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A colorful house dedicated to teaching and encouraging art in the community. Features a small art gallery showing exhibits of works by local youths.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Tiny local gem of a movie theater in a converted townhouse. Features a bar and screenings of indie and other obscure films.
Housed in the beautiful former Embassy of Mexico, the cultural center has a nice collection of Mexican artwork, and puts on frequent classical and other musical performances, as well as film screenings, lectures, and other events. The gallery and many of the events are free but some require hefty donations.
GALA stands for Grupo de Artistas Latino Americanas. The Tivoli Theatre was the grandest of D.C.'s early 20th-century movie palaces, built in ornate Italianate Renaissance style for a whopping one million dollars in 1921. Today the theatre is mixed use, with the important use being the small stage for GALA. Most of GALA's performances are in Spanish, with English subtitles, and range from classical Spanish drama to contemporary Latino theater. They also put on frequent non-dramatic performances of dance, music, etc.
This one is a fun advertisement of sorts for both City Bikes and Ben & Jerry's.
Weekly swing dancing in the Josephine Butler Parks Center, a 1920s marble-filled mansion that once housed the Brazilian and Hungarian Embassies. The weekly event attracts most of the dedicated swing dancers from the area and there are always a couple top notch instructors around to get beginners started for free. The limited number of window air conditioning units and restrictions on opening the windows due to noise can make the dance floor as hot as a sauna in the summer, but free ices are provided. BYOB.
aka Malcolm X Park
A 12-acre park centered on a long, stunning, cascading waterfall, surrounded by European-style terraced landscaping, and administered by the National Park Service. The grounds have long been an esteemed commodity in the city, first surrounding an 1819 mansion that became President James Quincy's home following his presidency. Around 1900, Mary Foote Henderson, who owned the land, petitioned Congress to move the White House to or establish the Lincoln Memorial at Meridian Hill, since the National Mall was just north of the putrid stench of the mosquito and sewage-infested Washington City Canal in Waterfront. The plan didn't pass the House of Representatives. However, she did convince Congress to create a park and, in 1910, the federal government purchased the ground and later converted it into the extravagant Italianate park that you see today. After the 1968 DC riots, the park was a haven for open-air drug markets, which got worse and worse throughout the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Following the murder of a teenager in 1990, the community decided to take back control of the park, and organized regular citizen patrols throughout the day and night. They were very successful, and the park is quite safe today. The sword from the statue of Joan of Arc—the only female equestrian statue in the city— was stolen and replaced several times.