Washington, DC History & Old Stories of DC

The Metro Stations Washington Almost Built: The 1967 Fight Over the “Coal Mine” Under Your Feet

Everyone knows Metro’s concrete vaults. Almost nobody knows the Commission of Fine Arts called Harry Weese’s rejected station designs “a refined coal mine shaft.”
Aug 10, 2026 · 9 min read

Carter Barron Amphitheater: The Golden Age of Concerts in Rock Creek Park
Aug 7, 2026 · 8 min read

For a generation, a 4,200-seat bowl on a Rock Creek Park hillside was the summer stage of Washington. Nat King Cole sang there. So did Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Danny Kaye, Stevie Wonder. Silent since 2017, the Carter Barron Amphitheater is coming back.
Stetson’s on U Street Was Once a Speakeasy Raided Five Times
Jul 28, 2026 · 9 min read

Long before Stetson’s Famous Bar & Grill filled 1610 U Street NW with punk shows and cheap beer, the same storefront was a Prohibition speakeasy. Federal agents raided it five times between 1921 and 1924. Then they raided it again in 1930.
The Reform School for Girls That Stood Where Sibley Hospital Is Now
Jul 27, 2026 · 9 min read

For sixty years a reform school for girls stood on the Palisades hill where Sibley Hospital is today. The troubled history of the National Training School for Girls, 1893 to 1953.

Nathans Georgetown: 40 Years at 3150 M Street, and What’s There Now

A bookie named Nathan Detroit opened it in 1969, Howard Joynt ran it for 28 years, Carol Joynt closed it on July 12, 2009. Now a Capital One Cafe occupies the southeast corner of Wisconsin and…

Jul 23, 2026 · 15 min read
The Whiskey Still Where Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff Lived, and Ran the White House

Halfway down the Rock Creek slope at 2400 Tilden Street NW stands Isaac Peirce's 1811 whiskey still. In 1954 Sherman Adams moved in and ran the Eisenhower White House from a converted distillery three miles from…

Jul 15, 2026 · 12 min read
Robert Askins, 1938 DC Cyanide Killer: A Four-Decade Arc

On December 28, 1938, in a small alley off 6th Street NW, a 31-year-old woman named Ruth McDonald accepted a drink from a young chemistry student and was dead within the hour.

Jul 15, 2026 · 19 min read