What happened inside Washington, DC’s buildings. Hotels where deals got cut, rowhouses where scandals played out, embassies that hosted defections and dinners both.
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.
Three bars in 63 years at one Georgetown address: Shamrock 1952, Winston’s 1972, Rhino Bar 1998. The full arc of 3295 M Street NW before retail took it.
Forty-five years of Georgetown’s loudest room. The Bayou opened in 1953, closed in 1998, and put U2, Dave Matthews, and a whole DC scene through its doors.
Inside the 1888 Atlantic Building at 930 F Street: the cast-iron columns Bad Brains leaned against and the eighth floor that founded the National Zoo.
Sixteen months from groundbreaking to dedication. Thirteen thousand workers on round-the-clock shifts. Segregated cafeterias FDR personally overruled.
In 1966 a teenager from Chevy Chase reached through the window of a Rolling Stones equipment van behind Washington Coliseum and walked off with Brian Jones’s custom electric dulcimer. The recovery involved a letter to the Evening Star, a Bentley from the British Embassy, and a follow-up Beatles caper. The same barrel-vaulted shed had hosted the Beatles’ first American concert two years earlier.
Frank Lloyd Wright drew Washington a glass city of twenty-one towers on a Connecticut Avenue hill. The height limit refused to let it rise.
Gordon Parks photographed Engine Company No. 4 in 1943: men trusted to run into a fire, and made to eat off separate plates.
