What’s better than a story on the hidden secrets of D.C.’s Jefferson Memorial? A sequel!

In Thursday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax returns to the Tidal Basin, alongside everyone’s favorite ranger, Mike Litterst, with even more little-known lore behind this iconic memorial.

From a severed head to America’s very own “National Treasure” moment, to a very obscure connection to the King of Rock and Roll himself, these historical facts show there’s a lot more than meets the eye at this D.C. staple!

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An Arlington-based barbershop quartet chorus is bringing back a love of the four-part harmony in Virginia, one note at a time.

In Tuesday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax learns a new tune — or two — as he joins in song with the Arlingtones.

are a Northern Virginia chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society, a nationwide organization that aims to help preserve this uniquely American form of music.

At one of their frequent “guest nights,” Kaufax observed firsthand how anyone curious or remotely interested can come in, learn the history of barbershop, learn a song from scratch and make new friends in a welcoming community that flies under the radar in the D.C. area.

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A pay phone in Takoma Park, Maryland, has become locally famous for playing bird songs to anyone who picks up.

In the latest episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax heads to the Maryland side of this D.C.-area neighborhood to connect to some feathered friends.

Installed in 2016 by local musician/artist and audio engineer David Schulman, this phone aims to connect anyone who passes by to nature, while showing that there’s more to the D.C. region than meets the eye.

From woodpeckers, ducks, crows, hawks, herons and doves, there’s a variety of birds calling you — literally — on the other line! There’s even a tribute to a legendary local wild rooster, who made Takoma Park his home in the ’90s.

Tune in to find out how this “hidden” attraction educates and entertains in the most unlikely location!

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In a less-frequented part of the north end of Alexandria, Virginia’s Old Town, you’ll find a little-known historical gem that goes all the way back to a time when the city was a part of D.C.

In the latest episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax dives deep along the water to uncover the past of the historic Alexandria Canal, visiting canal lock No. 1, the former waterway’s main entrance.

The lock itself, jutting into the water in a “V” formation, is impressive enough, but a closer look into the canal’s backstory reveals a tale that’s equally curious.

Completed in 1843, the canal was supposed to fulfill the dream of the city’s founders: For Alexandria to be a gateway into D.C. for the rest of the world. The plan at the time was to export tobacco from Virginia and coal from Western Maryland and the canal’s builders looked to D.C.’s C&O Canal for inspiration.

But ironically, the Alexandria Canal was only in use for a short period of time after completion, before being rendered totally obsolete. Find out why in this video adventure!

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If you stroll a little ways down from the Lincoln Memorial — and stop short of the incoming traffic — you’ll find a wooden structure that looks like a toll booth.

The brown shack sits on the corner of Independence Avenue and 23rd Street SW, right before cars that whiz by it round the bend en route to the Kennedy Center.

Once a tiny shack for police tasked with directing traffic on Rock Creek Parkway, D.C.’s “Phantom Tollbooth” may never have been used to collect tolls from ghosts, but it certainly has a mystical look about it — and some fascinating history.

Find out more about how this structure, one that hardly anyone who drives by notices, has survived through the years in today’s episode of “Matt About Town!”

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Throughout March, ������Ƶapp is celebrating��Women’s History Month. Join us on air and online as we honor the achievements of women in the D.C. region.

If you’ve ever walked the streets of D.C., you’ve probably seen them: Old emergency call boxes.

In Tuesday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax explains how these markers have found new life — commemorating some of history’s most prominent women’s rights leaders.

The renovation was completed in 2019, with nine call boxes near the White House in Downtown D.C., refurbished with brass murals, new paint and heartfelt tributes to women who were true historical groundbreakers.

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The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is getting a total makeover to celebrate 50 years since opening its doors to the public.

In the latest episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax put on his hard hat to get an exclusive first look inside two of five new wings set to open July 1. The last two renovated areas will open by the end of 2026.

From the a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope to a German V-2 rocket from 1944, all the way to Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, some of the new pieces added to the Air and Space Museum are (literally) out of this world.

In total, the museum has undergone renovations on around 20 separate wings since 2018, with this last group marking the final touches before all construction is complete.

The five exhibits opening on the museum’s 50th anniversary will also coincide with America’s 250th anniversary this summer, making Air and Space (and the entire Smithsonian Institution) a great spot to add to your must-see list!

