East Potomac Park is a section of Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., located south of the Jefferson Memorial and the 14th Street Bridge. Located between the Washington Channel and the Potomac River, the park is home to the East Potomac Park Golf Course, a miniature golf course, a public swimming pool (the East Potomac Park Aquatic Center), and tennis courts. The roads and paths of East Potomac Park are very popular with bicyclists, walkers, inline skaters, and runners. Ohio Drive, which runs the perimeter of East Potomac Park, is part of the Marine Corps Marathon course.
The park also contains a lot of Washington's famous cherry trees (or sakura). Many of the trees in the park are of the cultivar 'Kanzan', as opposed to the Yoshino which is around the Tidal Basin and celebrated during the National Cherry Blossom Festival. The Kanzan cherries have a different appearance and bloom about two weeks after the Yoshino cherry, which means they are only beginning to bloom when the Festival ends. These trees are located along Ohio Drive on the Potomac River side of the park.
East Potomac Park is accessible by road or Washington Metro. Parking is available all around Ohio Drive and at the parking lots south of the Jefferson Memorial. There is no Metro stop very close to the park but with a brief walk riders can access the park via the L'Enfant Plaza Station at the 9th and D SW Metro exit, going through (or above) the Promenade to L'Enfant Plaza SW to the footpath from Benjamin Banneker Circle that runs alongside the Francis Case Memorial Bridge (I-395), or the Smithsonian Station and the East Basin Dr Bridge.
Read more about East Potomac Park: Construction
Famous quotes containing the words east, potomac and/or park:
“At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Therefore awake! make haste, I say,
And let us, without staying,
All in our gowns of green so gay
Into the Park a-maying!”
—Unknown. Sister, Awake! (L. 9–12)