On a recent walk in DC, my husband and our young friend Gabriel and I parked the car at Woodley Park and wandered around, through Adams Morgan. We took a couple of turns and found ourselves confronted by the rarified architecture of Sheridan-Kalorama.
This historic district is home to ambassadors, politicians (and their relatives), ex-presidents, and various other rich folks. Gabriel, an avid smart phone user, gave us a running commentary as to whose house was whose, but there was another form of interpretation that, to me, was a lot more fun: repurposed call boxes.
What’s a call box? Well, according to the project’s web site, call boxes were used in the past (from “the 19th century” until the 1970s when the 911 system made them unnecessary) to call police or firemen in emergencies. You may have noticed them on city street corners – boxes of various shapes on a pole, painted red.
In 2003, the committee heading this project starting working to turn the abandoned call boxes into “mini-museums” with interpretive labels on one side, and original art work on the other. There are sixteen of them; we only saw three or four. Finding them all could make for a fun scavenger hunt/walking tour.
The “Women of Influence” box is located just inside a security fence surrounding a stately home. All along this fence is a sign that warns the viewer that you will be violating the law if you get any nearer. This turns out to be Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s digs. The call box is more interesting than that fact in my opinion.
The women of influence include Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. 
Hard to get a good angle on this thanks to Ivanka and Jared’s fence. And leaning in might have brought on the secret police?
Another box detailed the history of a nearby house called The Lindens, which was built in Massachusetts in 1754 and moved to Washington, DC in six railway cars and reassembled in DC in 1935. Without the call box, you’d just walk past the house and probably admire it, but you’d have no idea it was so well traveled.
You can read about the rest of the Sheridan-Kalorama call box mini-museums here. There’s a map of the neighborhood so that you can embark on your own walking tour as well.
“Kalorama” means “fine view” in Latin, and the view is indeed fine there, which we found out as we walked across the bridge back to Woodley Park as the sun was setting.
