Below is the text of my monthly “Editor’s Letter” in the new issue of Washingtonian.
—-
I’ve lived for nearly nine years now in DC’s Woodley Park—the subject, along with Cleveland Park, of our neighborhood guide on page 181—and I always thought I knew the area. I like the ciders at Ripple, the beef jerky at District Kitchen, and the meatloaf at Open City, all places our guide mentions.
Yet until September I’d never visited another spot we highlight: Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, the onetime home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, barely a mile from my apartment. Over Labor Day weekend, my significant other had family visiting and we took them to the estate on a beautiful sunny afternoon.
It was almost embarrassing to walk around Hillwood—to gaze on the priceless Russian portraits in the entry hall; to study, in the Icon Room, the midnight-blue Fabergé Easter egg that Tsar Nicholas II gave his mother; to see the jewels carefully inlaid in the nuptial crown of Empress Alexandra—and realize that some of Russia’s most important history resides just up the street from the deli Vace, where on Saturdays I often get the Italian sub we recommend in the same article. I’d had no idea, even though I love Russian history.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, is said to have wept with joy at Hillwood when she saw the enormous gold chalice that Catherine the Great commissioned in 1791. Mrs. Post literally saved many artifacts from the scrap heap while her third husband, Joseph Davies, served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Stalin was in the midst of purging Russia’s imperial and religious history, and the ambassador’s wife spent much of her time in Moscow buying up discarded liturgical icons and historic artifacts that now make up Hillwood’s collection.
The manicured grounds sprawl across acres bordering Rock Creek Park—there’s a French parterre garden, a greenhouse filled with orchids, and a Japanese-style garden with stone pagodas, lanterns, and creatures galore. During the Vietnam War, Post opened the gardens and the grand Lunar Lawn to wounded soldiers recuperating at Bethesda Naval Hospital and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Her palatial home taught me, once again, a lesson that I relearn several times a year in Washington: how often we take the world-class facilities, history, and people under our noses for granted.
Given her passions, Marjorie Merriweather Post would have been particularly interested in two of the articles in this issue.
First, there’s a beautiful story on the Vietnam veteran who has dedicated his life to preserving, for the National Park Service, the artifacts left behind at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (page 60)—a rare window into how the emotionally weighted mementos placed there are handled and stored for posterity.
Second, a half century after landscape architect Shogo Myaida designed Post’s Hillwood garden and a century after the Tidal Basin cherry trees arrived, Washington seems to be having something of a Japanese-food awakening—from ramen to sushi to sake to the izakayas that have appeared in recent months.
It’s a trend that led us to devote our entire Taste section to Japanese food—it begins on page 153. Don’t miss “Sake 101” with Tiffany Soto, the master sake sommelier behind Pabu at the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, which stocks 102 sakes, the most comprehensive collection on the East Coast. After an afternoon with Soto, I realized that absolutely nothing I thought I knew about sake was correct.
I imagine that Marjorie Merriweather Post, a renaissance woman and global explorer herself, would have enjoyed meeting Soto—one of the only English speakers, one of the only Americans, and the first woman to achieve the highest certification in Japan for sake tasting. She’s spent almost as much time in Japan as Post spent in Russia.
It’s fun to picture the two of them sharing a bottle of Dewazakura Oka Ginjo as they look out over the Lunar Lawn and swap stories about exploring remote corners of the world.
Recent Comments