Washington Monument; August 29, 2004

I thought I’d better rush over to the Washington Monument before they closed it on September 7 to complete security improvements. It won’t open to the public until next spring. I wanted to take photos of the DC area while all the trees are still leaved out.

Usually, you can reserve tickets for the next day over the Internet but everything was booked. They have half the tickets reserved. The other half are first come, first serve at the kiosk at the Monument. I got there a little after 8 AM and got tickets for the first tour at 9 AM.

Later, I realized that I was looking out the windows of the Monument at about the same time of morning that the attack on the Pentagon took place on September 11. The observation deck is fifty stories high, 500 feet in altitude, and features a view of the three juiciest targets for terrorists: the Capitol, White House, and Pentagon. It seems to me pretty likely that Mohammed Atta peered out these windows to prepare for the attacks.

There are two windows on each of the four sides of the monuments. One window is blocked off on each side. They don’t advertise it, but cameras have been installed in those windows to keep an eye on DC.

It's quite a view.

They're tearing up the grounds so you have to approach the Monument through this cattle chute. Moooooo!

Here's what the Monument looks like with your nose pressed up against it. It's 55 feet across at the base with walls fifteen feet thick. There are 36,491 white marble blocks in the Monument, mostly from Baltimore, Maryland. The whole thing weighs 91,000 tons which is about as much as ten Teddy Kennedys.

North View: The White House. Here's the White House through my zoom lens. That top floor on the roof is hidden from the ground by the white railing. That's probably where the Secret Service lurks. Lafayette Park is behind the White House.

There was a lawyer last year who was driving past Lafayette Park when a police car pulled him over. The officer looked at his ID. The lawyer asked him what he was pulled over for. Was he speeding? "No, sir," said the cop. "You're radioactive." The lawyer had just had a cardiac stress test where he swallowed a radioactive substance which was detected by sensors as he passed the White House, wary of a dirty bomb, ie radioactive material wrapped around a conventional bomb.

Here's another shot of the White House showing the West Wing on the left. The Oval Office is hidden behind trees on the left, as it was meant to be. You can't see it at all from the street level.

Here's the big picture of the White House with the Ellipse in front of it. It would be somewhat hard for a novice suicide pilot to visually acquire it directly though he could use the Washington Monument and the Ellipse to walk his eyes onto his target. On one of the rooftops next to the White House, they have hidden surface to air missiles, maybe on the Old Executive Building to the left of the White House.

You're looking down 16th Street on the far side of the White House. A few weeks ago, about two blocks down 16th from Lafayette Square at the corner of K Street, within sight of the White House, two wild boys kidnapped at gunpoint a college coed coming home late from her waitressing job. They got another young woman three blocks down the street. Bad things happened. They wanted to use them to set up their own prostitution ring. The girls survived, kinda. The boys got caught.

The predators come out at night in DC. You don't want to be walking around on the deserted DC streets in the dark.

Looking northeast, to the right of the White House, you can see Constitution Avenue running left to right, where they carried Reagan to the Capitol a few months back. Those are government buildings on the far side of the street and museums of the Smithsonian on the near side. In the upper center you can see the tower of the Old Post Office, where you can get another splendid view of DC.

Here's a zoom look at the Old Post Office tower.

Looking east into the sun at the National Mall with the Smithsonian museums on either side. This is something like the view the suicide skyjacker pilot had the morning of Sep 11. The Capitol is obscured by the sun's reflection off the haze. The Pentagon was easier to see.

A zoom look at the Capitol, a mile and half away. That curvy thing behind it is RFK Memorial Stadium. When you drive by the Capitol, there are police on the street to make sure you're not driving a car bomb.

These are two of my favorite museums. The National Museum of American History is the closest. That's where Dorothy's ruby slippers are on display. The next museum over is the American Museum of Natural History. It's full of dinosaur bones and minerals. You can see the Hope Diamond there.

Moving clockwise to look southeast downriver at the Potomac. A park ranger told me that the Potomac here is salty from the backflush of the Chesapeake Bay but it seems unwise to give it the taste test. The big grey building next to the river is the Bureau of Engraving & Printing, the money factory, where they print all those twenty dollar bills of which I am so fond. You can buy uncut sheets of ones there. The dark red building on the near side of it is the Holocaust Museum. They have piles of shoes and suitcases on display which the Nazis harvested from Jews headed for the gas chambers.

Turning clockwise to look south at the Jefferson Memorial sitting next to the Potomac River.

Looking south at the Jefferson Memorial. Above the Memorial on the other side of the river is the Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). Runway 01 points at the bridges on the other side of the Memorial where an Air Florida Boeing 737, Flight 90 to Fort Lauderdale, crashed in a blizzard back in 1982. The wings were iced up. The jet stalled on take off and smacked into the 14th Street bridge, the one in the middle, killing five commuters, and went into the river close to the far bank. Five people survived out of the sixty-nine on board. Commuter Lenny Skutnik dived into the icy cold Potomac to fish one woman out before the chopper arrived for the rest. She was screaming for somebody to find her baby. Her baby was the last body recovered.

The Jefferson Memorial. There is a colossal statue of Jeff inside but it's way too early for any tourists to be gawking at it.

Looking southwest at the Tidal Basin. The cherry trees on its bank explode into a pinkish-white cloud for a couple weeks in spring. The Pentagon is that flat white thing on the far side of the river to the right of the bridge. This is about the view the suicide skyjacker pilot had as he made his left turn to impact on the far right back side. All three suicide pilots approached their targets in a left turn to keep them in sight from the left seat.

The Lincoln Memorial is next to the Tidal Basin.

Looking west at the Lincoln Memorial. The Arlington Memorial Bridge leaps the Potomac to the left of the Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery on the far bank.

A zoom look at the new National WWII Memorial.

A closer look at the Pacific side of the WWII Memorial with the little tiny people on it.

A look at the Lincoln Memorial.

Here's a detail of the far end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge leading into Arlington National Cemetery. If you follow the line of the road, it points to a mansion perched up on a hill. That's Robert E. Lee's former home.

Here's a closer look at Lee's mansion. His wife inherited the plantation from her family, the Custis family, who were related to George Washington. Colonel Lee received a letter here offering him command of the Union Army when the Civil War broke out. He slept on it, then rode his horse to the White House to tender his resignation from the Army. Virginia, where Lee's mansion lie, was a Confederate state. Lincoln could look into the Confederacy from the balcony of the White House.

Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, ordered to find a new cemetery for the Union dead, decided in a fit of spite to bury them on Lee's plantation. He had once served under Lee. He made a point of burying soldiers in Mrs. Lee's rose garden to make the place uninhabitable. He buried his son, First Lieutenant John Rodgers Meigs, there. And Meigs, himself, is buried at Arlington.

John F. Kennedy is buried at the foot of the hill directly below Lee's mansion. His brother, Robert, is buried to the left of him, marked by a plain white cross.

Looking northwest toward Foggy Bottom. The State Department is in the middle of all those buildings.

Another look at Foggy Bottom with The Ellipse to the right.

One more turn to the right to complete our 360 degree panorama. That's the White House on the left.

A painted panda outside the National Museum of American History. They are planting these fiberglass pandas all over DC, each one painted to suit the artist's taste.

Dupont Circle, the trendy part of town northwest of the White House.