It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

The District

The Executive Mansion presented a kaleidoscope of colors.  The green room.  The blue room.  The red room.  The White House. 

Apart from a few very notable items (famous portraits of Kennedy and Washington, carved wooden eagles as table legs) one could have been in any antebellum mansion.  For being the world's most famous residence, further hyped by the throngs of people lined up to enter, it was a bit under whelming.   

The exact opposite was the Supreme Court, which, although just East of the Capitol, seemed lonely and begged for visitors.  A lecture in the actual Supreme Courtroom thoroughly explained the processes by which the nine most honorable people in the country select and hear cases.  The most appreciated nugget of information: the East Pediment features a relief of Confucius, a much needed tribute to Eastern traditions in a building (or even culture) that is otherwise firmly Greco-Roman. 

The most visible third of the conspiracy against the Federal government in 1865 was the assassination of Lincoln.  The other two were the stabbing of Secretary of State Seward and the planned attack on Vice President Johnson.  One has a mixture of emotions upon seeing the location of Lincoln's last consciousness at Ford's Theater, especially for such big Lincoln fans.  Railsplitter, Lawyer, Congressman, President, Emancipator, Unifier, Martyr.  Could the life of such a legend have ended any other way?

NYC...Take Three!

Stayed in SOHO this time around.  Made it to a Yankees game and the top of One World Trade Center.

Philly at Night

Gettysburg

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

                 Abraham Lincoln
                 November 19th, 1863

New England

From the Streets of Philadelphia