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.
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.
A four-year-old cut the ribbon on the Whitehurst Freeway on October 8, 1949. It was Washington’s first elevated highway.
The stone arches near the Kennedy Center are the Godey Lime Kilns, Washington’s last 19th-century industrial ruin.
Brickskeller was an iconic DC institution that many locals remember fondly. Learn about its slow demise and the beer renaissance that arrived in DC, as well as a look back at the 1957 advertisement for its opening.
Learn the history of luxury automaker Cadillac’s first major dealer showroom in downtown Washington DC. The Cook & Stoddard Company location on Connecticut Avenue was the go-to destination for politician bigwigs, businessmen, and auto enthusiasts to experience new Cadillac models in their prime from 1912 to the late 1920s.
