You’ve all heard the joke: How do you make a small fortune in the [art/wine/horse] business? Start with a large one. Well, add another one to that: The early real estate business on Capitol Hill. No one better exemplifies this than Thomas Law, who arrived here in 1795 with a large fortune — and ended […]
Finding a house in D.C. by its address is, today, a trivial operation. The numbers match-up with the streets, and thus make navigation child’s play. It was not always this easy. For the first 50-or-so years, D.C. had no street numbers. Addresses were given as “n side Ls btw 7 & 8e,” leaving it up […]
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to chat with one of the builders who worked on many of the Capitol Hill houses that were fixed up during the 60s and 70s. Watch this space – and the Hill Rag – for more on him and his family, but one of the houses he mentioned […]
A regular roundup of interesting miscellany from our fellow neighborhood bloggers. The Location has a photo of the discovery last month of the perfectly preserved sewer created to cover the old Washington City Canal, forming today’s Constitution Avenue. The Georgetown Metropolitan has been going through the American Community Survey results and presenting some of the […]
One of the ways I try to keep my tour groups’ eyes open is to have them search for something in a monument or memorial we are visiting. My personal favorite is the – repaired — error on the engraving of the Second Inaugural Address of the Lincoln Memorial, which can see in the picture […]