Washington, D.C

Is DC home to America's liveliest cemetery?

Published

2 years ago

October 5, 2024

Is DC home to America's liveliest cemetery?

Welcome to a spot in Southeast D.C. where you can hang out with your friends, have a cup of coffee, watch some live theater … and where 70,000 people have chosen to make their eternal resting place.

We’re wondering: Could historic Congressional Cemetery be America’s liveliest cemetery?

“We are still an active cemetery, so we’re actually still selling plots and burying people, as well as having movie nights, immersive theater,” said Jackie Spainhour, president of Congressional Cemetery. “We’re a certified 5K course. We have a writing group; we have a book club. Everything you can think of, we have tried here.”

They call it D.C.’s greatest undertaking.

In addition to its 70,000 permanent residents, the cemetery welcomed 10,000 guests to its events last year alone.

WRC

News4’s Tommy McFly talks to an actor for Soul Strolls, the annual immersive theater experience put on by the historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Those events include Soul Strolls, their immersive history theater experience and guided-lantern tour.

“We have actors actually portraying the people buried here, and we usually have these thematic stories that connect them,” Director of Programming AJ Orlikoff said. “This year it blew me away. We sold out over 1,600 tickets for four nights of the event in two and a half days. Ultimately, Soul Strolls is a fun, spooky time with your friends. But you know, it’s a fun, spooky history time with your friends.”

Permanent residents include some big names from local — and national — history

Speaking of history: Cemetery residents include former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, J. Edgar Hoover, composer John Philip Sousa and Civil War-era photographer Mathew Brady.

“I would say he’s the father of photojournalism,” Docent of the Year Rick Liebling said.

Way before selfies at events, Brady’s lens snapped Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and President Abraham Lincoln.

A gravesite monument to Mathew Brady, known as the father of photojournalism.

“Brady took pictures of Lincoln and made him look presidential, and Lincoln himself said, ‘Brady is the one who got me the presidency’,” Liebling told us.

Liebling also shared that he plans for Congressional to be his final resting place, too.

“But I’m comfortable knowing that there’s dogs here, and because there’s dogs here, that means people will actually walk near or around where I’m going to be. I find that somewhat comforting,” he said.

Dogs were the first to bring life back to Congressional Cemetery

Before interactive theater and movie nights and book clubs, it was dogs that brought life back to the cemetery.

“Well, I will tell you, way back around 1988 or so, it was not a real pleasant, comfortable place to come,” said Victor Romero, one of the founding members of Congressional Cemetery’s K9 Corps. “I mean, aside from the stones and the markers themselves being in various states of disrepair….”

Dogs sniff around Congressional Cemetery in Washington D.C.

There were also reports of illegal activities — not the welcoming place visitors know these days.

“And we brought more life to corners of the cemetery that people had not been to in ages,” Romero said. “This is indeed the liveliest place in Washington, D.C.”

Meet a death doula (and try not to freak out)

Laura Lyster-Mensh said people usually get unsettled when she tells them what she does.

“Then they meet me and they chill out a little, but yeah, no, it sounds scary, but it’s not,” said Lyster-Mensh, the cemetery’s death doula in residence. “It’s actually about living, not dying, to do things like death cafés.”

Think of Death Café as maybe getting a latte and talking about mortality.

“We do, of course, have people here with terminal illnesses who are dying and know that their their time is very finite, but most people are coming to be in groups to talk about this relationship with death, and they’re often young,” Lyster-Mensh said. “Some come on dates.”

Laura Lyster-Mensh is the death doula in residence at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

“I have much optimism for these couples,” she added, laughing.

‘Every cemetery has its own kind of brand, and this is ours’

Other historic cemeteries such as Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, Green-wood in Brooklyn and Oakland in Atlanta also look toward the living for a breath of fresh air.

“We’re really on the cusp of a real cultural transformation of cemeteries as spaces, and they really are spaces for the living now, and that entails everything that the living love to do,” Orlikoff said.

But do people ever feel like a lively scene at a cemetery is too disrespectful toward the dead?

“Yeah, we get that every once in a while, people who have different cultural traditions and maybe just don’t understand,” Spainhour said. “We’re very transparent that this may not be the space for you, if this isn’t what you like. You know, every cemetery has its own kind of brand, and this is ours.”

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Washington, D.C

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

Published

30 minutes ago

April 19, 2026

Press Room

Storm Team4 Forecast: A chilly, gusty Sunday before a cool start to the week

4 things to know about the weather:

Chances of rain in the morning
Gusty Sunday
Chilly Monday
Temps will rise again through the work week

Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.

After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.

The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.

Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.

However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.

QuickCast

SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s

MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s

Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.

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Washington, D.C

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

Published

1 day ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington

The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.

In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.

“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”

Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.

Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.

“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.

“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”

Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”

A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.

Rachel Reeves posted this image on Instagram from Washington DC on Thursday with the message: ‘Friends that run together – work together.’ Photograph: Rachel Reeves/Instagram

Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.

Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.

But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.

“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”

At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.

The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.

Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.

For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.

“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”

For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.

In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.

Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.

“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”

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