Kalorama residents will be able to check out the newly renovated Kalorama Park on Saturday at a reopening event that is set to include live music, workout classes and crafts for kids.
The grand reopening is scheduled to take place from 11 a.m.-3:30 p.m. this Saturday and is meant to celebrate the completion of a new playground and seating area at the park at the intersection of Columbia and Kalorama roads NW.
Mayor Muriel Bowser is scheduled to speak at the ceremony, which will also include live jazz and bluegrass performances. Here’s the full schedule for the free event:
Ready your call signs, Borderstan.
The HacDC Amateur Radio Club will host a youth-centric amateur radio “kids day” from 2 to 8 p.m. this Sunday on the third floor of the St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, located at 1525 Newton Street NW.
During the free event, participants of all ages will be able to work real ham radios and chat with other operators over a variety of radio frequencies.
“Kids Day is designed to give on-the-air experience to youngsters and hopefully foster interest in getting a license of their own,” reads the HacDC webpage. “It is also intended to give older hams a chance to share their station and love for amateur radio with their children.”
Kids will also receive a colorful certificate after working the radios.
Photo via Facebook.com/hamradiodc
Bourbon, the whiskey-soaked Adams Morgan hangout, wants patrons to bring their kids along for happy hour.
Each Friday from 5 to 8 p.m., the bar opens its upstairs space to grown-ups and kids alike during “kiddy happy hours.” The idea is simple: Drinks for the adults, cartoons, music and coloring for the kids.
Jessica Dallesasse, Bourbon’s general manager, says the bar started its kid-friendly happy hours about six months ago when a patron complained they had nowhere to take her kids during happy hour.
Now, Dallesasse says the event attracts up to 20 parents each week, and even more during the school year.
“Parents don’t often get to go out to eat or drink with their friends,” says Dallesasse. “So they just all bring their kids to a bar. The kids don’t get bored and the parents don’t get bored.”
While parents buy drinks and food at happy hour prices, kids can munch on chicken nuggets, french fries and mac and cheese from the bar’s kitchen.
And even though kids can roam the upstairs bar freely, they’re always within view of their parents, Dallesasse says. “It’s not like they just drop them off and walk away,” she adds.
Are the kids well-behaved? Dallesasse says, mostly. “There’s never been any temper tantrums or anything,” she says. “The only thing that can get loud is all the kids running around.”
Photo courtesy of Bourbon
From Allison Acosta. Email her at allison[AT]borderstan.com.
ArtSpace at 6th and S Streets NW. (Allison Acosta)
In the basement of the New Community Church at 6th and S Streets NW, ArtSpace DC has offered local residents from all walks of life the opportunity to develop their artistic talents for more than a decade.
ArtSpace’s mission is to act as a “conduit for personal and community expression, empowering participants to find their artistic voice, celebrate the beauty of the world that surrounds us and expose what needs to change with powerful visual statements.”
The church has served the Shaw community for nearly 30 years. In 1984, they purchased what was then an abandoned and dilapidated property on a block known for drug deals from the DC Government. With help from church members, neighbors, and Manna, a non-profit that renovates and builds affordable housing founded by the church’s leader, the Reverend Jim Dickerson, the property was restored and reopened to the community.
In 1999 Rachel Dickerson Brunswick, Dickerson’s daughter, returned to Washington, DC after studying the visual arts in college. Shaw community members, seeing how much their children enjoyed the arts in the church’s after school program, decided they wanted a space of their own to explore their creative sides. Artspace was opened, and volunteer artists have offered affordable classes to the community ever since.
“It really is a community-based setting, and I think that’s what appeals to a lot of people,” says Brunswick. “It’s a mix of people that we’ve always had. And the people that come around are really interesting. Everybody’s got a story.”
Maybelle Taylor Bennett has offered a popular fiber arts class from the very beginning, offering instruction in weaving on any of several looms as well as knitting and crochet. Artspace is also host to a ceramics class and offers students access to three electric potter’s wheels and a kick wheel, as well as a kiln. Artspace offers Open Studio nights on Mondays.
Spring classes are now forming. Artspace has recently added a black and white darkroom and a darkroom class begins March 21. The newest addition to the class schedule is a Toddler Open Studio Class for young children and their caregivers being offered Mondays at 10am starting April 1.
Volunteers and donations of art supplies are always welcome at ArtSpace. The space has hosted cooking classes and workshops, bookmaking classes, yoga classes, acoustic musical performances, art exhibitions, and movie screenings. You can sign up for a class of for the email list at dc.artspace[AT]gmail.com.
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Take in ZooLights at the National Zoo, just a Red Line Metro ride away from Borderstan. (Image: Luis Gomez, One Photograph A Day.)
We went to the annual ZooLights exhibit/festival at the National Zoo last Saturday night. It was a cold night, but there was a light snow and the experience ended up being quite wonderful. A number of the animal houses are open, so you can duck inside and look at the animals and get warm. My partner has photos and his impressions of our visit last Saturday here at One Photograph A Day.
You can still take in ZooLights on these nights: December 12-14; 6 to 8:30 p.m. each night; and December 18-30 (except 24th & 25th): 6 to 8:30 p.m. each night. Tickets are $12; $6 for members of Friends of the National Zoo, and can be purchased online through Ticketmaster.
Borderstanians, I received this comment from Lisa of Borderstan in response to a posting on a mapping tool, the DC Citizen Atlas, which I highlighted here on this blog. I will let Lisa explain how you can find playspaces for kids using a mapping tool created by a DC-based non-profit, KaBOOM!
Any parents on this blog looking to find great places for kids to play? I live in Borderstan and thought I’d share a cool program with everyone: Its called the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder. I work for a DC based national non-profit called KaBOOM! We work to make sure kids nationwide have a great place to play within walking distance of their home… by empowering communities and corporations to take action and support and build playgrounds and recreation areas.
Essentially, KaBOOM! created Playspace Finder to be an online, user-generated national database of outdoor places for kids to play. It is also available as a widget for those of you with blogs.
The KaBOOM! Playspace Finder is an amazing online tool that allows people to enter, search, and rate playspaces in their communities. It is a free, searchable directory that helps parents, community members and kids to locate playgrounds, skate parks, sports fields, and even ice rinks across America. It can also be used to alert local communities about recreational areas that need a little help.
Right now, more than 10,000 playspaces have been entered on our website and we’re looking to really turn DC into a leader by making sure that we have all of DC’s playgrounds included (which we do not right now–please help us out with this) and also make sure that folks in DC are using this program as a resource, since we are based here.
Anyone can add a playspace to the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder. With step-by-step instructions and a Playspace Finder worksheet, its pretty easy for you to upload photos, include details about the playspace and submit your thoughts on the space’s overall “play value.” The KaBOOM! Playspace Finder is a great and easy way to get your kids outside to play, help visitors and new residents in your community locate nearby playgrounds, and create positive changes in the state of play in your neighborhood.
Ultimately, our hope is that we will use the data we collect in the Playspace Finder to help us audit the quality and quantity of, and access to, play nationwide. We’ve already seen it work in some communities–in Tucson, Arizona, for example, city leaders recognized, via their audit of playgrounds with the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder, a disparity in access to playgrounds across their community.
In order to address this deficit, the City formed an explicit partnership with the Tucson Unified School District whereby identified school playgrounds would remain open after school hours, on weekends and during summer months. The new program will begin with 12 elementary school playgrounds and the hope is that all of the school playgrounds will open as neighborhood parks in the future.
Please check out this great resource and pass it on!
P.S. – We also have a program set up for school-age kids who are looking for community service credit to work with us, and help us populate the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder. Visit our Web site to find out how to volunteer.
