Famous and infamous Washingtonians and the buildings tied to their names. Presidents, mobsters, madams, and the corner addresses that outlasted them.
She walked into the Treasury Building on a Monday afternoon in 1865, shot the clerk who had courted her since she was twelve, and walked free in five minutes.
Robert LeGendre set a world record at the 1924 Olympics, then built a quiet life as a Washington dentist. When his granddaughter asked about the 1930 divorce that ended his marriage, we traced what the records could honestly tell her.
The Maret School began in 1911 in a rented Washington apartment, founded by three immigrant sisters. The story of how it started, and of the school’s first student.
Three blocks from the Capitol dome sits a 1947 dive bar with deer butts on the wall and a Nardelli behind the counter.
The Hechinger hardware empire began in 1911 as a Southwest DC wrecking crew. The story of Sidney Hechinger, the navy-blue H, and the bankruptcy that ended it in 1999.
In late May 1957, Marilyn Monroe slept on a sofa bed in a Forest Hills den while her husband Arthur Miller stood trial in Federal Court for contempt of Congress. She bicycled the neighborhood in sunglasses, sat by a backyard pool, and held one news conference on the front lawn at 3625 Appleton Street NW. For seven days, the biggest movie star in the world was a houseguest in Northwest DC.
On January 31, 1958, the Evening Star started calling Dallas O. Williams “the Bad Man of Swampoodle.” The nickname stuck through five trials, three vacated convictions, and a 1961 double murder that exposed the broken machinery of DC’s insanity defense.
Just after 2 a.m. on January 14, 1973, WMATA condemned D.C. Transit and its suburban sister company out of existence. The owner was a New York lawyer named O. Roy Chalk, and he had run Washington’s bus system for sixteen and a half years.
Gordon Parks photographed Engine Company No. 4 in 1943: men trusted to run into a fire, and made to eat off separate plates.
