Our first stroll up 16th Street will only cover two blocks. “What?”, you say. It looks like three – H to I to J to K. But you forget. There is no J in Washington’s street alphabet. There is only speculation as to why that is the case. You can look it up. We don’t speculate here.

The first two blocks of 16th Street each contain a church and a fancy hotel. So let’s start there.

This is the Hay-Adams, built in the 1920s on the site of what had been the two homes of John Hay and Henry Adams.

Hay (among other things, Lincoln’s personal secretary, and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State),  and Adams (historian and public intellectual) were best friends and purchased adjoining lots just north of Lafayette Square in the early 1880s. They hired famed architect H.H. Richardson to design them side by side (and very large) townhouses. I have seen one photo of those townhouses, though, and concluded, architecturally speaking, their loss was no loss. Historically speaking? That’s another story.

The Hay-Adams remains a luxury hotel, with the least expensive single room costing about $800 per night. (I compared this outlandish amount with the cost of a room at the Waldorf Astoria, the former Trump International, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rooms at the WA are hard to find under $1000.)

On the next block, at the corner of 16th and K, you find the St. Regis Hotel.

The St. Regis is comparable to the Hay-Adams in all ways. In addition to expensive rooms, each has an expensive restaurant. Expense account places, only.

Moving to churches, you have to start with St. John’s Episcopal Church, across from the Hay-Adams, known as the “Church of Presidents”.  Built in 1815 (that’s a long time ago), it was designed by Benjamin Latrobe. Latrobe is (or should be) well known, as among other buildings he designed is the United States Capitol.

St. John’s is open to the public. The sanctuary is very simple (which I like). On the other hand, the stained glass windows are very colorful, even on a gray day.

Several presidents are recognized on the walls. Chester Arthur dedicated a window to his wife, after she had passed away.

Abraham Lincoln is recognized through the Lincoln pew, where it is said Lincoln always sat when he attended, and that he always attended alone.

The church on the next block is very different. The First Church of Christ, Scientist was housed in an important brutalist structure that few people  other than I, liked. It was torn down, and the Church decided to build a full scale office building with a church and a Reading Room enclosed within it. The entrance is striking, but don’t call me a fan. Below the photo of the new church is the now demolished Brutalist church, taken from the internet.

Among the other office buildings on these two blocks, we certainly can’t ignore the large AFL-CIO building, looking at both the outside and the mural in its lobby.

And we shouldn’t ignore eith the building  at the corner of 16th and I housing the Laborers International Union or the building  with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute ( a branch of the Reagan presidential library) and (coincidentally?) the office of the Motion Picture Association within it.

Finally, we should note that these two first blocks of 16th Street have been “renamed” Black Lives Matter Plaza, and that the words “Black Lives Matter” have been boldly painted on the street, but in a way impossible to photograph from ground level.