Meridian Hill Park is a dramatic urban oasis established in 1912 and completed in 1936 at 15th Street and Florida Avenue. Its twelve-acre landscape features the longest cascading waterfall of its kind in North America, a grand promenade, and some of the city’s most interesting sculpture. Nationally known artists performed there from the 1930s into the 1970s, making it America’s first park for the performing arts, and Pearl Bailey and Pearl Mesta drew 20,000 people for “an evening with the Pearls” in 1968. The park was inspired by Mary Foote Henderson, wife of Senator John B. Henderson, who lived in a romanesque, castle-like mansion that once stood at the northwest corner of 16th and Florida Avenue. Designer Howard W. Peasly drew on the eighteenth-century gardens of Italy and France, while John Joseph Early raised exposed aggregate concrete to the level of fine art in the park’s walls and walkways, the first use of that material anywhere in the world. Its multicolored stones, all from the Potomac River, were designed to shimmer in the light like an impressionist painting. Between a predominantly White community on the west and a predominantly Black community on the east, the park was shared by both races in segregated Washington, and today, known to many as Malcolm X Park, it again serves as a gathering place and setting for concerts and public programs amid the city’s most multicultural community.