Arlington, VA
Opened 1941 as Washington National. Built partly on Potomac River tidal flats — controversially, partly in Virginia rather than DC. Renamed Reagan National in 1998. The Runway 19 "river visual" approach follows the Potomac to avoid restricted airspace over central Washington. Sits inside the DC Special Flight Rules Area and Flight Restricted Zone.
George Washington's plantation home sits on a bluff above the Potomac eight miles south of Alexandria, the house he expanded over decades into the red-roofed mansion with its iconic two-story piazza facing the river — a porch he designed himself, where he liked to sit and watch the water. He was born into it, inherited it, farmed it as an experimental agriculturalist, returned to it after the Revolution and again after the presidency, and is buried in the tomb on the grounds with Martha. Like Monticello, the modern estate interprets the full story, including the more than 300 enslaved people who ran the plantation. Saved from ruin in the 1850s by the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association — the first national historic-preservation group in America — it has been open to the public ever since.
The companion to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum on the Mall — and the place they put the artifacts too big for downtown. Opened in 2003 in a vast 760,000-square-foot hangar on the south side of Dulles, it holds around 200 aircraft and spacecraft and 3,000 artifacts, and the roll call is staggering: the Space Shuttle Discovery, the most-flown orbiter in history, with its re-entry scars still on the tiles; the Enola Gay; an SR-71 Blackbird; a Concorde; and the Boeing 367-80, the prototype that became the 707 and the jet age. The Donald D. Engen Observation Tower overlooks the Dulles runways — one of the best legal spots in the country to watch heavy iron work while standing next to a spaceship. Admission is free.
On the Severn River where it meets the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland — the U.S. Naval Academy ("the Yard"), founded October 10, 1845 by Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft as a permanent shore school for officer candidates. The Academy produced 990 admirals and 24 Marine Commandants, 53 Medal of Honor recipients, three of the twelve men who walked on the Moon (Alan Shepard of Apollo 14, Jim Irwin of Apollo 15, and Charlie Duke of Apollo 16), Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell (USNA 1952), one President (Jimmy Carter, USNA 1946), and 60+ NFL players. Bancroft Hall, the dorm, holds the entire 4,400-midshipman Brigade — said to be the largest single dormitory in the world at 4.8 acres of floor space. The 210-foot copper dome of the Naval Academy Chapel dominates the Annapolis skyline; in the crypt below rests John Paul Jones (the Revolutionary War naval hero whose body was recovered from a forgotten Paris grave in 1905 and reinterred at the Academy in 1913). The Class of 1845 cannon — captured at Vera Cruz in the Mexican-American War — sits outside the entrance to the Yard. Annapolis itself is the Maryland state capital, with the oldest functioning state capitol in the U.S. (1772 Maryland State House) where the Treaty of Paris was ratified and George Washington resigned his Continental Army commission in 1783.
On the night of September 13-14, 1814, British warships bombarded this star-shaped brick fort guarding Baltimore harbor for 25 hours during the War of 1812. A Washington lawyer named Francis Scott Key, watching from a truce ship in the harbor, saw through the smoke at dawn that the enormous American flag still flew over the fort — and scribbled the lines that became "The Star-Spangled Banner." The flag itself (a 30-by-42-foot garrison flag) survives at the Smithsonian; the fort survives here as a national monument, the only one also designated a "historic shrine." Its low star-fort walls and the harbor it guards are the whole point — built to be seen and to command the water approach to Baltimore.