What happened inside Washington, DC’s buildings. Hotels where deals got cut, rowhouses where scandals played out, embassies that hosted defections and dinners both.
Inside Dan’s Cafe at 2315 18th Street NW: the windowless 1911 building, the immigrant Dan family, and the six decades Clinnie ‘Dickie’ Dickens ran one of D.C.’s oldest dive bars.
The Castle at 10 Post Office Road in Silver Spring is not a 19th-century folly. It is what a midnight furnace fire on April 24, 1922 left of the Forest Glen Trading Company, plus the granite a Pittsburgh oilman and the Seminary president bolted on top.
At 3125 Mount Pleasant Street NW, the Raven Grill has been a Washington DC dive bar since 1935. The booths are still the originals.
Before Commander Salamander made Georgetown punk, 1420 Wisconsin Avenue was a 1909 store and a quiet antique shop. The wild history of one storefront.
A reader asked about Georgetown’s Flour Mill at 1000 Potomac Street. The building was the neighborhood’s last working mill, and it began as a cannon expert’s cotton factory. Now its offices are headed for a 135-home conversion.
The Northumberland at 2039 New Hampshire Ave NW is Harry Wardman’s 1910 luxury apartment house and DC’s oldest self-managed co-op. Inside its storied past.
Own a home at River Place in Rosslyn and you don’t own the land beneath it. In 2052, the 99-year lease on the old Arlington Towers runs out. Inside the history of Rosslyn’s brick towers, from a diplomats’ training garage to Arlington’s cheapest river view.
Twice in twenty years, someone climbed into a stolen aircraft and put it down on the White House South Lawn. In 1974 it was a 20-year-old Army private in a stolen Huey. In 1994 it was a depressed truck driver in a stolen Cessna. Both times, the president was away. Both times, the Secret Service had to rewrite the rules.
Three blocks from the Capitol dome sits a 1947 dive bar with deer butts on the wall and a Nardelli behind the counter.
