Robert Pohl worked for many years as a computer programmer but recovered from that and became a full time stay-at-home dad. With his son now in school, he has expanded his horizons and become a self-taught historian. He has written books about his house as well as Emancipation in the District of Columbia. You can reach Robert at Robert[at]thehillishome.com
While researching Schott’s Alley over the last month or so, I kept running into mentions of an “Americanization School”— an entirely new concept to me. What is an Americanization School? Before the First World War, there was some concern that certain immigrants were not being integrated into the country quickly enough and that they needed […]
Over the last two weeks, I have looked at a long-gone alley in NE Washington, Schott’s Alley. While the press at the time was almost uniformly negative, the longer piece by Pauline Pry was particularly dour, to the point that it seemed that the author had some kind of ax to grind. A very different […]
Last week, I gave an overview of Schott’s Alley, which existed for many years in the shadow of the Senate Office Building. As a look at the census records showed, it was the dominion of the laborers and the recently arrived in the city. Unsurprisingly, Schott’s Alley rarely appeared in the pages of the news […]
I was recently reading a book about alley life in Washington and found myself looking at a rather remarkable picture: the pediment of the Senate Office Building rising above a decrepit alley. As it turns out, I was not the only one impressed by this image. It is used on the book’s dust cover as […]
In continuing to look at Mary Logan’s book on Washington and what she had to say about Capitol Hill, I next came to her description of the Library of Congress. However, when it came time to find a sentence or two to share, I was struck by her introductory passage of the chapters on this […]