Vintage photos of Washington, DC. Ordinary people on stoops, sidewalks, and streetcars. Faces and corners of a city most of us would no longer recognize.
The Big Hunt opened in 1992 inside a 1928 storefront at 1345 Connecticut Avenue NW and closed for good in 2020. Inside Dupont Circle’s three-story dive bar with the safari kitsch, the hidden patio, and the Hell’s Kitchen basement.
Before Blockbuster, the DC area had Erol’s Video Club. Turkish immigrant Erol Onaran arrived in 1960 with $16, opened a Georgetown TV shop in 1963, started renting tapes in 1980, and built the largest privately owned video chain in America before selling to Blockbuster for $40 million in 1990.
Heaven and Hell is the name people remember at 2327 18th Street NW. But the building’s first life as a political address began in December 1969 with the Black Panther Party.
When the cake was being cut, the President was upstairs sobbing. The story of Nellie Grant’s 1874 White House wedding, the East Room Grant rebuilt for her, and the marriage that fell apart.
Alexander Robey “Boss” Shepherd paved Washington, lit its gas lamps, and planted 64,000 trees, then bankrupted the territorial government in 1874 and cost the city home rule for 99 years.
From a parlor near Dupont Circle, Madame Marcia told Florence Harding her husband would die in office. Three years later he did.
The congregation built pews dedicated to Generals Grant and Lee, in the same sanctuary, five years after the war ended.
In June 1942, Washington D.C. gas stations on upper Wisconsin Avenue ran dry by 8:30 a.m. These Office of War Information photos show how the city lived through wartime gas rationing.
In the 1950s, the top entertainers in the country performed on 14th Street NW. By the early 1980s, it was known as Washington’s “combat zone,” lined with topless bars and adult bookstores. By 1986, it was rubble. What happened in between reveals how gentrification works when moral crusades and economic interests perfectly align.
