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- [Briggs] What is going on everyone?
Welcome back to "World According to Briggs"
and another mind blowing facts video.
Today we're gonna give Washington, DC a whirl.
Washington, DC or District of Columbia,
is the capital of the United States.
It was founded on July 16th 1790,
and today has a population of 5.3 million residents.
It's a good sized city.
The United States capital has some very interesting history,
and if you watch the national treasure movies,
you know this country has some funky secrets as well.
Sure those movies are fake, but were they?
Obviously they took some liberties
to make the movie more interesting, but how much?
A lot of things on this list at one point were secrets.
Washington, DC does have some mind blowing facts,
let's take a look at 10 of them right now.
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Number 10, the Crypt.
The United States first president was George Washington.
They liked him so much back in the day
that our early politicians decided
that he should be buried at the US Capitol
in Washington, DC.
Problem is, George wasn't keen on this plan
and he wanted to be buried at his home in Mount Vernon.
So the US Capitol right now has an empty crypt.
On the original blueprints of the US Capitol,
the building's first architect didn't write crypt,
he wrote Grand Vestibule for that room,
that was the blueprint from 1797.
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Number nine, the world's biggest library.
The Library of Congress
is actually the world's largest library.
It has more than 170 million objects in the collection,
and the library adds an additional 10,000 items
to the collection every working day.
Anything from books to recordings,
photographs, newspapers, maps,
and one of the books
is actually a top secret FBI interrogation manual.
This is something the FBI doesn't want you to see,
but they have to.
The manual is only available
because some guy copyrighted the secret document
and according to law, anything copyrighted
must be available to anyone with a library card
at the Library of Congress.
So get yourself a card,
go on in there and figure out what they're gonna do with you
when you decide to do something stupid
and the federal government gets involved.
A fire damaged half the library in 1851,
which led to the architect of the Capitol
to design a fireproof iron cast room,
which is still there.
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Number eight, the cherry blossoms.
There's about 3000 cherry trees all along the Tidal Basin
that were a gift from Mayor Yukio Ozaki,
from Tokyo in 1912.
Yeah, it's actually really beautiful,
it goes along right there where the Jefferson Memorial is
and the Martin Luther King memorial is,
and FDR's Memorial (muffled speaking),
it's this pond area off the Potomac River,
and it's just surrounded by cherry blossom trees
and it is beautiful,
if you go at the right time of the year.
Before you go keep in mind you could be arrested
for breaking off a blossom.
It's considered vandalism of federal property
in Washington, DC if you do that, keep that in mind.
Now this is the second batch of trees,
they had set one before in 1910,
but there were some insects found on there
that they really didn't know what they were,
so they decided to burn all the trees and ask for more
which the mayor of Tokyo sent them 3000 more.
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Number seven, voting rights.
Prior to 1961, you couldn't vote in the District of Columbia
in a presidential election.
I'm not even kidding, residents of Washington, DC,
could not vote in presidential elections
until the 23rd amendment was ratified in 1961.
Since the District of Columbia
ceased being any part of any state and not a state itself,
the district residents lost all representation in Congress
back then too.
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Number six, beneath the Washington Monument.
There are things buried under the Washington Monument,
we kind of know that for sure there's many references to it
and historians say there is something underneath there.
What exactly is buried in the foundation of the monument
is often brought up in conspiracy theories
and American legend,
there's all kinds of stories
about what's going on underneath there.
People have said
that it's like this secret sealed off basement
that was actually sealed off with workers still in there,
so nobody knows what's really underneath there.
I've seen part of the Illuminati and Freemasons
and all that, which, that one's kind of true,
a lot of them were.
But there's all these different things
that I suppose are going on there
even some people think alien stuff is there,
like proof we had aliens back in the 1700s.
One guy even tied it into HAARP
which is this government thing
that's always around conspiracy theories,
I don't know why, but it was in place 150 years
after they started building the Washington Monument,
but apparently they got some information in there.
It's weird, I know.
Depending on how you look at this one,
it's either what's buried inside here
or what they say is buried inside there.
Some of these things may include a copy of the Constitution,
a map of Washington, DC, a book of poems,
a Bible and a daguerreotype of George Washington
and his mother Mary.
If you don't know what a daguerreotype is,
it's this really old school way they took pictures
with a copper plate, Google it, it's pretty amazing.
So what's under there,
I guess we'll never really know for sure.
