Qualla: West End

West End: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim1965, Public domain. Lafayette Square holds the densest known squirrel population in any urban park on Earth. Biologists at the Smithsonian have estimated the density at over fifteen squirrels per acre - several times the average city park rate. The black squirrels visible among the more common gray ones are descendants of eight Canadian black squirrels sent from Ontario in 1902 as part of a National Zoo exchange, intended to add natural variety to the Zoo's collection. Some escaped. They liked Lafayette Square - which sits directly across from the White House, framed on its four corners by bronze statues of Lafayette, Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, and Friedrich von Steuben, all foreign-born generals who fought in the American Revolution. The Park Service has been mowing around their burrows ever since. The squirrels do not care that the most famous house in the world is across the street. They simply care that the tourists drop popcorn.

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Image: Tim1965 | Public domain

West End: 1600 Pennsylvania

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aude, CC BY-SA 2.5. Construction on the White House began in 1792, under the supervision of the Irish-born architect James Hoban, who modeled the building on Leinster House in Dublin (now the seat of the Irish parliament). The construction force included enslaved African Americans hired from their o...

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Image: Aude | CC BY-SA 2.5

West End: K Street

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:(WT-shared) Aude, CC BY-SA 2.0. Just north of the White House grounds runs K Street NW, the corridor that gave its name to the American lobbying industry. The Watergate scandal of 1972 prompted Congress to pass campaign finance and disclosure laws that, paradoxically, professionalized and expanded the lobbying ...

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Image: User:(WT-shared) Aude | CC BY-SA 2.0

West End: Foggy Bottom

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0. South of K Street, beyond the State Department's monolithic 1961 headquarters at 23rd and C Streets, lies Foggy Bottom - so named because the low-lying neighborhood at the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac was chronically blanketed in industrial smoke from the gasworks and...

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Image: ajay_suresh | CC BY 2.0

West End: The Kennedy Center

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J. Miers - User: (WT-shared) Jtesla16 at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was authorized by Congress as the National Cultural Center in 1958, then renamed and rededicated as a memorial to the assassinated president in 1964. The building, designed by Edward Durell Stone in a kind of restrained Neoclassi...

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Image: J. Miers - User: (WT-shared) Jtesla16 at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

West End: Lafayette Square and Black Lives Matter Plaza

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dbking, CC BY 2.0. Lafayette Square, the seven-acre public park directly north of the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue, is technically not a square - it is a hexagon, designed as a presidential park in Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 plan. The equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson at its center, sculpte...

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Image: dbking | CC BY 2.0