Today is Columbus Day, a Federal Holiday. This means that most government institutions are closed. For the librarians at the Library of Congress, this is not an excuse not to work, but rather an opportunity to show everyone what it is that they do. For this purpose, the main reading room of the Library of […]
Writing these columns, I sometimes spend hours researching a topic and teasing out numerous strands to build up a coherent narrative and explicate an arcane point of Capitol Hill history. Other times, I find a single article that I just have to share with the world–after spending about five minutes finding a little bit of […]
Last week, we looked at the Second Baptist Church, located at 4th Street and Virginia Avenue since the early days of Washington D.C. It was one of the many quiet churches that saw to its parishioners’ spiritual interests with no fuss throughout most of the 19th Century. That would change in with the early 1880s with the […]
The number and variety of churches on Capitol Hill has always been of great interest to me; particularly those that were the first to make their way to this part of the city. Today’s installment is a look at a church that was part of the Hill from the earliest days until 1957. Second Baptist […]
My look at Bloodfield last week focused on the lawlessness that prevailed there –for the simple reason that this was what the newspapers of the time reported. Occasionally, however, there were also hints of the abject poverty that afflicted those who lived there. For instance, just a few months after the piece on the tallest […]