In the late 19th century, tourism took off as a mass phenomenon. This meant a whole new market for guide books, which had existed for decades already, but usually more for people moving to a new location, and not for middle class tourists now thronging the great cities and important sights of the world. In […]
One of my current obsessions are old DC guidebooks, guides to the city published before the Civil War. They are fascinating for a number of reasons, not the least that they somehow managed to fill 300+ pages about a city that was pretty small and had almost no sights to see, in some cases by […]
I recently began reading Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech’s wonderful 1941 book that describes the Civil War from the perspective of DC. In it, you get a real sense of what it was like to survive that disastrous war in the nation’s capital – and get to meet some of the remarkable characters that flocked […]
Last week, I wrote about the Coliseum, a bike-racing track on Capitol Hill, and the various famous bicyclists who raced there. Today, I’ll look at the end of bicycle racing there, and its further uses over the years.
Once again, my readers have come through with a question that had me research a completely new (to me) chapter in Hill history. In this case, it was a query about the use of square 1056, which was used in the early 20th century as a sports field, showing up in the Baist map of […]