So we're not gonna start digging that thing up
any time soon, maybe we should call Nicolas Cage.
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Number five.
Some monks dug some holes.
Washington, DC has a Franciscan monastery
that looks amazing.
It's some great architecture there,
both above and below ground.
A group of Franciscan monks
decided to build some catacombs under the monastery
in the late 1800s
for Americans who couldn't go all the way to Europe
to see the catacombs they had there.
The catacombs are a complete replica
of the original tombs in Rome.
Most people have no idea these catacombs exist,
if you go there, you can get a tour, I guess.
Sometimes you can't,
I don't know, with a pandemic who knows?
But there's actually a real live body
buried in these catacombs in DC,
the bones of St. Innocent, he's a child martyr,
but he's buried there or she, whatever.
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Number four, Darth Vader.
Okay, so, I don't know if you know these things,
but there're faces that they put on buildings
kind of similar to the gargoyles
that they put on old school buildings,
but in some points, corners and stuff,
they put these little faces,
they're actually called grotesques,
and the National Cathedral has a whole bunch of them.
In the 1980s during the construction of the Northwest Tower,
a children's competition was run by National Geographic
to draw a grotesque for the building.
The drawing of Darth Vader won third place
and he was put up there.
It's hard to see with the naked eye,
so if you got a pair of binoculars,
bring them with you and take a look,
it's pretty interesting.
They're all kind of cool,
it's just really neat that they have Darth Vader.
While I was researching this,
I found out that there's an abbey in Scotland
called Paisley Abbey, and they have the alien
from the Ridley Scott movie, "Aliens" or "Alien", whatever,
there's one of those up there as one of their grotesques.
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Number three, pet alligators.
Everybody knows the President has a dog.
Actually, I think President Trump was the first one
in who knows how long,
that didn't actually have a dog at the White House.
But that's like a tradition for American presidents,
you gotta have a White House dog.
Well, not all presidents wanna go for a dog,
as a matter of fact, two presidents over 100 years apart
decided they needed an alligator
to live at the White House with them.
John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover both owned alligators.
That's not all the weirdness
that goes on with presidential pets,
Andrew Jackson had a parrot
that apparently could swear up a storm
and President Van Buren had a couple tiger cubs,
they came as a set from the Sultan of Oman
and Thomas Jefferson had a couple bear cubs.
If I was the president, I'd get sea-monkeys.
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Number two, the oldest fish market.
When you think about fish markets,
people often think about the iconic fish markets
like Seattle's Pike Place or New York's Fulton fish market,
but most people don't know that the District of Columbia
has DC's municipal fish market
and they've had it there for over 200 years.
But this is the place you'd go to get fish, crabs, oysters,
whatever else, for over two centuries.
It is located on the wharf of the Potomac River
just beyond the National Mall
and east of the Jefferson Memorial.
All right, before we get to number one,
don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
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just push that button.
All right, onto number one.
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And number one, wasn't supposed to be the capital.
Now there's a lot that goes into this story,
but there were eight US capitals
before we settled on Washington, DC.
The first one was Philadelphia,
and that's where we adopted the Declaration of Independence
on July 4th 1776,
and a whole bunch of other stuff went on there.
Second was Baltimore,
as British troops closed on Philadelphia at the end of 1776,
the Continental Congress decided to abandon the city
and flee south to the safer haven of Baltimore.
The third was Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just for one day,
when they decided that it was still too close
to what was going on in Philadelphia,
they moved 25 miles away to York, Pennsylvania.
The US capital then went on to do a stretch
in Princeton, New Jersey, followed by Annapolis, Maryland,
then back to New Jersey again to do it in Trenton.
At that point, they thought they'd move it back over
to New York City and on the second floor balcony
of the newly renamed Federal Hall,
Washington took the oath of office
as the first President of the United States
on April 30th 1789.
The land that Washington, DC sits on now
was taken from Virginia and Maryland
and became the capital in 1790 as a result of a compromise
between Alexander Hamilton and the northern states
and Thomas Jefferson and the southern states.
The reason they kind of moved it down to Washington, DC
right there on the border
of where the south ends and the north starts,
it's because they felt if it was in New York City,
the southern states
would feel too much of the power was up in the north
and they'd have a problem with it
and just became part of this big compromise that they had.
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All right, that's today's video.
Some mind blowing facts about Washington, DC.
Hope you guys enjoyed it,
hope you got some information out of it,
now go out, have a great day and be nice to each other.
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