Photos: The new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

by Melanie Renzulli on

Although the formal dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington, DC, is not until August 28 (as we indicated in this post last week), the memorial officially opened on Monday. I was among the hundreds of tourists and locals that visited the new MLK Memorial and below are some photos I took of the site.

To give you a sense of what you will be looking at, the King Memorial is situated between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials on four acres of the National Mall overlooking the Tidal Basin. One enters the King Memorial through a “mountain of despair,” symbolism mentioned in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

Beyond the mountain of despair lies the “stone of hope,” from which a 30-foot marble statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges. Surrounding the central statue of Dr. King are low, granite walls inscribed with 14 quotes from Dr. King’s speeches.

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An inside look at Lake Tahoe’s Thunderbird Lodge

by Kyle Ellison on

Immaculately constructed on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, Nevada’s Thunderbird Lodge is the infamous domicile of legendary California playboy and bon vivant, George Whittell Jr.

Inheriting a fortune in the 1920’s worth the modern day equivalent of $49 billion, the highly eccentric and endlessly fascinating Whittell vowed to never work a day in a life, a goal he eventually achieved until his death at the age of 87.

Having purchased over 100,000 acres along the eastern shore of the Sierra’s Lake Tahoe, during the height of the Great Depression Whittell commanded a legion of local workers to construct his “Castle in the Sky” that would eventually become the Thunderbird Lodge.

Camouflaged into the granite and aqua marine shoreline, highlights of the lodge range from fish tanks embedded in the walls to multiple secret passageways, the longest being a 600 ft. subterranean tunnel that connects the main lodge with the card house that was host to legendary high stakes poker games.

In addition to his lakeshore mansion, Whittell was perhaps most famous for his full throttle lifestyle that was rife with curiosities. An elite member of San Francisco high society during his youth, upon completion of school Whittell left the US to join the Barnum and Bailey Circus in Europe against the will of his parents.

During his time in the circus, Whittell developed a keen pension for exotic animals, a love which would one day lead to him operate a safari business in Africa and keep a pet lion named Bill with him at his California and Nevada estates. For a short period of time, Whittell even housed an elephant named Mingo at his Thunderbird Lodge, though the cold weather would prove to be detrimental to Mingo’s health.

Fluent in 7 languages, Whittell married a French nurse who tended to wounds he sustained while driving an ambulance in World War I. After the war, the couple eventually moved back to California and spent their summers at the Lake Tahoe Castle in the Sky, which thanks to the Thunderbird Lodge Preservation Society is now open to the public for tours.

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After The Flood: Nashville’s Rebuilt Gaylord Opryland Hotel

by Paul Brady on


A few days after I explored vibrant post-flood New Orleans, reborn and bustling in the wake of the storm nobody’s forgotten, I found myself in the lobby of the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, the largest non-casino hotel in the country.

It’s home to the famed Grand Ole Opry, the shrine of country music, and sits along the Cumberland River, which poured over its banks last year, flooding the city and causing more than a billion dollars of damage in an event so severe it’s forecast to happen only once every thousand years.

More than nine inches of rain fell on Nashville in 24 hours. By May 3, 2010, the hotel was no longer on the banks of the river. It was in the river.

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This July, in the vast lobby of the Opryland, I met Jenny Barker, the resort’s PR director. She pointed out the huge chandeliers, hanging about 10 feet above the floor. If these new fixtures had been here during the flood, she says, they would’ve been submerged.

Built in stages since 1977, when it opened with 601 rooms and a single ballroom, the hotel is an adventure in monumental proportion, even more so when seen through the lens of recovery from the disaster. Among other features, the Opryland has a quarter-mile-long artificial river, nine acres of tropical botanical gardens, dozens of waterfalls, thousands of rooms, restaurants of every stripe, more than 600,000 square feet of meeting space. It takes 3,600 employees to run the place, including the musician who valeted my car on check-in. Turns out he’s a friend of a friend of a friend.

The size of the hotel is so staggering–and so confusing upon arrival–that the hotel prints out maps for guests, directing them to their rooms. Carpeting is color-coded to help with way finding. I knew I was close to my room, in the Delta wing, when the green flooring gave way to red, indicating elevator bank D1 would be right around the corner. To make a phone call to another room, you have to press six numbers.

