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Anaedo, beautiful pictures, all of them. Thanks. But considering that this is post 9/11, how were you able to take such great pictures of landmarks without being accosted by the law? If you were Arab looking, do you think you could have taken those pictures without attracting attention to yourself? You must live around the area.
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quote:Originally posted by Ednut: Anaedo, beautiful pictures, all of them. Thanks. But considering that this is post 9/11, how were you able to take such great pictures of landmarks without being accosted by the law? If you were Arab looking, do you think you could have taken those pictures without attracting attention to yourself? You must live around the area.
Oga Ed,
Thanks for the positive reinforcements oo.
To answer your question, I suppose if one went about suspiciously, then he/she will attract unnecessary heckling. As you have seen from some of the pictures, these sites are tourist attractions, and so quite a considerable number of people are visiting these places at any particular time.
LOL, but yeah, there is still some kind of remote monitoring and behind-the-scenes security until you hit the "ghetto" areas of DC.
Oh, by the way, it didn't make much of a difference if you looked Middle-Eastern. I saw some Middle Eastern men and their wives and children examining these landmarks. And no, I don't look like Aboki Daud or some of his terrorist chums.
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On our way to the White House (and by the way, we are going through the rear side of the President’s Mansion) we came to the street directly behind the White House grounds.
I took this picture as I was standing inside the little park/garden at the back of the Whitehouse. The Whitehouse was behind me and I was looking out at the street directly behind the White House garden.
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It was calm and peaceful in the park/garden behind the White House. So peaceful was it that when I sat down on one of the park benches over there, park squirrels came up to me and fed directly off my palm. Feeding over, they hesitantly pitter-pattered off in different directions.
Just then, I spotted a statue erected to President Andrew Jackson.
More nearly than any of his predecessors, Andrew Jackson was elected by popular vote; as President he sought to act as the direct representative of the common man.
Born in a backwoods settlement in the Carolinas in 1767, he received sporadic education. But in his late teens he read law for about two years, and he became an outstanding young lawyer in Tennessee. Fiercely jealous of his honor, he engaged in brawls, and in a duel killed a man who cast an unjustified slur on his wife Rachel.
Jackson prospered sufficiently to buy slaves and to build a mansion, the Hermitage, near Nashville. He was the first man elected from Tennessee to the House of Representatives, and he served briefly in the Senate. A major general in the War of 1812, Jackson became a national hero when he defeated the British at New Orleans.
In 1824 some state political factions rallied around Jackson; by 1828 enough had joined "Old Hickory" to win numerous state elections and control of the Federal administration in Washington.
In his first Annual Message to Congress, Jackson recommended eliminating the Electoral College. He also tried to democratize Federal officeholding. Already state machines were being built on patronage, and a New York Senator openly proclaimed "that to the victors belong the spoils. . . . "
Jackson took a milder view. Decrying officeholders who seemed to enjoy life tenure, he believed Government duties could be "so plain and simple" that offices should rotate among deserving applicants.
As national politics polarized around Jackson and his opposition, two parties grew out of the old Republican Party--the Democratic Republicans, or Democrats, adhering to Jackson; and the National Republicans, or Whigs, opposing him.
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other Whig leaders proclaimed themselves defenders of popular liberties against the usurpation of Jackson. Hostile cartoonists portrayed him as King Andrew I.
Behind their accusations lay the fact that Jackson, unlike previous Presidents, did not defer to Congress in policy-making but used his power of the veto and his party leadership to assume command.
The greatest party battle centered around the Second Bank of the United States, a private corporation but virtually a Government-sponsored monopoly. When Jackson appeared hostile toward it, the Bank threw its power against him.
Clay and Webster, who had acted as attorneys for the Bank, led the fight for its recharter in Congress. "The bank," Jackson told Martin Van Buren, "is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!" Jackson, in vetoing the recharter bill, charged the Bank with undue economic privilege.
His views won approval from the American electorate; in 1832 he polled more than 56 percent of the popular vote and almost five times as many electoral votes as Clay.
Jackson met head-on the challenge of John C. Calhoun, leader of forces trying to rid themselves of a high protective tariff.
When South Carolina undertook to nullify the tariff, Jackson ordered armed forces to Charleston and privately threatened to hang Calhoun. Violence seemed imminent until Clay negotiated a compromise: tariffs were lowered and South Carolina dropped nullification.
In January of 1832, while the President was dining with friends at the White House, someone whispered to him that the Senate had rejected the nomination of Martin Van Buren as Minister to England. Jackson jumped to his feet and exclaimed, "By the Eternal! I'll smash them!" So he did. His favorite, Van Buren, became Vice President, and succeeded to the Presidency when "Old Hickory" retired to the Hermitage, where he died in June 1845.
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Then from the Park, I looked at the White House (the back view)
The White House The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the President of the United States of America.
The White House is a white-painted, neoclassical sandstone mansion located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. (38°53′51″N, 77°02′12″W). As the office of the U.S. President, the term "White House" is often used as a metonym for the president's administration. The property is owned by the National Park Service and is part of President's Park.
An image of the White House is on the back of the $20 bill.
