Max Meltzer – We Love DC http://www.welovedc.com Your Life Beyond The Capitol Tue, 23 Mar 2021 09:52:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.9 The Insider’s Guide: Golfing in Golf Breaks Turkey http://www.welovedc.com/2013/06/26/the-insiders-guide-golfing-in-the-city/ Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:00:30 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=92578

With summer heat comes the heart of golf season. The AT&T National is this weekend in Bethesda, and August’s PGA Championships round out this year’s crop of majors. You can learn more about best iron set for beginner and where to play and find equipment while you are on the city just by visiting www.pineclubgolf.com.

I prefer other sports (and can’t sit through a minute of golf on TV), but on a hot summer day, far away from a river, ocean, or pool, the mood to compete at something that doesn’t involve running occasionally does strike. It did this past Sunday, when I visited the driving range at DC’s East Potomac Golf Course with my new uneekor eye xo.

DC has three public golf courses, unbeknownst to many, and there’s a good chance that you’ve passed at least one of them without realizing it. The East Potomac Golf Course sits on Thomas Jefferson’s marble doorstep within spitting distance of the Mall. The Rock Creek Golf Course is at 16th Street and Military, in the bloated belly-section of DC’s largest parks system. And the TimberStone Golf Course has called Benning Road home, just past where H Street ends, since 1939. see TimberStone Golf Course website to learn more about the course.

All three locations have 18-hole courses, a pro-shop, carts and clubs for rent, and extremely reasonable greens fees. Visit guys weekend golf courses and have fun winning with your friends. The East Potomac and Langston courses also sport driving ranges and full-service restaurants. My favorite thing about any of them, however, is the White Course at East Potomac. It’s an easy and fun 9-hole course with no holes longer than a par-4, making it perfect for a quick jaunt with friends, an outing with the family, or a practice session for beginners like myself. Check out Golf Holidays Direct for the Latest golf deal offers.

It may not be a world-class stretch of links, but for $13/person on weekdays and $16/person on weekends, it’s an absolute steal. Weekday greens fees at Congressional – where the AT&T National is hosted – sit somewhere around $165.

Note: The official DC website for these courses is awful (www.golfdc.com), but it does let you reserve tee times online, and provides some additional information for those brave enough to explore.

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Florida Avenue (9th to 15th Streets) in Photographs http://www.welovedc.com/2013/05/23/florida-avenue-9th-to-15th-streets-in-photographs/ http://www.welovedc.com/2013/05/23/florida-avenue-9th-to-15th-streets-in-photographs/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 20:00:01 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=91896

Washington DC is a great city. It’s a place where dense, immutable history is intersected with a whirling landscape of constant urban change. Restaurants open and close, green spaces appear and recede, events are inaugurated and ended, and this constant movement is threaded around a city bursting with social, architectural, and historical significance. It’s overwhelming at times, but it’s also what makes DC great. The old and the new collide. Cracks are opened. And within these cracks, residents can lose themselves in an endless space of exploration.

I’ve lived in the DC area for almost my entire life, and I’m perpetually finding new places to explore. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I’ll pick something – a neighborhood, a restaurant, a landmark, it doesn’t matter how large or small – and set out on an expedition. I don’t always stumble into the unforgettable, as I did along Florida Avenue, but more often than not, I see something new. These little exploratory experiences refresh me, and remind me that when you live in a city as diverse and expansive as DC, you can always find something you haven’t seen before.

The bell shaped stretch of Florida Avenue, between 9th and 15th streets NW, was recently the subject of my exploration. It’s a beautiful and meaningful strip of road, wedged between U Street and Columbia Heights, with a story to tell about the history of the city, the diversity of its population, and the speed of its change. My westward route started at the 9:30 Club, took me past The Blind Dog Cafe and the Florida Avenue Grill, stopped off at Pica Taco, and ended at Meridian Hill Park. I took a camera with me. Click below to see what I saw.

The 9:30 Club moved to its current location in 1996, when few people would have considered U Street a destination. This year, Rolling Stone ranked it the best “big room” music venue in the country.

The Blind Dog Cafe opened at 944 Florida Ave. a little over a year ago. You’ll know you found the right place, which is unmarked besides this clapboard sign, if you see a wooden outhouse and an old black wooden carriage on the small strip of lawn outside.

Everyone knows about Ben’s Chili Bowl, but the Florida Avenue Grill opened in 1944, 14 years earlier, and has been serving thankful, hungry patrons ever since. The diner’s walls are lined with photos of famous black visitors.

