Posts the Ghosts of DC editors hand-pick from the archive. The strange, the vivid, and the ones worth pulling back to the front page after a few years buried.
The Army and Navy Club has occupied the corner of 17th and I Streets NW since 1891. The current building opened in 1912. In 1987 Shalom Baranes gutted everything behind that 1912 facade and rebuilt the club around it. The facade survived. Almost nothing else did.
The man whose name is over the door at 1264 Wisconsin Avenue was a Boston Braves shortstop in the 1914 World Series before he opened a Georgetown tavern the year Prohibition ended. Ninety-three years and four generations later, it is still open, still owned by the same family, and still has a brass plaque on the booth where John F. Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier.
These haunting 1967 photos show the inside and outside of the old Capitol Traction Company Powerhouse, previously located on the Georgetown waterfront.
This is from the Georgetown University archives showing a group of young men gathered in a dorm room in 1913.
An 1855 painting showing Georgetown, D.C. from an elevated perspective.
Take a look back in time at Southwest D.C. in the 1930s & 1940s through this old photograph. See how the area has changed since then and explore the 1927 Baist map of the area.
3815 Georgia Avenue NW has been a restaurant since 1929. In the 1960s it was Billy Simpson’s, Washington’s Black political forum.
DC’s diagonal avenues, named for states, all radiate from the Capitol. The prominent ones nearby honor the original thirteen colonies.
Take a look back in time to explore Washington, DC before the Great Depression. See photos of 18th, N St. and Connecticut Ave. and 21st and Florida Ave. from 1929.
