After the chitchat about Washington, DC on Articleman's post, I was thinking about the time I rode Beach Drive with a young girl who was visiting MD (I just got in trouble for writing that BTW). About all I remember is that we rode up Linden Lane so I could show her the odd little buildings of the National Park Seminary, like the Pagoda pictured above.

National Park Seminary is near an annex of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, just off Georgia Avenue. It was farmland and woods until the late 1880s when a developer built a hotel, Ye Forest Inne, for Washingtonians to use as a weekend retreat. ... the hotel ran into financial trouble and was sold and turned into a finishing school for girls mostly from wealthy families, according to Bonnie Rosenthal, property manager for the Alexander Co.

The owners of the school thought girls should learn about the world by experiencing its architecture, according to historians of the property. They built sorority houses in the form of a Japanese pagoda, Swiss chalet and English castle, and an Italian villa with elaborate gardens, a Dutch windmill and a Spanish mission-style building. The school gym has Corinthian columns out front. As different owners ran the school, they added their own touches, including covered walkways that linked such buildings as the music conservatory to the chalet and ballroom, and the Court of Maidens, with concrete statues of women in flowing robes that served as pillars on the founder's home.

I read that the area has been developed into apartments and condominiums, but that Alexander was required to preserve the old buildings. I hope so, because now I want to go see it again.

As for that girl, I recalled that she was studying violin, so I googled around and viola, er voilà, she's a player with Spuyten Duyvil, an alternative roots band based in the Hudson Valley area (Now I'm really in trouble, even though she was just a friend :-) ). But they sound good. Spuyten Duyvil is both part of the Bronx, and a creek nearby. Depending on who you ask, it means either spitting devil, spinning devil, spite the devil, or In Spite of the Devil. That last became the title of the group's first album.

So here they are:

I used to listen to a lot of live music at Armand's Chicago Pizzeria, in suburban MD. They had a rotation of young singer-songwriters. At Armand's they'd give you a deep dish of dough and you could spread out all the toppings from their pizza bar, then drink a pitcher and listen to some guy playing while it was cooking. I remember Wade Moroughan, particularly, and Dave Allan. No luck googling them.

Best live act I ever saw, in a small place, was Livingston Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, and Jon Poussette-Dart in Rye NH. They each sang for about half an hour.