IF YOUR HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT..

WASHINGTON - If you live in the Washington area, it may sound hard to believe with how much everybody gripes about traffic and how many hours everybody works, but you're probably happier than folks who live in other large cities.

The latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index finds D.C. area residents are the happiest of the nation's 52 largest cities.The survey measures your well being on these factors: life evaluation, emotional health, work environments, physical health, healthy behaviors and basic access.

The poll finds 85 percent of people in the region don't smoke and 72 percent go to the dentist annually, leading to healthier lives.

Meanwhile, residents tell The Examiner that free museums, parks and monuments create an area rich in culture and pleasant scenery.

Here are the happiest largest metropolitan areas:

1. D.C.
2. Austin, Texas
3. San Jose, Calif.
4. Seattle
5. San Francisco

Gallup came to its conclusions through telephone interviews, talking with 352,840 adults between Jan. 2, 2010 and Dec. 29, 2010.

ELLICOTT CITY AND COLUMBIA, MD

Columbia/Ellicott City, Md.

(Wikimedia user: David J. Brantley)

These two neighboring towns came in as the second best cities.

Pictures: 'Money' Magazine's 2010 best places to live

These towns made "Money" Magazine's list of best places because they boast plenty of job opportunities,
great schools and offer a safe place to raise a family. See pictures and maps of the cities below.

ART DECO STYLE

"The City of Greenbelt has gone into the history books as the first community in the United States built as a federal venture in housing. From the beginning it was designed as a complete city, with businesses, schools, roads and facilities for recreation and town government."

"The architecture was streamlined in the Art Deco style popular at that time—with curving lines, glass brick inserts in the facades of apartment buildings, and buttresses along the front wall of the elementary school. These buttresses create vertical lines framing a set of bas reliefs by WPA sculptor Lenore Thomas. (These features make the original buildings of the city some of the finest examples of Art Deco to be found in the Washington area."

Ever dream of being an Astronaut? 
NASA is also in Greenbelt, MD

Project Location by Lessard Group

Greenbelt, Maryland

Greenbelt Metro Park integrates a 1.2 million square foot shopping mall, 1 million square feet of office space, 1,000 residences and 3,000 parking spaces with an existing Metro Rail station. The design creates a transit hub in this bustling urban center of the Metropolitan D.C. area. Each element of the site is carefully positioned to maximize the efficiency of the existing infrastructure, and preserve the wetlands and green spaces. A parking garage is situated above the Metro Rail with access to the outward-oriented mall. Commercial space is located on ground level in several mid-rise buildings along the perimeter of three plazas placed on the Metro line.