This is a fascinating series of photos taken by Carl Mydans in September 1935. He was a photographer who worked for both Life Magazine and the Farm Security Administration. This is a series of photos we dug up at the Library of Congress.

He devoted himself to photography while he was a student at Boston University, having abandoned alternative career aspirations to become a photojournalist. In 1935 he went to Washington to join a group of photographers to document conditions of American rural workers. Below are the some of the images he took while wandering the streets of Georgetown, then a much less posh neighborhood with some serious pockets of poverty. And of course, don’t forget that the country was in the depths of the Great Depression.

These images show a very different side of Georgetown from what we’re used to today.