Note well the pavement at the bottom of the picture which marks out the edge of the street on which the White House stands.
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When I reached that brick-red demarcatiion, I looked to my left...
Cont'd:
History: The White House was built after Congress established the District of Columbia as the permanent capital of the United States on July 16, 1790. President George Washington helped select the site, along with city planner Pierre L'Enfant. George and Martha Washington lived in a home on the Pawmunkey River called the White House and named the new Washington residence after it.
The architect was chosen in a milad competition, which received nine proposals. James Hoban, an Irishman, was awarded the honor and construction began with the laying of the cornerstone on October 13, 1792. The building Hoban designed was modeled on the first and second floors of Leinster House, a ducal palace in Dublin, Ireland, which is now the seat of the Irish Parliament. Contrary to widely published myth, the North portico was not modelled on a similar portico on another Dublin building, the Viceregal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin, residence of the President of Ireland). Its portico in fact postdates the White House portico's design. The decision to place the capital on land ceded by two slave states—Virginia and Maryland—ultimately influenced the acquisition of laborers to construct its public buildings. The D.C. commissioners, charged by Congress with building the new city under the direction of the president, initially planned to import workers from Europe to meet their labor needs. However, response to recruitment was dismal and they soon turned to African Americans, both slave and free, to provide the bulk of labor that built the White House.
Construction of the White House was completed on November 1, 1800. Over an extremely slow 8 years of construction, $232,371.83 was spent. With inflation, this would be approximately equivalent to $2.4 million today.
The front and rear porticoes were not part of the structure until about 1825.
The building was originally referred to as the Presidential Palace or Presidential Mansion. Dolley Madison called it the "President's Castle." However, by 1811 the first evidence of the public calling it the "White House" emerged, because of its white-painted stone exterior. The name Executive Mansion was often used in official context until President Theodore Roosevelt established the formal name by having "The White House" engraved on his stationery in 1901.
John Adams became the first president to take residence in the building on November 1, 1800. In 1814 during the War of 1812, much of Washington, D.C., was set alight by British troops (invading from what would later become Canada), and the White House was gutted, leaving only the exterior walls standing. Popular legend holds that during the rebuilding of the structure white paint was applied was to mask the burn damage it had suffered, giving the building its namesake hue. This is, however, unfounded as the building had been painted white since 1798. Of the numerous spoils taken from the White House when it was ransacked by British troops, only two have been recovered — a painting of George Washington, rescued by then-first lady Dolley Madison, and a jewelry box returned to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 by a Canadian who said his grandfather had taken it from Washington. The majority of bounty was lost when a fleet of British ships en route to Halifax sank off Prospect during a storm. HMS Fantome was leading a convoy of ships back to Halifax when the vessels sank in a storm on the night of 24 November 1814. [1]
The White House was attacked again on August 16, 1841, when U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill which called for the reestablishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members rioted outside the White House in what was (and still is, as of 2005) the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
Like the English and Irish country houses it resembled, the White House was remarkably open to the public until the early part of the twentieth century. President Thomas Jefferson held an open house for his second inaugural in 1805, when many of the people at his swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol followed him home, where he greeted them in the Blue Room.
Those open houses sometimes became rowdy: in 1829, President Andrew Jackson had to leave for a hotel when roughly 20,000 citizens celebrated his inauguration inside the White House. His aides ultimately had to lure the mob outside with washtubs filled with a potent cocktail of orange juice and whiskey. Even so, the practice continued until 1885, when newly elected Grover Cleveland arranged for a presidential review of the troops from a grandstand in front of the White House instead of the traditional open house.
Jefferson also permitted public tours of his home, which have continued ever since, except during wartime, and began the tradition of annual receptions on New Year's Day and on the Fourth of July. Those receptions ended in the early 1930s.
The White House remained open in other ways as well; President Abraham Lincoln complained that he was constantly beleaguered by job seekers waiting to ask him for political appointments or other favors as he began the business day. Lincoln put up with the annoyance rather than risk alienating some associate or friend of a powerful politician or opinion maker.
The White House was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 19, 1960.
It is also one of the first government buildings in Washington that was made wheelchair-accessible, with modifications having been made during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who needed to use a wheelchair as a result of polio. In the 1990s Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the suggestion of Visitors Office Director Melinda N. Bates, approved the addition of a ramp in the East Wing corridor. It allowed easy wheelchair access for the public tours and special events that enter through the secure entrance building on the east side. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman added a much-discussed balcony to the South Portico at the second-floor level. Not long after the balcony was constructed, the building was found to be structurally unsound, and in imminent danger of collapse. President Truman and family moved to Blair House across the street while the White House was renovated. The old interior was dismantled, leaving the house as a shell. It was then rebuilt using concrete and steel beams in place of its original wooden joists. Some modifications were made, with the largest being the repositioning of the grand staircase to open into the Entrance Hall, rather than the Cross Hall, as was the case previously. President Truman and family moved back into the White House on March 27, 1952.
