Slobot About Town LXXXVI:
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Slobot goes to Washington, DC; pt. 02!
The Washington Monument, like the gnomon of a sundial, stretched a long shadow, |
a shadow in which Slobot slept...
until rattled awake by the rumble and thunder...
of a whirlybird!
A startled Slobot sprinted to the far side of the Tidal Basin.
Beyond Slobot sat a memorial to the third President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson! |
The Memorial's cornerstone would be laid by the thirty-second President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1939. |
The Memorial would be dedicated just in time for Jefferson's 200th birthday, April 13, 1943. |
Between the columns of the Memorial Slobot saw the silhouette of a man...
a 19-foot-tall man...
a man cast in glorious bronze!
Thomas Jefferson!
The original Jefferson was not of bronze, but of plaster painted bronze because copper, the principal component of bronze, was, at the time, in wartime short supply. |
It would not be until 1947 that a bronze Jefferson would be erected. Today Jefferson peers from between columns at his former home... |
the Executive Mansion of the United States...
the White House!
The White House was built between 1792 and 1800. John Adams, the second President of the United States of America, would be its first resident. |
In the creeping darkness Slobot could see the Jefferson Memorial,
she shone in the night.
Slobot meandered the tenebrous thoroughfares of the District. On Pennsylvania Avenue Slobot found the Willard InterContinental Washington, where Bob Fosse was staying at the time of his fatal heart attack on September 23, 1987. |
At daybreak Slobot found and followed a pack of Segways.
They led Slobot to a real bulldog of a building. Brutalist in design, it is appropriately named for J. Edgar Hoover. |
The J. Edgar Hoover Building is, among other things, home to Assistant Director Walter "Skinman" Skinner and Special Agents Fox "Spooky" Mulder and Dana "Starbuck" Scully. |
Nearby Slobot spotted the National Archives, home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. |
The Constitution of the United States established a Supreme Court.
But the Supreme Court did not have a building of its own until 1935.
Today the Supreme Court Building sits one block east of the Capitol. Stay tuned for the next edition of Slobot About Town, in which Slobot goes to the Smithsonian! |