), and the Supreme Court (judicial). Washington has many national monuments and museums, primarily on or around the National Mall. The city hosts 177 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of many international organizations, trade unions, non-profits, lobbying groups, and professional associations, including the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organization of American States, AARP, the National Geographic Society, the Human Rights Campaign, the International Finance Corporation, and the American Red Cross.
A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973. However, Congress maintains supreme authority over the city and may overturn local laws. D.C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, but the District has no representation in the Senate.
I spent 4 days in Washington in 2009 and saw all the free Smithsonian museums.
Smithsonian Castle (Smithsonian Institution Building). It houses the Smithsonian Institution’s administrative offices and information center. The building is constructed of Seneca red sandstone in the faux Norman style (a 12th-century combination of late Romanesque and early Gothic motifs). It is built in the Gothic and Romanesque revival styles and is nicknamed The Castle. It was completed in 1855.
The National Cathedral (Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul) is an American cathedral of the Episcopal Church. It is of Neo-Gothic design and is the third-largest church building in the United States and the fourth-tallest structure in Washington, D.C. Over 270,000 people visit the structure annually.
Construction began in 1907 and ended 83 years later when the “final finial” was placed in the presence of President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
The following buildings are in the NM “Modern Architecture Buildings” series.
Capitol Hill.
White House.
IFC headquarters. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is an international financial institution that offers investment, advisory, and asset-management services to encourage private-sector development in less developed countries. Built in 1995-6, the 13-story building is 47m high.
The IFC is a member of the World Bank Group, established in 1956. The IFC’s stated aim is to create opportunities for people to escape poverty and achieve better living standards by mobilizing financial resources for private enterprise, promoting accessible and competitive markets, supporting businesses and other private-sector entities, and creating jobs and delivering necessary services to those who are poverty-stricken or otherwise vulnerable. The IFC is owned and governed by its member countries.
NGOs frequently criticize IFC for not being able to track its money because of its use of financial intermediaries. Another criticism is that IFC works excessively with large companies or wealthy individuals, for example, granting financing to a Saudi prince for a five-star hotel in Ghana.
Several hotels in Washington are in the NM “Hospitality Legends” series:
Omni Shoreham Hotel. In Northwest Washington, D.C., it was built in 1930. The third-floor suite (the Franklin D. Roosevelt suite), where he and his family stayed, was fully enclosed, and the glassed-in balcony can still be seen today. On 10 February 1964, The Beatles booked the entire 7th floor of the hotel for one evening.
A minority financial partner, Doherty and his family moved into an apartment (now Suite 870) in the hotel, along with their maid, Juliette Brown. A few months later, their maid died in the night, and a short time later, the Dohertys’ daughter, Helen, also died in the suite. The Dohertys moved out, and the apartment remained unoccupied for almost 50 years. The apartment was renovated into a hotel suite. But guests and hotel staff began to tell stories of faint voices, cold breezes, doors slamming shut and opening of their own accord, and televisions and lights turning on and off. The Omni Shoreham Hotel has named the room the “Ghost Suite.”
The Fairfax at Embassy Row Hotel. Opened in 1927, it operated as a combination transient/residential hotel and was the home of numerous government figures: Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, future President George H.W. Bush and his parents, Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, lived at The Fairfax when in Washington. Future Vice President Al Gore’s family lived in the three-bedroom suite on the hotel’s top floor for twenty years during his youth. It was the only establishment with kitchens within the limited temporary-housing allowance. The hotel was in bankruptcy from 1986 until 1988 and has had several owners since.
The Jockey Club restaurant opened in Fairfax in 1961 and has remained one of the city’s most famous watering holes for the rich and politically powerful for decades. The Jockey Club closed in 2001 and is now a breakfast room called The Capitol Room.
The Mayflower Hotel is a historic hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., the largest luxury hotel in the District of Columbia, and the longest continuously operating hotel in the Washington D.C. area. The Mayflower is known as the “Grande Dame of Washington”, the “Hotel of Presidents”, and as the city’s “Second Best Address” (the White House is the first)—the latter sobriquet attributed to President Harry S. Truman (a frequent guest at the hotel). However, today it is only a four-star hotel.
The Willard InterContinental Washington is a historic luxury Beaux-Arts hotel. HThe hotel is located at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. Its facilities include nmerous luxurious guest rooms, several restaurants, the famed Round Robin Bar, the Peacock Alley series of luxury shops, and voluminous function rooms. Room rates range from $425 to $8,000 per night.
The present 12-story structure opened in 1901. It closed in 1968 and sat vacant for years, but was restored to its turn-of-the-century elegance.
Washington, DC, Union Station. Opened in 1907, it is Amtrak’s headquarters and the railroad’s second-busiest station with an annual ridership of just under 5 million and the ninth-busiest overall in terms of passengers served in the United States. The station is the southern terminus of the Northeast Corridor, an electrified rail line extending north through major cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston and the busiest passenger rail line in the nation.
