Take a look down F Street NW around 1908, with the camera pointing west toward the Treasury Building. Click the photo for the high-resolution version, because the details are worth it.
Look closely at the streetcar. It’s a Lincoln Park car, and the sign on its side is advertising the “hydraulic dive” out at Glen Echo, the amusement park on the Maryland side of the Potomac. A century-plus later, that’s the kind of detail that stops you cold: an everyday trolley doubling as a billboard for a long-gone summer attraction.
This stretch of F Street was the heart of downtown shopping in the early 1900s, the corridor that runs through what we now call Penn Quarter. Plenty of what you’re seeing is gone, but a few of these buildings are still standing if you know where to look.
