Meridian Hill Park
City Within a City
Just ahead of you at the corner of 15th Street and Florida Avenue is the entrance to Meridian Hill Park, a dramatic urban oasis established in 1912 and completed in 1936. Its stunning, 12-acre landscape features the longest cascading waterfall of its kind in North America, a grand promenade and some of the city’s most interesting sculpture. Nationally known artists performed here from the 1930s into the 1970s, making it America’s first park for the performing arts. Pearl Bailey and Pearl Mesta drew 20,000 people for “an evening with the Pearls” in 1968.
The park was the inspiration of Mary Foote Henderson, the wife of Senator John B. Henderson who lived in a romanesque, castle-like mansion that once stood at the northwest corner of 16th and Florida Avenue. Howard W. Peasly, the park’s designer was inspired by the eighteenth-century gardens of Italy and France. The walls and walkways of the park represent the first use of exposed aggregate concrete anywhere in the world, here raised to the level of fine art by John Joseph Early. The multicolored stones are all from the Potomac River and are designed to shimmer in the light like an impressionist painting.
Located between a predominantly White community on the west and a predominantly Black community on the east, the park was a public place shared by both races in segregated Washington. Today the park, known to many as Malcolm X Park, sits amidst the city’s most multicultural community and is again a gathering place and a setting for concerts and public programs.
Marker is on New Hampshire Avenue south of W Street/Florida Avenue, NW, on the right when traveling north.
Courtesy hmdb.org