Pica Taco. This location opened in 2010 and is the sister location to the original in Columbia Heights.

Get the tacos. Or try El Toro Burrito Challenge

Meridian Hill Park is a place that many people know and love, but I just discovered. It’s one of Washington’s most stunning, and fascinating, public green spaces. Stumbling upon a place like this is unforgettable.

Just off of Florida Ave, the striking St. Augustine Catholic Church. The church’s founding group of black Catholics dates to 1858.

A mural from G. Byron Peck, painted in 1994.

See the entire photo set here.

See a map of the route here.

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The Insider’s Guide: Gatsby’s Grave http://www.welovedc.com/2013/05/07/the-insiders-guide-gatsbys-grave/ http://www.welovedc.com/2013/05/07/the-insiders-guide-gatsbys-grave/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 12:00:20 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=91596 IMG_8637 (photo by the author)

F. Scott Fitzgerald is buried in Rockville, MD. You heard that right. Francis Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise and one of the seminal American writers of the 20th century, is not buried in Paris, or New York, or Los Angeles, or even Princeton, but rests next to his wife, Zelda, and his daughter, Scottie, in a small, forgotten graveyard nestled between a thoroughfare and a train track in Rockville, MD.

The story of how he wound up there goes like this. Fitzgerald’s family had a long-standing history in the area. His father, Edward, grew up in Montgomery County, and F. Scott would often visit his Aunt, who lived near Rockville, as a child. He was named after Maryland’s own Francis Scott Key, composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a direct relative of his somewhere along the cousin spectrum. His father was buried in the family plot at St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, and by all accounts, that’s where F. Scott always planned to be buried. Yet, his connection to the city, and the state of Maryland, was significantly more ancestral than biographical. The only place Fitzgerald actually lived in Maryland was Towson, 50 miles from Rockville, where he rented a house to be by his wife’s side as she underwent psychiatric treatment, presumably for schizophrenia, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the early 30’s.

When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of 44, he was living in Los Angeles with a woman who wasn’t his wife, and had largely slipped out of the public eye. His last novel, Tender Is the Night, had been met with a mixed reception when it was published in 1934, and his new work, The Last Tycoon or The Love of the Last Tycoon, remained unfinished. Alcoholism, exhibitionism, and a generally provocative lifestyle were the traits commonly associated with his name.

This, in combination with his marriage to Zelda, a Protestant, and his self-acknowledged distancing from Catholicism, led the church to deny the Fitzgerald family’s request for F. Scott to be buried in the plot at St. Mary’s. Instead, when the body arrived from California, it was laid to rest at the Rockville Cemetery, a mile away, on a rainy day with little fanfare and only 20 or so people in attendance. 8 years later, when Zelda died, she was buried alongside her husband.

In 1975, after 35 years and a great deal of lobbying, the Catholic Church finally accepted the petition to have Francis and Zelda’s bodies re-interred at St. Mary’s Church, and they’ve remained there, largely unnoticed, ever since. Fitzgerald’s fame, critical reputation, and pop cultural status have been wholly restored, and most Americans with a high school diploma have read at least The Great Gatsby, but few Washingtonians have visited F. Scott’s gravesite, or even realize that it’s there.

Part of that can be attributed to location. I visited St. Mary’s and, while pretty, it’s not a destination in it’s own right. If F. Scott was buried at a place like Arlington National, he might be receiving scores of visitors each day. But I also see it as an indication of our tendency to worship characters over real people. F. Scott was a complicated individual with an untidy biography, and while a great historical character like Ernest Hemingway will be worshipped for years to come, much more so than his literary avatars Jake Barnes or Robert Jordan, it’s Jay Gatsby, the superior character, who will live on in an eternity of recognition, not Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

With Baz Luhmann’s The Great Gatsby only days from hitting theaters and interest in the book reinvigorated, now would be a great time to pay a visit the author’s grave. The St. Mary’s Cemetery is only a half-mile walk from the Rockville metro station, and there’s parking for those who drive behind the old church building. You’ll see these signs on a few lampposts when you approach the entrance to St. Mary’s from Rockville Pike.

It’s a quietly upheld custom to bring F. Scott a small bottle of liquor in addition to flowers. Don’t be surprised if you’re the only one there, as I was when I visited. It was a strange experience for me, and by no means a grand one, with cars whirring by glass buildings on one side, and trains chugging past on the other, but it was a trip I was glad to have made. I count more than one of his works among my personal favorites, and was happy to have paid a moment of respect to the literary tycoon sleeping eternally on Washington’s doorstep.

