H Street History Trail unveiling at the H Street Festival this Saturday + Union Market Tour

CulturalTourismDC is the DC nonprofit that works on various projects on DC's cultural history.  They are best known for "producing" history "trails" in various neighborhoods around the city ("Heritage trails mark the path to preserving D.C. history", Washington Post) along with coordinating tours around the city during WalkingTown and BikingTown, an Embassy events weekend, and other activities.

The newest trail to be launched is the "Greater H Street NE Heritage Trail."  The ceremonial launch will take place on the 14th Street Stage (14th and H Streets) at 12 noon at the H Street Festival this Saturday.

The trail interpretation work extends and exceeds the work that we did about 10 years ago on the Capitol Hill North/H Street social and history study, which was funded by the DC Historic Preservation Office and the Federal Historic Preservation Fund, with additional support from the Capitol Hill Restoration Society.

The CulturalTourismDC project did especially good work on image research.  There are many images on the signs that I am unfamiliar with.  I was a reviewer-commenter on the text, and I look forward to going through and seeing the final results!

Union Market (formerly Florida Market) Tour | 2 PM  Saturday | 
Meet at Florida Avenue and 5th Street NE

As part of the launch I agreed to give a tour of the now renamed Union Market district, although not necessarily the Union Market building, which had its inaugural soft launch last weekend, and won't be in regular operation until November, although it will be open weekends in the interim.

Paul and Brenda Pascal will be "co-leading" the tour.  They both have long ties to the market district, starting with Brenda's father, who owned a poultry business that was based there.   Paul was the anchor of the effort to prevent the market from being eradicated and redeveloped.  I helped, but without Paul, the market district would be gone.

This handout on the market district is a bit old and needs some updating but it will get you around...

- Easy print Florida Market Directory

And the new Union Market building has nice restrooms, which were sorely lacking before.