The façade stretches more than 600 ft (180 m), the waiting room ceiling is 96 ft (29 m) above the floor and stone inscriptions and allegorical sculpture in the Beaux-Arts style; expensive materials such as marble, gold leaf, and white granite from a previously unused quarry.
An intermodal facility, Union Station also serves MARC and VRE commuter rail services, the Washington Metro, the DC Streetcar, intercity bus lines, and local Metrobus buses.
In 1988, the original station renovated for use as a shopping mall. Today, Union Station is one of the busiest rail facilities and shopping destinations in the United States, and is visited by over 40 million people a year.
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MARYLAND (Baltimore, Annapolis, Frederick, Hagerstown)
Berlin (pop 4,485). Berlin started around the 1790s, and the name Berlin is believed to be derived from a contraction of “Burleigh Inn”, a tavern located at a crossroads. In the early 20th century, Berlin was known as a rest stop for travellers on their way to the coastal resort of Ocean City. Since the late 1980s, the town’s historic downtown has been revitalized to feature nearly two centuries of architectural heritage from three distinct periods.
Two major motion pictures have been filmed in Berlin’s historical downtown district: Runaway Bride (1999), starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts and Tuck Everlasting (2002), starring Sissy Spacek, Ben Kingsley, and William Hurt. Berlin was the home of the great racehorse Man o’ War (1917- 1947).
Ocean City. It is famous for its classic three-mile-long wooden boardwalk, listed as one of America’s ten best and known for its food. It dates back to 1902, when a wooden walkway was removed at high tide and stored on the hotel porches. In 1910, a more permanent boardwalk was created that was destroyed in the great storm of 1962, rebuilt to its current length, and in 2010, the old splintering and rotten boards were replaced with new wood, while retaining the old-fashioned feel. There are amusements, arcades, food, shopping, surfing and thousands of hotel, motel and condominium boardwalk accommodations.
I then drove north through southern New Hampshire and returned to Maryland.
Easton (pop 16,500). In 1916, the town erected a statue in honour of Confederate soldiers and 2011, added a statue of Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist, who was born into slavery in 1818 at Wye House plantation near Easton. Located on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, Easton was named one of America’s top 5 coolest towns to buy a vacation home by Forbes. Landmarks include Avalon Theatre, Trinity Cathedral, All Saints’ Church and Third Haven Friends Meeting, built in 1684 and still in use.
Kent Island is the largest island in Chesapeake Bay (31.6 square miles) and a historic place in Maryland. To the east, a narrow channel known as the Kent Narrows barely separates the island from the Delmarva Peninsula. On the other side, the island is separated from Sandy Point, an area near Annapolis, by roughly four miles (6.4 km) of water. At only four miles wide, the main waterway of the bay is at its narrowest at this point and is spanned here by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
The first English establishment on the island, Kent Fort, was founded in 1631, making Kent Island the oldest English settlement within the present day state of Maryland and the third oldest permanent English settlement in what became the United States—after Jamestown, Virginia (1607), and Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620).
Annapolis (pop 38,500) is the capital of Maryland. The Maryland State House, dating from 1779, is the oldest continuously used legislative building in the United States. It is topped by the country’s largest wooden dome, built without nails.
Situated on the Chesapeake Bay at the mouth of the Severn River, 25 miles (40 km) south of Baltimore and about 30 miles (50 km) east of Washington, D.C, the city served as the temporary national capital of the United States in 1783–1784. Annapolis is the home of St. John’s College, founded in 1696, and the United States Naval Academy, established in 1845, is adjacent to the city limits.
On September 18–19, 2003, Hurricane Isabel created the largest storm surge in Annapolis’s history, cresting at 7.58 feet (2.31 m). Much of downtown Annapolis was flooded, and many businesses and homes in outlying areas were damaged.
From Annapolis, I returned to Virginia to see Mount Vernon and Arlington.
BALTIMORE (pop 603,000, metropolitan 2.8 million). Baltimore is located about 40 miles northeast of Washington, D.C., The city’s Inner Harbour was once the second leading port of entry for immigrants to the United States. In addition, Baltimore was a significant manufacturing center. After a decline in major manufacturing, heavy industry, and the restructuring of the rail industry, Baltimore has shifted to a service-oriented economy. Johns Hopkins Hospital (founded in 1889) and Johns Hopkins University (established in 1876) are the city’s top two employers. Baltimore’s population is 63.7% Black, 29.6% White, and 2.3% Asian. 23.7% of the population lived below the poverty line, compared to 13.5% nationwide. Housing in Baltimore is relatively inexpensive for a large, coastal city of its size. The median sale price for homes in Baltimore in 2012 was $95,000. The homeless population exceeded 4,000 people in 2011, with the increase in the number of young homeless people being particularly severe.
