During COVID, the library set up operations outdoors you’d put a hold on a book, and when it arrived you’d give your name to a librarian sitting at a table outside the entrance and they’d go in and fetch it. I’ve checked out probably hundreds of books there and gone to a few yoga classes.

This library, which was renovated and expanded in 2012, has been a constant in my life as I’ve moved in and out of Washington over the decades. library still in use and was the last to be built with funding from Andrew Carnegie. The Mount Pleasant Public Library was built in 1925. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Ideal Woman?” C&P Telephone Exchange, Washington, D.C., ca. Apologies for the photo quality-there was a lot of glare on my phone, so I was blindly snapping away.įor extra credit, here’s a photo of women working at a C&P telephone exchange, from my post “Are You H.L. However, I did happen upon this old C&P Telephone building in Columbia Heights, a few blocks from Mount Pleasant, which is now a child care center. And the reward, a photo of a cell phone tower, didn’t particularly motivate me to persevere. A search for nearby cell phone towers proved unexpectedly difficult-the sites I looked at were all difficult to navigate, insecure, or lacking in information. With technological progress and the breakup of Ma Bell, telegraph and telephone stations have gone by the wayside. As part of this effort, the owners dump all over Meigs and the store’s builder, calling its architecture “undistinguished” and saying that “despite the fact that both men had practices based in Washington, DC, neither are considered preeminent in their field.” The review board agreed, saying, “Even if its architect had been recognized as a creative master, this is not a master work or a manifestation of artistry.” The store, which was the oldest Safeway on the East Coast, closed in 2019.***** government’s historic preservation office by the owners of a Meigs-designed Safeway in the Palisades neighborhood not to have the store designated as historically significant. When I looked him up, I found (after being sidetracked by the father-son civil engineering duo of Montgomery C. The 1941 building was designed by architect Carroll Meigs.

Mount Pleasant doesn’t have its own post office, so I photographed the one in nearby Cleveland Park. Know the names and locations of the Post Office, Telegraph and Telephone Stations, Public Library, City or Town Hall, one hospital of good standing, one hotel or inn, three churches, one Protestant, one Catholic, one Synagogue, and the nearest railroad.*** I’ll be back with additional pathfinding in a future post. The project started to balloon out of control, so I decided to scale my ambition back further and devote this post to one particularly labor-intensive requirement. Where possible, I chose buildings that were at least a hundred years old. At least, not in the overachiever way I decided to go about it, which included not just knowing about places in my community but photographing them and learning about their history. It’s not my actual neighborhood, but it was developed in the early years of the 20 th century so has a 1920s feel.**īeing a Pathfinder ended up being no simple task. (I rotate between the two.) I decided to focus my efforts, where possible, on the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant.

There’s a vastly improved set of requirements in the 1920 handbook, plus I’m in a different city-Cape Town, South Africa, then and Washington, D.C., now.

I came fairly close to success last time, but I failed the requirement to know all the public buildings and public schools in my city. I decided to take it slower this time, with one badge per post.įor my first badge, I chose Pathfinder, where you learn about your local area. My poor husband! Plus, at that torrid pace I tended to give up on requirements I could have fulfilled if I’d been willing to devote more time to them, like memorizing the names of all the cabinet secretaries. That was a bit much, what with all the knot tying and flower drawing and ironing and recorder playing. I’m on it! But I’m scaling back from my insanely ambitious effort last time, when I tackled all 36 badges over the course of just two posts. Renamed Scouting for Girls, it’s full of new badges, as well as revamped old ones with new, generally more realistic requirements. It’s been almost three years since I set out to earn badges from the 1916 Girl Scout handbook, How Girls Can Help Their Country.* In the meantime, a 1920 edition has been published.

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