On a Sunday afternoon in summer, you can hear Meridian Hill Park before you see it. The drums start around four. By five, the lawn at the top of the cascade is full of dancers, picnickers, and people staring at the sunset over 16th St.
Almost nobody up there knows the woman who pushed the park into existence once tried to move the White House to this spot.
This is the long version of the Meridian Hill Park story. The naming, the proposed Executive Mansion, the Italian Renaissance design, the only equestrian statue of a woman in DC, the naked man who vanished in 1938, Fidel Castro holding a baby, the 1968 riots, the rename to Malcolm X Park, and the drum circle that has been going since the week Malcolm X was killed in 1965.
Why It’s Called Meridian Hill
This is the bit of Washington trivia worth committing to memory, especially if you live anywhere along 16th St. NW.
Pierre L’Enfant originally planned the City of Washington around a right triangle. The Capitol on the eastern point, the White House on the northern point, and the 90-degree angle near where the Washington Monument sits today. Thomas Jefferson marked that spot in 1793 with a wooden post, replaced in 1804 with the Jefferson Pier.
The north-south line running from that point through the White House would form a prime meridian for the United States. They called it the Washington Meridian.
Also in 1804, Jefferson placed an obelisk on a sloping hill about a mile and a half due north of the White House. The marker sat at the end of 16th St., just outside Boundary Street (today’s Florida Avenue), past the city limits.
That obelisk is gone now. But you can still see a sign on the east side of 16th St., on the wall of the park, marking the former spot. Look for it the next time you walk up the hill.
The hill is named for the meridian. The meridian is named for Jefferson’s measurement. And the park inherited the name when the federal government bought the land in 1910.
For most of the 1800s, locals also called this College Hill. Columbian College (later George Washington University) sat here on 46 acres from 1821 until the Civil War forced the campus to relocate. Two names for the same hill. Meridian stuck.
Before the Park: Civil War and an 1867 Vision That Never Happened
Long before the cascading fountain, this hill had soldiers on it.
Carver Barracks stood here during the Civil War, with Columbian College visible in the background of the surviving photographs. You can see one of those images on the Cultural Tourism DC marker near 16th and Euclid. The barracks served as a hospital and staging ground.
A few years after the war, in 1867, a developer named Hall and Elvans drew up a subdivision plan for the hill. The street names tell you how close-but-not-quite-right the plan was. Columbia Rd. and Crescent St. survived. Superior Street became Kalorama. Boundary Street became Florida.
The 1867 plan never happened. The hill stayed mostly open, mostly farmland, mostly waiting.
Mary Foote Henderson and the Empress of Sixteenth Street
By 1900, the woman who would build Meridian Hill Park lived directly across 16th St. from it.
Mary Foote Henderson was born in 1842 in Seneca Falls, New York. She married Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri in 1868. He was the senator who introduced the 13th Amendment, the one that abolished slavery. They returned to DC in 1888, bought up dozens of lots along the northern edge of the city, and built a stone castle at 16th and Florida that everyone called Boundary Castle or just Henderson’s Castle.
The castle is gone now. Beekman Place sits on the spot. The stone retaining wall going up 16th St. on the left is what remains.
Mary Foote Henderson was a vegetarian, a temperance advocate, and a women’s suffragist. She was also relentless about real estate. She earned the nickname “The Empress of Sixteenth Street” by buying every parcel she could and lobbying every committee she could find.
Her boldest move came in 1898. Working with architects Paul J. Pelz and Jules T. Crow, she pitched the federal government a new Executive Mansion on Meridian Hill, a building so ostentatious it would have fit better in Rome. Plans went to Congress. The Hendersons stood to make a fortune if the White House moved north of Boundary Street. We’ve written the full story of the proposed Executive Mansion on Meridian Hill.
It didn’t happen. Teddy Roosevelt expanded the existing White House by adding the West Wing instead.
But Mary Foote Henderson didn’t stop. She kept lobbying for parks, embassies, and grand boulevards along 16th. In 1913, she actually got Congress to rename 16th St. the “Avenue of the Presidents.” It lasted about a year. Nobody liked the name. They quietly switched it back.
