Yesterday Tom shared a somewhat jarring photo of the Capitol dome — colored red. It wasn’t something we had seen before, dating roughly to the late 1950s. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have much information. After a bit of digging, we now know that the Capitol’s re-painting (and temporary red coloring) happened in April 1960. The photo spotted on Twitter came ... Read More »
You can get lost in these old classified pages. This one is from the Washington Post on Saturday, October 5th, 1895. Turkish Baths anyone? Shampooer of twenty-two years’ experience. How can you turn that down? Read More »
Maybe this is a little hyperbolic, but that was the ad for the National Clothing Company, at the corner of 7th and D St. NW. Check out this page from the Washington Post classified pages on March 29th, 1879. These are always fascinating to dig through. You can find some serious gems in them. Read More »
Our favorite officer and the patron saint of Ghosts of DC, Officer Sprinkle, took a trip up to New York City with a group of 21 contest winners from The Washington Post. Twenty-one winners in the Post’s European tour contest were in the Big Apple prior to heading across the Atlantic for their journey. Below is the account of a ... Read More »
GoDCer Ben sent along a great photo of the Washington Post baseball scoreboard circa 1912 (the same year the Titanic sank). It’s remarkable how this low-tech scoreboard resembles our current day ESPN Gameday and MLB.tv. Read More »
About 5,500 weekends ago, Washingtonians woke up and lazily flipped through their newspapers. It was Sunday, November, 11, 1906 and something bold and new was described for the first time in The Post: New Portmanteau Words. Have you received any invitations to “brunch”? [...] “Brunch” is the latest Park Lane for a midday refection that includes breakfast and lunch. And ... Read More »
I haven’t done one of these in a while … so, GoDCer Jon, this is for you. A quick Washington Post search uncovered an article about the buildings construction. This was published on June 15th, 1919 (this happens to be the day Pancho Villa attacks Ciudad Juárez, and kicks off an incursion into U.S. territory — read the related post ... Read More »
Yowza! This is a crazy story that lives up to the title, albeit a brief story. I came across this in the Washington Post on October 25th, 1941. A few gnawed bones and a wild dog were found on an island in the middle of Kingmans Lake yesterday, grim evidence that a Negro squatter had been devoured by the starving ... Read More »
I was poking around the archives of both the Washington Post and Washington Times to come across a gem of a story to share and the one that caught my eye involved two Georgetown boatmen engaged in a brutal fight to the death. Reading through any article titled “Murder in Georgetown,” you’re primed for a taste of some horrid scandal ... Read More »
Rolling Stone just broke the sad news that Bee Gees co-founder Robin Gibb died today, succumbing to cancer. In the late 70s, the Bee Gees were on top of the world, owning the music industry. The Washington Post wrote an article about the group coming to Washington for a performance in 1979. They played the Capital Centre on Sunday, September ... Read More »
This has less to do with the history of our city, but everything to do with the (almost) history of our nation. Arizona had been admitted to the union only a few years earlier in 1912 and by the middle of the decade, the two new senators, Marcus Smith and Henry Ashurst, were strongly advocating to acquire Mexican territory south ... Read More »
Here’s an advertisement I found in the Washington Post. It’s from the mid 1920s and row houses were being sold throughout Brookland. Check out today’s view of the sample homes from the ad. The address is 2902 10th St. NE. Related articles Thanks For the Encouragement (ghostsofdc.org) Move to Cathedral Highlands: An Unobstructed View of the Entire Surrounding Country (ghostsofdc.org) Read More »
Here’s a cool ad for homes in Glover Park in the late 1920s. The sample home was at 3833 Beecher St. NW, but the photo in the advertisement appears to be 3837 Beecher St. (according to Google Street View). Take a look yourself. Related articles If Walls Could Talk: Plain Old Pearson’s in Glover Park (ghostsofdc.org) If Walls Could Talk: ... Read More »
It’s been a little while since we’ve done a “Reader’s Choice” post, so this one is for GoDCer Samantha, who tweeted the request to do something on Cathedral Heights. I also haven’t really done anything about that area, so this works out well. Let me start with a quick fact … Cathedral Heights started out as Cathedral Highlands. The neighborhoods of ... Read More »
In Washington, late into the evening of December 6th, reporters worked their normal, likely frantic, hours and submitted their articles in time to be published the following morning. War had been raging in Europe now for two years, but it was still very distant for Americans and those living in Washington. It was the thing they read about in the ... Read More »
Ghosts of DC The lost and untold history of Washington