Washington DC is the center of the United State’s political scene, but also a center for the famed Smithsonian Institute, which maintains a system of 19 museums. You’ve heard of some of these museums before: The National Air & Space Museum, the National of American History, and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
There are other museums, less well known, most certainly within the metro’s reach of some of the best hotels in Washington . These would include the S. Dillon Ripley Center, on the Mall, and the National Postal Museum.
The S. Dillon Ripley Center , also known as the Ripley Center is visible from the Mall only as a small pagoda. The greater part of the center is underground, containing the International Gallery as well as the Smithsonian Associates, a conference center and meeting rooms. Underground, it connects to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. The Smithsonian Associates began last century, in 1992, as the educational, cultural and membership division of the Smithsonian Institution. It includes the Art Collectors program, dedicated to the creation of contemporary American art in limited editions, creating a place for collections and a forum for artists to talk about their work.
The National Postal Museum is partly run by the U.S. Postal Service and the Smithsonian Institute; it opened a year after the Ripley Center. It’s located across from Union Station in a building that was once the main post office of Washington D.C., from 1914 to 1986. Visitors will find here exhibits from the present to the past, from direct marketing (“What’s in the Mail for You”), the use of railroads and the mail, all the way back to the Pony Express.
It’s free to visit the Ripley Center and the National Postal Museum, as it is for every Smithsonian Museum, which was created to expand knowledge based on a gift by a British scientist named James Smithson (1765-1829), who asked in his will that, if his nephew should die without heirs, that the Smithson estate go to the United States for the purpose of increasing and diffusing knowledge among men. The gift at the time was 500,000 dollars, which would have been the equivalent of about ten million dollars today. The bequest was accepted and an act of Congress established the Smithsonian Institute in 1846 by President James Polk.
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