The Commission of Fine Arts later wrote about her: “Persistently she labored during four decades, persuading and convincing Senators and Representatives. Single-handed and alone she appeared before committees of Congress to urge approval for the work of development.”
That’s a hell of an obituary line.
Building the Park, 1910 to 1936
Henderson got her park. On June 25th, 1910, Congress approved the establishment of Meridian Hill Park and authorized $490,000 to buy the land. It would take twenty-six years to finish.
The lead landscape architect was George Burnap, hired in 1913. After a 1914 government-sponsored trip to Europe, Burnap and his protégé Horace Peaslee came back with sketchbooks full of Italian Renaissance and Baroque gardens. The cascading fountain you see today is based on the water chains at the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, with influences from the Villa d’Este on Lake Como and the Villa Torlonia in Frascati. The wall sections borrow from the Boboli Gardens in Florence. The fountain niches echo the Villa Medici in Rome.
Burnap got fired from the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds in 1916. Peaslee took over and stayed on the project until 1935.
Then there’s the concrete. This is the part the architecture people get excited about.
A craftsman named John Joseph Earley turned the entire park into an experiment in exposed-aggregate concrete. The walls, walkways, and balustrades are not stone. They are concrete with carefully sorted pebbles exposed at the surface, polished and arranged to look like fine masonry. Meridian Hill Park is the first place in the world where exposed-aggregate concrete was used at this scale and treated as fine art. The technique would later show up in everything from highway barriers to mid-century apartment buildings, but it started here.
Below are construction photos we dug up at the Library of Congress. We hadn’t seen these until we started looking.
Most of the major work wrapped up by 1932. Ownership transferred to the National Park Service in 1933. The Public Works Administration finished the last details in 1936. Total cost: $1,536,209. The park officially opened that October.
The Joan of Arc Statue Arrives
Before the park was even finished, it got its most striking piece of art.
On January 6th, 1922, President Warren G. Harding and First Lady Florence Harding stood on the upper terrace and watched the unveiling of the Joan of Arc statue. A battery from Fort Myer fired a seventeen-gun salute. The French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, traced Joan of Arc’s history and credited her spirit with the success of Allied troops at Verdun. World War I had ended only three years earlier.
The statue is a cast of a 19th-century work by the French sculptor Paul Dubois. The original stands in front of the Cathedral of Reims. The DC version was a gift from the Society of Women of France of New York to the women of the United States.
It is the only equestrian statue in Washington, DC, that depicts a woman.
The sword she holds was stolen in 1978. Why anyone would steal a statue’s sword we cannot tell you. A new sword was installed in December of 2011. We’ve written more about the Joan of Arc statue dedication if you want the full ceremony program and the speeches.
Photographs of the Park’s Golden Age
These two images from the Library of Congress show the park in the 1920s, when the upper terrace was new and the cascading fountain was the most photographed feature on 16th St.
The reflecting pool at the top of the cascade was designed to mirror the sky. The lower basin terminates the formal axis. Between them, thirteen basins step down the hill, each one feeding the next.
It looked good. It still does, when the water is on.
The Naked Man Who Vanished, 1938
This one we couldn’t make up if we tried.
We came across this gem in the New York Amsterdam News, dated June 18th, 1938. The article ran under the question “GONE WITH THE WIND?”
WASHINGTON, June 15. Residents surrounding Meridian Hill Park, where once stood old Wayland Seminary, telephoned police that a colored man in the nude was roaming through the park. When members of the park police unit arrived, although a thorough search was made of the park, no man could be found. However, the sergeant in charge says he found one pair of pants, one shirt, two shoes, one belt, one hat with the initials B. T. and five dollars in cash. The articles are at the Park Police hearquarters [sic]. No man was found. GONE WITH THE WIND?
A guy ditches every piece of clothing on his body, including his shoes and five bucks, and walks out of Meridian Hill Park into 1938 without a single witness picking him up. The Park Police kept the hat with the initials B.T. on file.
We have a lot of questions. The 1938 Park Police Sergeant had even more.
