In September of 1960, the U.S. and Japan were celebrating 100 years of diplomatic relations. Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko traveled to Washington at the end of the month to celebrate the occasion with an official state visit. An amusing article was published in the Washington Post on September 28th of that year, detailing the state dinner at the ... Read More »
Several readers have suggested Ghosts of DC start focusing on a broader range of neighborhoods and communities and we agree. So continue sending those emails and suggestions to give us more ideas. Below is an old real estate advertisement we came across in the Washington Post from 1961. This is from Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, just outside the District border on ... Read More »
Wow! What an amazing colorized photo. This shows a Wilkins Coffee truck being loaded on location, somewhere on the 500 block of Rhode Island Ave. NE. Click on it to take a closer look at the guy. He looks just like Robert DeNiro. Creepy. I think this certainly warrants further investigation to learn more about Wilkins Coffee. Read More »
Pass the afternoon by studying this photo close up. Amazing detail, including a view of the Willard Hotel as well as the Old Post Office. Read More »
Earlier this week, Ghosts of DC received a generous invite to tour the 9:30 Club. To some GoDCers, it might come as a shock that we haven’t yet written about this hub of the local music scene. It wasn’t the lack of content or stories, but the overwhelming volume of music history that made it impossible to choose one. The ... Read More »
Do not piss off an angry monkey. It will tear your face off. Never trust a monkey, especially one that is getting its first taste of freedom. The summer of 1929 had the residents of Read More »
We love articles about whoopee parties. Who doesn’t? Here’s one that we came across which had a troubling ending, far worse that the last one that we wrote about. The article was published in the Washington Post on July 8th, 1929. A drunken brawl, concluding a whoopee party of men and women at Arlington, Va., shortly after midnight Saturday night, ... Read More »
A beauty queen hero emerged on the banks of the Potomac, one summer day in 1924. Below is an article from the Washington Post, published on June 2nd, 1924. Miss Leoma Davis, winner of several Washington beauty contests, yesterday afternoon dived into the Chesapeake canal and saved G. W. Cave, local insurance man, from drowning. Cave had gone down the ... Read More »
Babe Ruth and the Yankees came to town in September of 1934 for one last hurrah. They were to play the Senators in a doubleheader on Saturday, September 29th, followed by a Sunday afternoon game. Already having lost the American League pennant to the Detroit Tigers, the Yankees would close out the 1934 season at Griffith Stadium. George Herman Ruth ... Read More »
One of the stranger GoDC titles yet? I’d say so. We dug up a bizarre article from July 31st, 1909 in the Washington Post. You have to read this one to believe it. This is a monkey tale; the story of a live simian, evidently crazy with the heat, and bent on stirring up a little midsummer excitement. After escaping ... Read More »
Meet Major Walton Atwater Green, Chief Prohibition Inspector for Washington, D.C. This is not a guy you want to cross. Don’t let him catch you with some hooch. Read More »
Here is an awesome article from the Washington Post, published on March 2nd, 1929. It was written by Arthur Dean, “The Parent Counselor.” You think being a parent is tough today? Well, it wasn’t any easier in the 1920s. Parents who had growth up in the Victorian age had their hands full with wild and unruly teenagers with raging hormones ... Read More »
Workers were digging a sewer trench beneath a Capitol Hill street in 1898. They came upon a few fossil fragments — among them, a 6-inch bone that now represents the largest piece of the District’s controversial “official dinosaur,” the Capitalsaurus. The contractor on that sewer project, J. K. Murphy, presented his workers’ discovery to Smithsonian scientists on January 28, 1898. Here’s how ... Read More »
Here we have another bizarre article from the Washington Post, published on December 5th, 1916. This one was sent to us by GoDCer John (i.e., our inspiration and Mr. Streets of Washington). Mrs. Mabel E. Bates, 38 years old, wife of Henry E. Bates, 38 years old, former assistant manager of the Willard Hotel, died at Emergency Hospital last night from ... Read More »
This is a great one to kick off our new Ghosts of DC design. This photograph shows a group of White House photographers from the press pool, standing on the South Lawn back in 1918. Read More »
Ghosts of DC The lost and untold history of Washington