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Photos of the Week – Lake Placid, MD – April 2012

Every now and then you come across an event that tugs at your heart. That occurred on Friday, April 20 at the dedication ceremony for the Public Safety Memorial in Gaithersburg, MD at a place called Lake Placid on a street named Edison. I was invited as a local member of the press.

First a bit of history about this photo setting – the PhotoLoaf version.

The National Geographic Society former owners of the land and building set on a bucolic meadow in what was at one time rural Montgomery County named the lake outside of their “remote” office and printing/shipping plant – Lake Placid. For future readers the NatGeo’s HQ is in DC just blocks north of the White House.

The building and site changed hands as NatGeo consolidated staff and got out of the business of printing their own magazines and books. General Electric bought the land years later and used it to move what was a former “time-sharing” GEISCO computer operation from it’s Rockville location to a new Gaithersburg campus site they named Edison Park Drive.

Now Montgomery County MD owns the site and is centralizing public service staffs and operations to the campus. For 10 years the county wrestled with creating a memorial for service members who died in the line of action serving the citizens of this Metro DC urban/suburban/rural landscape.

Ah – Lake Placid – a perfect confluence of meeting of time and place.

And so on April 20th – a beautiful Spring morning – city, county, national leaders, civic and business leaders and families of the fallen gathered on the “eastern” shore of Lake Placid to dedicate the home of a permanent Public Safety Memorial.

So on a street named for the GE scientist, Thomas Edison, along a shore line of a still body of water named by National Geographic for that picturesque upstate New York venue – came a slice in time for all to experience and return to on occasions to reflect – at a memorial for the ultimate sacrifice of our public hero servants.

And go to Media at

And go to http://www.creativemoco.com/public-art/public-safety-memorial for more on the memorial.