Washington, DC neighborhoods and buildings that aren’t there anymore. Murder Bay, the old Center Market, brownstones erased for federal office blocks.
For sixty years a reform school for girls stood on the Palisades hill where Sibley Hospital is today. The troubled history of the National Training School for Girls, 1893 to 1953.
A bookie named Nathan Detroit opened it in 1969, Howard Joynt ran it for 28 years, Carol Joynt closed it on July 12, 2009. Now a Capital One Cafe occupies the southeast corner of Wisconsin and M.
On December 28, 1938, in a small alley off 6th Street NW, a 31-year-old woman named Ruth McDonald accepted a drink from a young chemistry student and was dead within the hour.
On March 1, 1976, a Foreign Service officer killed his family in their Carderock Springs home and vanished into a 48-year manhunt that is still open.
Walk into the Everlane store at 3259 M Street NW today, all blond wood and folded denim, and you are standing in what used to be the rowdiest room in Georgetown. For about a quarter of a century, this three-story building was the Crazy Horse, a beer-and-boogie nightclub the neighborhood spent years trying to shut … Read more
How a Court House Oldsmobile dealership became the Plymouth-in-the-wall brewpub Bardo Rodeo, then Dr. Dremo’s Taphouse, then a condo tower.
For 43 years, Tom Sarris’ Orleans House held the corner of Wilson and Lynn in Rosslyn, complete with iron balconies and a steamboat salad bar.
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.
