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 […]
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 […]
At the end of last week, I was sent an edited copy of the scandal book, with a number of questions and statements needing clarification. Most of them were quite simple, but one took me a couple of hours. And although there was, in the end, little need to change any words, I did discover […]
With the manuscript of my book at the editors, I can once again look at some piece of arcana of Capitol Hill history. And little is more arcane than what I discovered while researching something completely different: The electric scoreboard. In those long-ago days before TV – or even radio – the only way to […]