Oddly, my room had a balcony, indoors but overlooking the artificial river and a New Orleans-themed public space called Delta Island. The sun streamed in through a glass canopy, and the stillness of the air gave the feeling of being encased in some elaborate biodome. I was five miles from downtown Nashville, but it might as well have been on another planet.

The flood of 2010 reminded everyone that Opryland is just as real and as fragile as the rest of the rest of the city. Employees rounded up about 1,500 guests for evacuations and the hotel, like many businesses in the city, was shuttered.

Amazingly, the entire hotel opened just 195 days after 71.3 million gallons of water were pumped out of mechanical closets, underground passageways, atriums and the 115 guest rooms that were flooded. (Most guest rooms were not inundated.) In addition to repairs, the property used the flood-forced closure to carry out renovations. Again, the statistics are mind boggling: nearly 281,000 square feet of carpeting were replaced and more than a million drywall screws turned.

The rebuild also allowed Opryland to address environmental concerns. The resort modernized its laundry plant to consume less water and set goals to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent by 2015. Future additions–not an unlikely prospect given the expansionary history here–will pursue LEED certification.

It’s not all wonky either: This winter, a partnership with DreamWorks will bring characters from the Madagascar movie franchise to the hotel for a Christmas program, November 18 through January 8. Unsurprisingly, the show will involve an unbelievably large volume of ice: 2 million pounds of the stuff will be carved for the event.

The Official Re-Birth of the Barbary Coast. Sort of.

by David Farley on
Certain travel magazines and newspaper travel sections like to proclaim that cities and neighborhood’s have been re-born. I remember seeing an article in a travel magazine several years ago that claimed Stockholm had achieved this seemingly other-worldly status. Oh really? I thought. It seems such an enlightened incarnation of an entire city would have been more newsworthy.

Aside from travel writing’s sometimes proclivity for exaggeration, the once legendary and long disappeared Barbary Coast neighborhood has been re-born. Well, sort of. I’ve spent the month of August looking for remnants of it and until I met a man named William Sauro I had no idea that the neighborhood is officially back.


But, you’re probably thinking right now, I thought the Barbary Coast was long gone since 1917?

I met Mr. Sauro at the Old Ship Saloon, fittingly enough, since the bar – on Pacific and Battery Streets, right in the heart of the Barbary Coast – is constructed from an old ship that had brought miners from New York to get in on the potential riches of the Gold Rush. I wanted to ask him the same question about this supposed resurrection of the Barbary Coast.
Mr. Sauro, who is retired, told me he’s the president of the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association. Such associations, he said, have a lot of power in San Francisco. The infamous and longtime Telegraph Hill Dwellers are the most powerful neighborhood association in the city. And so, in 2005, some of the denizens of the area formerly known as the Barbary Coast decided to create their own association. “It’s mostly so we can have a say in land development and quality of life issues,” he told me as I sipped a glass of pisco punch. “Someone needs to represent the residents here and that’s what the neighborhood association does.”

But why, I asked, did they choose the name Barbary Coast? After all, it’s a bit ironic that a bunch of well-off city dwellers would take a name known for crime and poverty (adding an extra dose of the irony is that the San Francisco Board of Realtors endorsed the name change).


“The Financial District Neighborhood Association just doesn’t sound very cool,” Sauro said. I agreed.

Sauro did make an interesting connection between the current neighborhood and the legendary one, noting the expensive restaurants that have popped up along the nearby Embarcadero. “They’re great restaurants,” Sauro said. “But so expensive that people in the neighborhood are still being shanghaied–just in a totally different way.”

And so, as such, the Barbary Coast is re-born. That sounds newsworthy to me.

Photo of the Day – Boston T Station

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Everywhere you look, there’s a photo waiting to happen. Consider this photo by Flickr user Aypho of one of Boston’s famous “T Stations.” Just a mundane train station, right? Not this time – the photographer’s subtle use of lighting at dusk, the colorful lines of the railway and platform edge and the blurred car in the background all convey a striking sense of movement to the image. It’s almost as if the viewer was riding along on a speeding train, being whisked away to some unknown destination off in the distance.

Taken any great photos during your recent travels? Why not add them to our Gadling group on Flickr? We might just pick one of yours as our Photo of the Day.