Weekend open thread, massive crowds, and Flickr pool

Some readers have suggested we start posting “weekend open threads” for readers to discuss other issues besides those in recent posts..

The theme for today’s thread is: how did you enjoy our walkable urban places this weekend?

I watched half the World Cup match between England and the US in Dupont Circle, which was packed with people far beyond anything I’ve seen. The screens weren’t huge and we couldn’t really see due to a large tree limb blocking part of the view, but the energy of the crowd was amazing.

M.V. Jantzen wrote, “For the first ever in my life, I had to circle a block to find parking. … For my bike.” Bikes were locked to every pole and every fence around the Circle, and at the edges, people were constantly arriving to find their friends, or leaving to buy food or water at one of the many establishments nearby.

The Capital Pride Parade, seersucker bike ride, and other events also took place yesterday. What did you do?

Also, we’ve now created a Flickr photo pool, Greater and Lesser Washington. If you upload photos to Flickr and would like us to consider your photos to illustrate a post or to feature on the site, please add them to this pool.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth is also interested in photos to illustrate their campaign materials, and we are partnering with them on this pool. We will also periodically feature photos uploaded on the pool that particularly catch our eye.

Anything you think would be interesting to Greater Greater Washington or CSG can go in the pool. We are particularly interested in photos about the best and worst of urbanism in the Washington area: Beautiful buildings and ugly ones, buildings that engage the street and those with the worst blank walls, Metro efficiency and Metro delays, great bike lanes and harrowing bike close calls, new bulb-outs and unsafe crosswalks, parks beloved by people and parks that just function as separators between virtual freeways, streets filled with people and streets empty, and so on.

And, of course, it’s be great to have photos from all jurisdictions in the region: All neighborhoods and all wards of DC, Arlington, Alexandria, Montgomery, Prince George’s, Fairfax County, Falls Church, Fairfax City, even Loudoun, Prince William, Howard and so on. We’d love the urban corridors and single-family homes of Arlington, farms and sprawl of Loudoun, Montgomery inside the Beltway to the Agricultural Reserve, planned Greenbelt to not so planned Upper Marlboro, DC west and east of the river, and everywhere else.

To date, I have generally found photos through the Creative Commons search, and definitely encourage anyone uploading to Flickr to post under a Creative Commons license so other bloggers can utilize your images as well. However, some people don’t want to grant that level of permission, and the Flickr pool is also a good chance for you to highlight images to us that might make good blog post illustrations but which we might not otherwise find through keyword search.