Crime in Baltimore, generally concentrated in areas high in poverty, has been far above the national average for many years with high homicide rates (344 homicides in 2015 represented the highest homicide rate in the city’s recorded history and the second-highest for U.S. cities behind St. Louis and ahead of Detroit and as of 2018, higher than that of El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras). Drug use and deaths by drug use (particularly drugs used intravenously, such as heroin) are a related problem which has crippled Baltimore for decades. Among cities greater than 400,000, Baltimore ranked 2nd in its opiate drug death rate in the United States behind Dayton, Ohio. The DEA reported that 10% of Baltimore’s population – about 64,000 people – are addicted to heroin.
The 2018 surge in murders is related to the charges against six city police officers following the death of Freddie Gray after he fell into a coma while in police custody in April 2015. The Baltimore police were told they would be put in jail for making a bad arrest. So officers figured it out: ‘I can go to jail for making the wrong arrest, so I’m not getting out of my car to clear a corner,’ and that’s precisely what happened post-Freddie Gray. In Baltimore, “arrest numbers have plummeted from more than 40,000 in 2014, the year before Gray’s death and the subsequent charges against the officers, to about 18,000 as of November 2017, even as homicides soared from 211 in 2014 to 344 in 2015.
On February 7, 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed over 1,500 buildings in 30 hours, leaving more than 70 blocks of the downtown area burned. Damages were estimated at $150 million in 1904 dollars. By the beginning of the 1970s, Baltimore’s downtown area, known as the Inner Harbour, had been neglected, was occupied by a collection of abandoned warehouses, and was extensively redeveloped. The Baltimore Orioles baseball team uses Camden Yards, and the Baltimore Ravens football team uses M&T Bank Stadium next to Camden Yards. Baltimore has more public statues and monuments per capita than any other city in the US. Nearly one-third of the city’s buildings (over 65,000) are designated as historic in the National Register, which is more than any other U.S. city.
Mr. Trash Wheel, installed in 2014 at the mouth of the Jones Falls River, is a permanent water wheel trash interceptor to clean up the city’s polluted Inner Harbour. The wheel moves continuously, removing garbage and dumping it into an attached dumpster using only hydro and solar renewable power to keep its wheel turning. It has removed more than 350 tons of litter from Baltimore’s landmark and tourist attraction in its first 18 months, estimated as consisting of approximately 200,000 bottles, 173,000 potato chip bags and 6.7 million cigarette butts. Baltimore was the first city to use reclaimed waterway debris to generate electricity.
Fort McHenry is a historical American coastal pentagonal bastion fort located in the Locust Point neighbourhood of Baltimore. It is best known for its role in the War of 1812, when it successfully defended Baltimore Harbour from an attack by the British navy from the Chesapeake Bay on September 13–14, 1814. It was first built in 1798 and was used continuously by the U.S. armed forces through World War I and the Coast Guard in World War II. It was designated a national park in 1925, and in 1939 was redesignated a “National Monument and Historic Shrine”.
Lord Baltimore Hotel. It opened in 1928 in downtown Baltimore. Rooms cost $3.00 and up, and every 300 rooms have a radio. The 22-story hotel, designed in the French Renaissance style, has a dark red brick veneer with limestone trim, is 289 feet tall, and is topped with a tower/cupola featuring a copper mansard roof.
It closed in 1982, was renovated, and has seven separate owners.
Pedestrian Bridge at Inner Harbour. Over Jones Falls, the bridge links the waterside trail from Fells Point through Harbour East to the popular National Aquarium.
Baltimore Penn Station was constructed in 1911 and dates from the Gilded Age of architecture, when railroads were the economic force and train stations were monuments to civic pride. In the Beaux-Arts style, it features a granite and terracotta exterior and an interior of Sicilian marble walls, domed skylights of leaded glass, and Rookwood ceramic tiles.
It is about a mile and a half north of downtown and the Inner Harbour and is the eighth-busiest rail station in the United States regarding the number of passengers served each year.
Fort Frederick State Park. Big Pool. The fort is a large stone quadrangle on the Potomac River with bastions at each corner. Two of the three barracks buildings have been restored. The fort’s design conforms to the style developed early in the 18th century by Sebastien de Vauban, a French military engineer considered the father of modern fortification.[6]
Fort Frederick was built in 1756-57 by the colony of Maryland. During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the large stone fort was designed primarily as a refuge for area settlers. Between 1757 and 1758, small raids by Indians in nearby settlements caused settlers in the surrounding countryside to flee eastward. The fort was not designed to resist artillery, as it was correctly assumed that the French could not transport artillery to the remote location from the west. The fort served its purpose in 1763 during Pontiac’s Rebellion, but was never directly attacked.
During the American Revolutionary War, the fort was used as a prisoner of war camp from 1777 to 1783. As many as 1,000 captured British and German soldiers[7] were incarcerated there after the Battles of Saratoga (1777) and Yorktown (1781).
In the American Civil War, the fort was garrisoned at the outbreak of war and used as a gun emplacement to protect the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which paralleled the canal. However, the fort’s military usefulness ended by 1862.