 

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF8&q=St.+Mary’s+Church,+Rockville+MD&fb=1&gl=us&hq=St.+Mary’s+Church,+Rockville+MD&hnear=St.+Mary’s+Church,+Rockville+MD&cid=0,0,7578321840798921550&t=m&ll=39.082922,-77.143378&spn=0.00583,0.013947&z=16&output=embed&w=650&h=350]

P.S. If you’re a taphophile (I can’t believe that word actually exists), or a “tombstone tourist” (as Wikipedia calls it), the cemetery where F. Scott was originally buried is just up the road. The Rockville Cemetery dates to 1738, is actually far larger and more beautiful than St. Mary’s, and is the final resting place of baseball legend Walter Johnson.

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The Insider’s Guide: Bear. Church. Rock? http://www.welovedc.com/2013/04/23/the-insiders-guide-bear-church-rock/ http://www.welovedc.com/2013/04/23/the-insiders-guide-bear-church-rock/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:24:24 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=91379

When I’m hit with an urge to get outdoors, you might find me cruising down Route 29 towards Shenandoah National Park. Shenandoah is the most extensive wilderness space easily accessible to DC, and encircles almost 200,000 untouched acres of Northern Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The places that I visit most often in the park are Old Rag Mountain, a challenging day hike with rock scrambling sections and breathtaking summit views, and Skyline Drive, a 105-mile undulating, ridge-hugging highway that’s best to drive in the spring or fall when tree colors are changing. I’m sure I’ll be returning to both spots soon, but on an early spring day I convinced a couple of friends to try a destination we’d never been to before.

We got a late start on the day (as we usually do), and overshot our intended noon departure time by almost an hour, sailing down Constitution Ave heading west out of the city. As anyone familiar with I-66 might expect though, we quickly found ourselves in traffic. How that road has backups on it seven days a week I’ll never understand, but it did eventually ease up and we decided that with the sun staying out well past 7:00, we’d still have time to complete the four hour hike as planned.

The drive to Shenandoah gets really nice when you thumb your nose at 66 and exit onto Route 29. At a gas station fittingly staffed by a clerk named “Ghas,” we grabbed supplies and rotated our drivers, which also meant the end of playing Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” on repeat, but Fleet Foxes’ “Blue Ridge Mountains” was a solid replacement. Driving down Route 29 reminded me just how quickly DC gives way to farmland, and we were lead past beautiful open country and farms with horses, bison, llama, sheep, cows, and goats. A few miles after turning off of 29, we reached the diminutive hideaway marked as the Graves Mill parking area, unloaded, and began the hike.

The route I had picked was described as an 8 mile out and back with constantly shifting landscapes: river scenery and small waterfalls to start, secluded nature and wilderness sightseeing in the middle, and then a steep ascent to the finishing point, a rocky outcropping with an unobstructed view known as Bear Church Rock. I still have no idea what Bear Church Rock means (the three words couldn’t have been produced by anything other than free association), but it turned out to be a great day hike. The trail was perfectly maintained, but because it’s lesser known than some of Shenandoah’s others, there was almost nobody on it the entire way.

We started along the Rapidan River, clear and cold and bubbling with small waterfalls and pools, and after about two and a half miles turned away from the river on the Jones Mountain Trail. A steep rise up the mountain took us through a green canopy of mountain laurel, and past clumps of snow that had held on from the cold week before. The chilly March and early April weather, finally broken by the sunny and beautiful Saturday we had picked, provided us with views through leafless trees all along on the ascent. A winter of beer and minimal exercise didn’t help our fitness, but we reached the gorgeous Bear Church Rock viewpoint in good time. After getting our fill of the view we turned around, taking the same route down, and it was a little after seven with the sun still out when we got back to the car.

On our way home, we stopped at a Five Guys for a post-hike mega meal and celebrated about a Hershey’s Ice Cream store being next door. After slamming the burgers we went into the Hershey’s, blaring with neon “open” signs, and with music still drifting out of a radio, but there was eerily nobody inside. We waited and waited, expecting a flustered employee to come out of a hidden bathroom or rush into the store, and at a particularly low moment we thought about serving ourselves and leaving money on the register. Finally, our biggest ice cream fanatic stormed out, and returned a few minutes later with a smile on her face and an apologetic owner in tow. Apparently he owned both the Five Guys and the Hershey’s Ice Cream store, but had forgotten to check if any gluttons had went for ice cream after their burger. We laughed it off with him, slammed sundaes without a pang of guilt, drove back into DC, and fell asleep immediately.