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The Jefferson Memorial is one of the iconic locations on many D.C. tours, but did you know about the secrets it’s hiding in plain sight?

In the latest episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax dives into some little known facts — some hidden Easter eggs, if you will — about the memorial.

These fun facts, historical nuggets you can use to flex your knowledge next time you visit, are bits of information that go to show: just when you think you know everything, there’s still more history to uncover in D.C., even in some of its most familiar places!

Hear “Matt About Town” first every Tuesday and Thursday on 103.5 FM!

“Matt About Town” is now also on YouTube. Follow and to subscribe and get the latest episodes wherever you are!

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For the last three years, ������Ƶapp’s “Matt About Town” segment has brought you some of the D.C. region’s most interesting feature news stories every Tuesday and Thursday.

Starting Tuesday, March 24, in addition to being available on ������Ƶapp.com, full episodes of “Matt About Town” will also be available on YouTube.

You can watch on and also .

“Matt About Town” content will also still be available on your favorite social media platforms. But instead of full episodes, you’ll get highlights of the current week’s episode — almost like a movie trailer.

Be on the lookout for the debut YouTube episode of “Matt About Town,” featuring the hidden secrets of D.C.’s Thomas Jefferson Memorial!

And, as always, you can hear “Matt About Town” segments on air every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday on 103.5 FM, 107.7 FM and 103.9 FM.

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The library is working to preserve 135-plus years of physical media on its 45-acre Packard Campus.

We’ve visited a nitrate film vault containing thousands of Hollywood’s most popular classics, a state-of-the-art theater capable of playing movies in any format, and a public digital repository that provides online access to some of cinema’s most important works.

And one thing from our tour has become clear: there’s no place and no operation quite like the Packard Campus anywhere else in the world!

In today’s episode, ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax concludes his visit to the wondrous space where it all started — in the heart of Packard’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

Here, he got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine one of the rarest reels of film on earth: a nitrate negative of the 1903 film that changed cinema forever.

The last person to examine this reel before Matt? Oh, just Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino. No big deal.

Enjoy this behind-the-scenes finale from a perspective hardly anyone else gets to see.

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Located in the heart of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center on the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus, the Nitrate Film Vault contains nearly 150,000 reels of pre-1951 film shot on nitrate stock.

At one point, nitrate was universally used in the film industry, which is why so many classics are stored there.

The vault contains the world’s largest collection of original studio negatives from all the big Hollywood studios, such as Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, RKO Pictures and Warner Bros.

In this episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp’s Matt Kaufax takes you behind the scenes to a place few people in the region get to see.

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Located inside the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, the theater is open to anyone from the public. The Library screens films three days per week, most weeks of the year, and a lot of the films they show are original prints that can be found in the physical media vaults of the 45-acre campus.

The auditorium space itself is totally unique, with an elegant, timeless style including red velvet cushions, wood paneling and a pit area for an organ player to perform the scores of old silent films they often screen.

The central mission of the Packard Campus Theater is to preserve the traditional filmgoing experience.

In today’s episode of “Matt About Town,” head projectionist David March took ������Ƶapp behind the scenes in a way that few ever get to experience.

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In Tuesday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” ������Ƶapp explored the collection of nearly 1,300 works that have helped shape the art form we know as movies today.

The is an online project of the Library of Congress, spearheaded by the audiovisual conservation operation happening at the library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia.

If you click around the website, you’ll find it has a little bit of everything.

You might find classic cartoons like a 1936 short of “Popeye” next to a cut of the Claymation movie “Peter Cottontail” from 1971. Or you’ll stumble upon color footage of World War II from 1945, next to a tape of a Rolling Stones performance from the 1960s. Then, one more scroll of your mouse leads you to an episode of “The Danny Kaye Show” from 1965.

The National Screening Room has tons of classic films that have been selected as part of the National Film Registry as well, including pictures that revolutionized cinema like “The Great Train Robbery (1903), to “St. Louis Blues” (1928), to “Modesta” (1956), to Oscar winners like “The House I Live In,” starring Frank Sinatra, also from 1945.

The library said they try to make the widest selection of films available to the widest audience through its collection, and constantly add more as part of their ongoing mission to digitize all their physical media assets stored on the 45-acre Packard Campus.

