[inauguration] flag city

This is the hallway off the lobby of the Willard four days before the Inauguration. This is a most storied hotel. The word "lobbyist" was popularized because of schmoozing in this very hotel's lobby. And from Wikipedia I share these oh so relevant facts:

From February 4 to February 27, 1861, the Peace Congress, featuring delegates from 21 of the 34 states, met at the Willard in a last-ditch attempt to avert the Civil War. A plaque from the Virginia Civil War Commission, located on the Pennsylvania Ave. side of the hotel, commemorates this courageous effort. Later that year, upon hearing a Union regiment singing "John Brown's Body" as they marched beneath her window, Julia Ward Howe wrote the patriotic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune.

On February 23, 1861, amid several assassination threats, detective Allan Pinkerton smuggled Abraham Lincoln into the Willard during the weeks before his inauguration; there Lincoln lived until his inauguration on March 4, holding meetings in the lobby and carrying on business from his room.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in his hotel room at the Willard in 1963 in the days before his March on Washington.

This would be my first choice of hotel for this weekend. Of course it sold out licketysplit.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .