asides

fuckyeahdc:

tsunamis:

abudak:

The Washington Monument, Capitol, and WWII memorial from the plane.

 Great shot! Now I wish I was flying in and out of DCA (to/from South Carolina) for Christmas; instead, I am loading and unloading out of the 1970s-era ghetto Greyhound station tucked in several blocks behind Union Station (with all due respect to the people who live near the DC Greyhound station, forgive the implications of that description, I think most, however, will agree it is the most apt; it isn’t the area, per se, that is ghetto, just the pathetic bus station).

fuckyeahdc:

highdynamicrange:

One and Two Logan Circle:

A magnificent old mansion on Logan Circle in Washington, DC, recently restored.

I like how the windows reflect the sky, but the high dynamic range turns the trees neon orange which adds too much of an impressionistic touch in an otherwise non-impressionistic photo. Still, not a bad shot and Logan Circle has come full circle and once again being recognized as the gem it is.

</fake art and urban history critic mode>

fuckyeahdc:

(via meghanreed)

wow …  you don’t think they’re bathing in the reflecting pool do you? Maybe the Potomac.

This is the probably the Tidal Basin bathing beach; see pictures at shorpy.com, such as this one involving measuring women’s bathing suits

pullmyfoamfinger:

booyahgrandma:

jakelodwick:

The designboom blog write about photographer Christopher Payne’s new book, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals,

a collection of large-format photographs of seventy institutions in thirty US states, shot between 2002 and 2008. massive state-funded mental hospitals, built to warehouse the mentally ill, were a feature of the american landscape for centuries. emptied out in the 1970s and 80s, they now sit abandoned.

I liked this comment, from “zenondudasculpture.com”:

While it may be true that many of these institutions now lay empty what is also true is that the restraints of straps and walls is now replaced by drugs.

via wintercheck, who said, “I could live in this room.”

You can thank President Ronald Reagan for closing those mental institutions in the 70s and 80s.  First closing state institutions as the Governor of California and then doing so nationwide the rate of homeless men and women in the country drastically increased.  With no federally-funded mental institutions these mentally ill people had no place to live except the streets.

Congress, after noticing an increase in crime and brutal murders, tried to pass legislation (crafted by none other than the late Sen. Kennedy himself) that would fix the problem but the newly-elected Reagan vetoed it.  This veto on August 13, 1981 was the end of federally-funded community health care centers.

And now, 28 years later, we still have more homeless people than we could ever care for — a large majority of which are, sadly, veterans.

I’m sure this is only one related issue among many, though I suspect a major one. It is disheartening to realize how obvious this result should have been in hindsight.

Scenes of Washington: Neon - Greater Greater Washington

theimpossiblecool:

Springsteen.

 …in back-in-the-day Asbury Park?