Castro on the Lawn, 1959
On April 17th, 1959, a 32-year-old Fidel Castro stood on the lawn of Meridian Hill Park holding 16-month-old Sherry Robin Hayes. The Cuban Revolution had ousted Fulgencio Batista a few months earlier. Castro was Prime Minister of Cuba and on a goodwill visit to Washington.
He was staying at the Cuban Embassy at 2630 16th St. NW, three blocks south of the park. The Washington Post ran a piece the same day describing him: olive green shirt with the collar open, Army hat, big Cuban cigar that kept going out. When an embassy attaché suggested he wave to the crowd from a balcony, Castro snorted, “I’m no man on a balcony,” and dodged across 16th St. through traffic to meet the people.
Two and a half years later, the Bay of Pigs. Three and a half years later, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The photograph of Castro with the toddler still circulates.
We’ve written more about Castro’s 1959 visit to Meridian Hill with the full Washington Post article and additional photos from his arrival at National Airport.
Decline, the 1968 Riots, and Malcolm X Park
Then came the rough years.
The 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. devastated 14th St. and the Columbia Heights neighborhood around Meridian Hill. Affluent residents left. Businesses closed. By the 1970s, the park had a serious crime problem. By the 1980s, a worse one. The National Park Service instituted a 9 PM curfew in 1981. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy called it “Crack Park” and described people congregating at all hours to deal, smoke, and trade for crack.
But before the worst of the decline, something else happened here.
The week Malcolm X was assassinated in February of 1965, the Howard Theatre’s house drummer, Baba Ngoma, started a drum circle on the upper terrace. It became weekly. It became a Sunday tradition. It became one of the longest continuously running drum circles in the country.
By the late 1960s, the park had become the staging ground for civil rights rallies and Black liberation organizing. Activists started calling it Malcolm X Park. In 1970, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York introduced a bill in Congress to officially rename it. The bill failed. By federal rule, a park containing a presidential memorial cannot be renamed for someone else, and the James Buchanan Memorial dedicated in 1930 sits at the southwest corner of the park.
Officially, it has stayed Meridian Hill Park. Unofficially, the locals never stopped calling it Malcolm X Park.
This is the photograph from 1976, when the park was at its lowest point. The fountain was off. The walkways were cracked. The grass was patchy.
It is hard to look at this image and the 1920s images side by side and believe they are the same place.
Restoration, the Drum Circle, and Today
The turnaround started in the early 1990s.
A neighborhood group called the Friends of Meridian Hill organized cleanups, programmed events, and stayed on the National Park Service about the fountain. According to the Friends, crime in the park dropped more than 95% as use returned. They count roughly 1,500 members today.
In 2006, the cascading fountain was reactivated for the first time in decades. The statues got cleaned. The walkways got patched, including new exposed-aggregate work that had to match Earley’s original mix.
The park was designated a National Historic Landmark on April 19th, 1994, recognized as one of the finest examples of early 20th-century neoclassical park design in the country.
The drum circle that started in 1965 is still going. Bill “Babalu” Caudle, who has been drumming there since the early 1970s, has called it a spiritual revival. The crowd shifts every year. The neighborhood gentrifies. The drums keep going.
The cascading fountain was shut down again in 2020 for major rehabilitation. NPS reopened the lower plaza in 2023 and is still working on the cascade itself.
What’s There Now
You can stand on the upper terrace at sunset and look straight down 16th St. all the way to the White House. The Washington Meridian runs right through your feet. The Joan of Arc is behind you, sword restored. The Buchanan is below you to the southwest. Thirteen empty basins step down the hill where the water used to fall.
The drums still play. The cascading fountain is on its way back.
There’s another meridian in DC – it runs N/S parallel to 23rd St, NW and through the old Naval Observatory. At one time, Congress thought the US should have it’s own Prime Meridian and not use the UK’s in Greenwich. This died fairly quickly when the cost of re-doing all the sailing charts was considered. However some of the Western states and cities are measured from it. Unfortunately the meridian marker is on the secure campus formerly of the Navy that is now under the State Dept.
Did you run across this 1912 article while looking at Meridian Hill?
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045433/1912-01-21/ed-1/seq-7/
I dont think he replies to posts….
I haven’t… Thanks for sharing.