Though the structural integrity of the building had been corrected in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the interior, as a result of decades of poor maintenance and then the process of removal and reinstatement, had been allowed to deteriorate. Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John F. Kennedy (1961–63), remodeled the interior of many rooms with decors inspired by its early nineteenth-century appearance, often using high-quality furniture that had been put in storage in the basements and forgotten about. Many of the antiques, fine paintings, and other improvements of the Kennedy period were given to the White House by rich donors, including Jane Engelhard, Jayne Wrightsman, the Oppenheimer family of South Africa, and other moneyed individuals. The Kennedy decor, much admired then as now, had an imperial Francophile air that was the result of the decorator Stephane Boudin of Jansen, the eminent Paris design company that had planned and/or executed decors for the royal families of Belgium and Iran, the Duchess of Windsor, and Nazi Germany's Reichsbank. The rooms that had a more early American appearance were decorated by Boudin but heavily influenced by the millionaire museum founder Henry Francis du Pont.
Since then, every presidential family has made changes to the decor of the White House, some subtle, others more profound and controversial. In the 1990s, for example, President and Mrs. Clinton had some of the rooms recast by Arkansas decorator Kaki Hockersmith; the result, though presumably inspired by the Kennedy years, was unveiled to general derision
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When Obasanjo came here as a guest to the President, he was quartered in this building here immediately behind the White House, overlooking the White House Park/Garden.
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My examination of the White House being concluded, I looked gingerly around me. My fair companion was no where to be found. Scores of people surged around to partake of the sights that I had just seen. Then came a voice from the blue in accents grave and sonorous:
“Anaedo, even though thou hath seen these sights over 10 years ago, yet did thou not hearken diligently unto my voice even to record all that thou didst see. Now, for that error hath I permitted you an opportunity to see these sights today. Behold, I have summoned my faithful servant, thy Guide, to get an eye salve from Me with which she shall rub on thine eyes. Yea, so doeth I—even I—so that these images mightest forever be burned into your inner man. Bind up the visions which thou hath seen. Hold steadfastly unto it, and when I command thee, thou shalt make it plain unto the ends of the earth. Go forth in peace, for my grace is sufficient for thee!”
And as soon as these words were over, I was transported much against my will out of the Ancient City of Washington.
Photography is a graet work of art in many ways. But, don't you think this would make a good documentary with your picture and a brief profile of your humble self in sharing with us your fantastic adventure? Just my take!
Posts: 24 | From: Ankara, Turkey | Registered: Apr 2004
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However, I am not really interested in making an official documentary about this. Some of these pictures are well-known to many people (all around the world) as they have seen them not only in movies or documentaries, but also gracing the pages of other printed media. I am doing this just as a hobby and more over to indulge my waning capacity for fiction-writing. Sometimes I really just want to pick up my pen and scribble down all manner of thoughts, or perhaps, get lost in the vivid world of my imagination. Unfortunately, the tear and wear of daily living limits my time and effort at such creative writing.
Furthermore, by posting these pictures here, I have voluntarily given up my right of ownership to them. Anyone who wants to copy and use these pictures elsewhere is perfectly free to do so. LOL, I demand no special recognition/citation for such situations. As a matter of fact, if BNW Management wishes to copyright these pictures, I am hereby authorizing such. And come to think of it, I grin to myself when I muse on the possibility of posting some pictures I might have taken in Nigeria or other parts of the world. These pictures are freely given for our entertainment.
I simply count myself privileged to be part of this community. The Great Forum is for serious matters, so I have taken to relaxing here in these quieter parts. On that score, let us not burden ourselves with the rigors that come with documentaries ( no matter how semi-formal), but rather, let us enjoy these pictures solely for their aesthetic appeal.
I hope I have adequately answered your kind suggestion.
1. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to name this thread "a picture and a thousand words" since each picture is accompanied with a long educative thesis?
2. Are you for real when you say "your fair friend" addressed you as "Anaedo"? Isn't Anaedo a simple handle you created to mask your real life ID here like the rest of us?
Just curious, but keep trucking!
___________________ God bless Chukwuma Nzeogwu! Posts: 104 | From: Utrecht, The Netherland | Registered: Dec 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Nwa Asaba: Anaedo: Nice job but two questions:
1. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to name this thread "a picture and a thousand words" since each picture is accompanied with a long educative thesis?
2. Are you for real when you say "your fair friend" addressed you as "Anaedo"? Isn't Anaedo a simple handle you created to mask your real life ID here like the rest of us?
Just curious, but keep trucking!
1)I would not have added all those historical tidbits that came with the Washington DC pictures if I didn't consider them necessary. Other pictures which I have posted were not (and needed not to be) accompanied by many words.
2)Ok here's what was going on. The narrative that you find sandwiched into the overall writeup was mostly symbolic. The sequence of events was nearly accurate. However, I took a literary licence with regard to names, or details of conversations held. I admit though that the hyperbolic tone of the narrative was purely intentional. Moreover, I had already specified that I did this to engage my fiction-writing skills. I thought this was pretty obvious, so I remain baffled if you couldn't perceive the narrative to be the product of my imagination.
Thanks for the compliments though. Kai, ok, no more dogon turenchi.. I'll stick to posting slideshows(if need be)..
Topic Closed
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I thought this was pretty obvious, so I remain baffled if you couldn't perceive the narrative to be the product of my imagination.