AGNES, BOATS, + GTOWN
the hurricane agnes coverage has a lot of fun pics, and since our neighborhood is by the river, there are a lot of familiar faces (architectural) in the metro flood coverage. so let's all take a virtual walking tour around the NW bend of the potomac!
starting at the southmost star, we start with my fav picture: people at the kennedy center looking down from the back deck at the flooding
(this is unfathomably real btw. I promise you if we had a huge flood right now, there would absolutely be flood sightseers on the terrace. I promise you this. trust me. trust me. and they would be so annoying)
it's hard to tell (peep the streetlights) but all that is NOT supposed to be water—pic on the right for comparison (I'd prob date it around 71) where you can see rock creek parkway (bottom, goes under the deck) as well as F st (the 2 lane above—they widened it after the kc opened)(then totally redid it lol)
continuing up the river, the benches are all gone now (of course) but I think I've got the bridge lined up pretty well...
left is from dc dept of transporation's (DDOT) tumblr, which is why it's good, thank you DDOT tumblr. this is basically exactly where the kc patio overlooks, and it's actually, I think, been cut back a little, so the riverbank is higher. they also put in the bike trail, which we'll now follow along the river
what you CAN'T see in this picture, and WOULDN'T, even in hq, is the Georgetown Gap—
pic on the left is april 1973 (thx wikipedia!) and on the right is today
—the hole where yucky sewage water and the gutters of every street this side of town comes out. this is because it was completely underwater! that's how high the river came up
moving along now, to our first boathouse:
I killed like 17 lanternflies while down there, woo! mark THAT.
sadly, I was not able to find this little white plaque—I even asked, I won't lie—but here's thompson boat center today, with our friends in the background. on the other side of the boat center is also the Mile 1 marker for rock creek, which peels off the potomac right here. rock creek also flooded like crazy, including picking up & wrecking cars. nowadays, all you can get there is a brain worm, rfk jr
now, this star is a bit harder to find, but as we go west along the new georgetown waterfront (in the 70s it was still post-industry abandoned), we'll cut inland to...
...the c&o canal in georgetown which runs parallel to the river
now this is DEF the wrong spot on the canal, because there's a shit ton of construction I'll get to later, but at least you can see how deep the locks are. still not the worst thing they've found in the canal! when I started working in gtown, they'd just found a body down there, so. could be worse. just sayin
alright, then back down the hill to the waterfront... most of it did NOT look as nice and green as it does in the 2026 aerial, because they wouldn't really doing anything with the land until they started trying to clean it up, and even then the current waterfront was redone in the last 10 years or so
it's a much nicer walk these days, but either way, at the end of it you'll find:
the end/beginning of the iconic whitehurst freeway underpass (keaton for scale: I am 5'8")
there's actually a shit ton of construction happening right there at both ends rn, so that's actually me like half a block east, but on the right should be the same post (sans concrete, they removed that from most at some point)
I say that because this picture immediately reminded me of this, from DDOT again:
which, you can see, has that arch that's part of key bridge, the retaining wall on the right, and the boat launch on the left, which is called something else now but essentially exactly the same lol. next to the car on the far left, you can also see a canoe/rowboat of some kind that's floated out from the boathouse !
thus concludes your virtual walking tour with keaton. thank you for walking with me. and sorry to jon katz, for making him look foolish now—hopefully, this can serve instead as the only reminder of the "Flood of June 24, 1972"
bonus cool fish on the side of the USGS Streamgage, for the aquarium dimension stans