Getting There: To get to Shenandoah, and the launch point for this hike, you’ll really need a car. Here is the exact location of the Graves Mill parking area, which can only be found with coordinates and isn’t searchable by name on Google Maps.

[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&oe=UTF-8&q=38.43695,+-78.36710&ie=UTF8&hnear=0x89b44197a02a64a7:0xaa792b151445aa21,38.43695,+-78.36710&gl=us&t=m&source=embed&ll=38.529905,-78.340759&spn=0.429721,0.88028&z=10&iwloc=A&output=embed&w=640&h=400]

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The Insider’s Guide: Cherry Blossom Bliss http://www.welovedc.com/2013/04/11/the-insiders-guide-cherry-blossom-bliss/ http://www.welovedc.com/2013/04/11/the-insiders-guide-cherry-blossom-bliss/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:00:37 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=91090 IMG_5130

All photos by the author

There are a handful of great places to seek out Washington’s cherry blossoms but my favorite by far is Kenwood. The neighborhood, just around the corner from downtown Bethesda, is the insider’s paradise for a stroll through the flowers. I’d reckon that a visit on a spring day like the one I took this week could fill any hardened urbanite with suburban dreams.

Every year, a few days after their more famous siblings at the Tidal Basin start to show off, Kenwood’s cherry blossoms explode into life. With only three hundred some odd homes the densely packed twelve hundred Yoshino cherry trees blanket the neighborhood in stunning fashion. Weekend days during peak bloom can generate a crowd, but it’s nothing compared to the tidal basin’s overwhelming swell, and this is one of the best reasons to go to Kenwood. I think the place is also aesthetically more spectacular. The cherry trees in Kenwood are inescapable and encompassing, lining nearly every street and dotting nearly every front yard. They blanket the place in color, and in the neighborhood’s most magical spots the branches on each side of the road meet above your head forming tunnels of pink and white.

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I used to visit almost every year with my family and friends and it was great getting the chance to go back. I swung by twice this year, once when the blossoms were initially predicted to be in bloom, and again yesterday when they actually came out. Seeing the difference a week’s time made was an experience of its own.

During my first trip on a cold and windy day with the buds still tightly closed, I found the neighborhood almost deserted. A week later, with temperatures in the 80’s and the blossoms approaching their maximum brilliance, the place was reborn. There were bikers and runners, families and couples, grandparents and grandchildren. There were manicured dogs looking like they had just come from Westminster, and lemonade stands staffed by angelic but hard bargaining six year olds. The enviable custom homes, pretty on any day of the year, took on entirely new levels of desirability. Out of their depth homebuyers slobbering over for sale signs were a common sight.

If you want to take in one of Washington’s most unforgettable displays of natural beauty, Kenwood is a great choice. Bring a bike, a blanket, a friend, a girlfriend, a dog, a camera, all of the above, or none of them, and try to make it by this weekend. If you do, I’d venture to guess you’ll be back next year.

Mini Transportation Guide:

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By Metro: The fantastic Capital Crescent trail (which stretched from the Georgetown waterfront to Silver Spring) runs right across Kenwood’s doorstep, crossing the entrance to the neighborhood at Dorset Avenue and Little Falls Parkway. Take the red line to the Bethesda station, and then enter the Capital Crescent trail on Bethesda Avenue next to the Ourisman Honda dealership. The walk from the metro to the neighborhood entrance is a do-able mile and a half.

By Bike or Foot: If you’re feeling more adventurous and looking for a workout, you can pick up the Capital Crescent trail at its terminal point right under the Whitehurst Freeway in Georgetown, and bike or run along a scenic 6 mile route staying on the Crescent trail the entire way.

By Car: If you’re suffering from the effects of “last Friday night” and have a car, the drive from DC to Kenwood should take between 20 and 40 minutes depending on how northwest you start. Turn into the neighborhood from Little Falls Parkway, River Road, or Bradley Boulevard. This year, I was surprised to notice official “No Parking” signs on many of the streets, but after a little exploring I found a stretch of road that didn’t have the signs on Kenwood Avenue just west of the Brookside Drive circle. While walking around the neighborhood, I noticed a few more bits of pavement where neighborhood residents seemed to be welcoming vehicle encumbered visitors.

IMG_0912First visit, before the buds had bloomed…

IMG_5137One week later…

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IMG_5229A kind welcome…

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