It’s November, I am having coffee outside in Cleveland Park, and the temperature is supposed to hit 80.

Our cousin Kiku had a 6:50 pm flight yesterday and we drove her to Dulles. Normally, it would take about 45 minutes, but the Dulles access highway is under repair, and we had to take an alternative route. My GPS has been playing with me a long time now, and yesterday, it led us on a wild plane chase that involved several counterintuitive turns and a long delay caused by a crash ahead of us. Yes, Kiku made her flight, but we understand it was close.

Yesterday was also our 48th anniversary, so we (okay, I) thought we should have an early, casual, unusual, and celebratory dinner somewhere near Dulles. Chaatwalla, in Herndon, an Indian street food restaurant with a 4.6 Yelp rating, seemed like a good choice.

It was not only casual, but very casual, and its extensive street food menu was hard to grasp. The friendly owner, from Delhi, became our menu advisor (yes, he had a conflict of interest), and we did all right, but I don’t think we will go there for our 49th.

You know, when you have a houseguest, you become a tourist in your own town, and are sometimes faced with questions you can’t quite answer satisfactorily.

Take the Corcoran Gallery of Art, for example.

Have you been there lately?

I know the answer to that question, because the Corcoran, founded in 1869, closed ten years ago, in 2014. The building is now part of, or perhaps the home of, The George Washington School of Art and Design. But, asked Kiku,  what happened to the art?

All I could answer is that it went to other museums. But now I know more.

The Corcoran was a great museum, and I remember feeling quite sad when I went to its closing exhibit.

I always underestimate the scale of a museum’s collection, and the Corcoran was no exception. But I now see that the Corcoran owned about 20,000 pieces of art, and the task of distributing the art was given to the National Gallery of Art. And yes, like the owner of Chaatwalla, it had a conflict of interest.

The National Gallery is now the owner of just less than half of the Corcoran Collection, about 9000 pieces. Yesterday, we visited the National Gallery with Kiku, and went through the part of their Corcoran exhibit that is housed in the East building. Here are a few examples:

But where are the remaining 11,000 pieces? You can download a list off the Corcoran website that will tell you where every piece is. The download itself is about 1200 pages long.

The answer is that the majority of pieces were given to the American University Museum in DC, with smaller numbers given to George Washington and Howard Universities and the University of the District of Columbia. Others were given to various Smithsonian museums, and to various DC government agencies. Very few were sent out of town.

Now you know as much as I do.

The founder of the Corcoran was also a founder of Riggs Bank, now part of PNC. And the original location was today’s Renwick Museum, dedicated to rotating craft exhibits for the most part. The museum moved to its final location in the 1890s.