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.
Five forgotten people, robbed, slashed, shot, or stabbed in Washington’s Murder Bay slum between 1865 and 1868. We pulled their names out of the old Evening Star: named victims, named killers, and real intersections that no longer exist.
A few doors south of Heaven and Hell, 2321 18th Street NW in Adams Morgan was the Blue Room lounge, then Bill Thomas’s Bourbon whiskey bar, and now Death Punch.
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.