Tuesday’s episode includes excerpts from several recognizable��films, including recent selections to the National Film Registry that haven’t been added yet. But it could be available for free online one day.

These movies, and their importance to history and culture, cannot be overstated. The fact that the Library of Congress has made them all available to anyone with access to the internet is a national treasure!

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They were known at the time as “contrabands,” and risked everything for a chance at freedom — and a better life — during the 1860s.

“We say that these are enslaved men, women and children who came from other areas seeking freedom behind Union lines here in Alexandria,” said Audrey P. Davis, the City of Alexandria’s African American history division director.

City historian Dan Lee said up until 2007, the plot of land had an office building and a gas station on top of it. But a historic archaeological excavation changed all that.

“This is kind of a redemption arc for the City of Alexandria,” he told ������Ƶapp. “This is a living memorial to the people who took the Declaration of Independence literally, that perhaps it wasn’t written for them, but they said, ‘this applies to me, and I want this too.’”

A sculpture called “the Path of Thorns and Roses” dominates the landscape with figures with outstretched arms reaching to the sky, in a desperate bid for freedom.

“Many, unfortunately, due to the disease and their health situations, did not live long in freedom,” Davis explained.

She said the origin of the term “contrabands” started in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, when three enslaved men who had been forced to work for the Confederacy by their white slave holders— Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend — escaped, and got into a rowboat bound for the Union outpost of Fort Monroe.

“Arriving there just a day ahead of them was Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler,” Davis said.

Butler, a Union general, was faced with a choice when the three men arrived: adhere to fugitive slave laws of the time and send them back, or keep them as a “contraband of war.”

“He said: ‘I’m going to keep them as contraband of war, and I’m going use their labor for the Union cause,'” Davis recounted. “And it’s said that word spread so fast when he did this, and when he kept these three men, that within the first week or two, hundreds of contrabands were flocking to Fort Monroe. And I’m actually proud to say my great-great-grandfather was one of them.”

In addition to the sculpture, the memorial has multiple rectangular bronze walls, adorned with bas-reliefs depicting the brave souls who made the journey north from all over — but mainly from parts of Southern Virginia.

You can also see murals of young Black children receiving education in freedmen’s schools. Back then, education was seen as the ultimate symbol of freedom — taking something back that had been denied to African Americans for so long.

On the bronze walls of the memorial are the names of everyone known to have been buried on the plot of land. These records, which were kept by the military, are very rare, considering the lack of documented Black history from this time period.

“It gives you not only the first and last name of a formerly enslaved person, but the age they were when they died, where they died, and what they died of,” Davis said.

Next to some of the names on these bronze walls, you might also see a circle with a triangular arrow, and the words “living descendant” written, signifying that they’ve been able to identify a living relative of someone buried here. So far, Davis said they’ve been able to use genealogy methods track down around 2,000 descendants.

“These were people — men, women and children — who are struggling to survive, who know that if they can get here to Alexandria, that they have a chance to have a life and to be free,” she reflected. “And that’s all anyone ever wants, is to be free, to be able to decide how you can educate your children, how you can live.”

After 2007, amid a groundswell of community support and activism, was constructed and dedicated in 2014.

“It shows the importance of African American history to Alexandria’s history,” Lee told ������Ƶapp.

Today, it stands for all time, as a proper reminder of how far we’ve come: a solemn, yet hopeful dedication to those who deigned to achieve the dream of liberty through sheer force of will and determination.

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In Thursday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” come explore the different ways staff members at the Library of Congress Packard Campus are making sure more than 135 years of media stand the test of time — so anyone from the public can view these pieces of history and culture.

The preservation mission at the Packard Campus, a remote 45-acre plot in Culpeper, Virginia, is twofold: Staff are working to digitize every single piece of physical media the library has in storage and they’re working to preserve the original copies of these pieces of media (like film and TV reels) so they can be optimized for playback in their original formats as originally intended.

It’s a tall task when you consider there are 415,000 square feet of storage on the campus.

The fascinating ways in which staff accomplish both of these goals shines a light on just how intricate — and how much of an art form — this process really is.

You can also visit��“Matt About Town” to see all episodes in the Packard Campus exploration series, an exclusive all-access collaboration with the Library of Congress you won’t find anywhere else.

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