Rock Creek Park in the context of "National Mall and Memorial Parks"

The Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS) is a research institute for classics located in Washington, D.C. at 3100 Whitehaven Street NW. It is affiliated with Harvard University.

Nestled in Rock Creek Park behind Embassy Row, the Center for Hellenic Studies offers a variety of both residential and remote fellowships each year to scholars and researchers working on projects in a variety of fields, including "archaeology, art history, epigraphy, history, literary criticism, philology, philosophy, pedagogical applications, reception, and interdisciplinary studies". The center provides housing for "residential" fellows and their families, and accommodates remote fellows and visiting scholars during shorter stays. Fellows are selected by a panel of Senior Fellows, a group of five internationally selected senior classicists. Fellows are typically pre-tenured PhDs from around the world, most often from Europe or North America. The "Center", as it is commonly called, has been a stopping point in the careers of many budding classicists who have gone on to be major contributors in the field.

The United States has 63 national parks, which are congressionally designated protected areas operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior. National parks are designated for their natural beauty, unique geological features, diverse ecosystems, and recreational opportunities, typically "because of some outstanding scenic feature or natural phenomena." While legislatively all units of the National Park System are considered equal with the same mission, national parks are generally larger and more of a destination, and hunting and extractive activities are prohibited. National monuments, on the other hand, are also frequently protected for their historical or archaeological significance. Eight national parks (including six in Alaska) are paired with a national preserve, areas with different levels of protection that are administered together but considered separate units and whose areas are not included in the figures below. The 433 units of the National Park System can be broadly referred to as national parks, but most have other formal designations.

A bill creating the first national park, Yellowstone, was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, followed by Mackinac National Park in 1875 (decommissioned in 1895), and then Rock Creek Park (later merged into National Capital Parks), Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890. The Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service "to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." Many current national parks had been previously protected as national monuments by the president under the Antiquities Act or as other designations created by Congress before being redesignated by Congress; the newest national park is New River Gorge, previously a National River, and the most recent entirely new park is National Park of American Samoa. A few former national parks are no longer designated as such, or have been disbanded. Fourteen national parks are designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS), and 21 national parks are named UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BR), with eight national parks in both programs.

The Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, informally called the Rock Creek Parkway, is a parkway maintained by the National Park Service as part of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. It runs next to the Potomac River and Rock Creek in a generally north–south direction, carrying four lanes of traffic from the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Memorial Bridge north to a junction with Beach Drive near Connecticut Avenue at Calvert Street, N.W., just south of the National Zoological Park. During rush hours, the parkway is converted to one-way traffic corresponding to the peak direction of travel: southbound in the morning and northbound in the afternoon.

The Parkway was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 4, 2005. Built from 1923 to 1936, it is "one of the best-preserved examples of the earliest stage of motor parkway development".

16th Street Northwest, briefly known as the Avenue of the Presidents, is a prominent north-south boulevard in Washington, D.C., located in Northwest D.C. The street was laid out as part of the 1791 L'Enfant Plan, which served as the original blueprint for the city. The street begins just north of the White House, across from Lafayette Square in the President's Park, and continues north along the Washington meridian until Blair Circle.

The street passes through several notable landmarks and thoroughfares, including K Street, Scott Circle, Meridian Hill Park, Rock Creek Park before crossing Eastern Avenue into Silver Spring, Maryland, where it ends at Georgia Avenue. From K Street to the District line, it is part of the National Highway System, while the Maryland portion is designated Maryland Route 390. The entire street is 6.4 miles (10.3 km) long. Part of the street is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Sixteenth Street Historic District. From June 2020 to March 2025, the section immediately north of the White House was known officially as Black Lives Matter Plaza, featuring a large-scale mural of the wordmark on the street.