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City Museum, Washington, DC
Website:
http://www.citymuseumdc.org
In Washington,
DC, home to
numerous world-class museums, a new city museum recently
opened that focuses on the many unique neighborhoods in
the nation’s capital. Located across from the new DC
Convention Center, the Historical Society of Washington,
DC converted the former Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon
Square into the new DC City Museum.
Geography and History
Situated at the
confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac
rivers, the land that became Washington consisted of
the small but prosperous port towns of Georgetown and
Alexandria with the intervening land between the rivers
occupied by pastureland and farm estates.
Under the leadership of
the new president, George Washington, Pierre L’Enfant, a
Frenchman, drafted a plan for the city and Benjamin
Banneker, a free African American, helped survey the
land. Within the resulting diamond-shaped city
boundaries was an orderly street plan of gridded streets
and grand boulevards that intersected at a series of
squares and circles designated as reservations. This
elaborate plan included prominent sites for new federal
buildings, such as the President’s house and the
Capitol. Over 200 years later, the original L’Enfant
plan is still very much in evidence.
The DC City Museum
focuses on “residential” Washington, as opposed to the
federal institutions, monuments, and museums that most
people visit when they tour the nation’s capital. The DC
City Museum serves as a gateway to numerous local venues
scattered throughout the District’s vibrant and
culturally diverse neighborhoods. The DC Heritage
Tourism Coalition helps to coordinate tourism efforts in
the city by providing information on the wide variety of
tourist sites available to the public and by developing
and promoting a series of neighborhood and thematic
walking tours.
Archeology and Public
Interpretation
The focus of the DC City
Museum as a series of “neighborhood gateways” reflects
not only customary financial and space limitations but
also a relatively new approach in museum development
that allow visitors to experience museum exhibits closer
to the source. That is, while 19th-century museums were
filled with collections of artifacts and art objects
obtained from other parts of the world, the development
of local museums allow visitors to learn more about
nature and culture close to their geographic origins.
The new DC City Museum encourages people to venture out
into all the neighborhoods of the city—making DC itself
the ultimate exhibit at the new DC City Museum.
From its inception, the
City Museum was designed to
include an archeology exhibit and laboratory; in
addition, archeology was planned as an integral
component of public interpretation, particularly
educational programs, developed at the museum. In line
with this effort, a “walking and metro guide” to
archeology in downtown DC has been developed to
highlight excavations that have been done in the city’s
commercial core.
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