This is cool. We dug up a really rare U.S. Census record from 1900 showing the Johnson family of Humbolt, Kansas. Their 12-year-old boy would eventually grow up to be on of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball and he would do that as a member of the Washington Senators. You” see the […]

We haven’t done one of these “They Were Neighbors” posts in a while, and we stumbled across this great collection of U.S. Census records from 1940. Below are all the pages listing the residents of the Mayflower Hotel in 1940. How cool is this? Click on each of these images to see a larger version […]

If you’re not a genealogy buff, you may not know this, but much of the 1890 U.S. Census was destroyed in a massive fire in January 1921. It was a tragic loss for genealogists and historians alike. I was walking down 14th St. and turned onto Corcoran St. NW with Mrs. Ghost and Ghost Dog […]

Faithful and extremely patient GoDCer Jeff requests some time ago that we do a piece on the Northumberland, just north of U St. Our apologies for the long delay in getting to your request, but hopefully you’ll agree that it’s better late than never. The building at 2039 New Hampshire Ave. NW, was built in […]

This is a far more charming photo of Washington in 1943 than the mock execution being held on the grounds of Woodrow Wilson High School. More than likely, Spangenberg was in the background of that photo, running drills. After a little Googling, I found Walter Spangenberg had his own biographical page. He learned to fly […]

The District's peacetime population exploded as government grew and workers - men and women - flocked to new jobs.  It was 1940.  Census employees hit the streets in April.  They determined that D.C. had grown rapidly.

Initially, this was going to be part of the previous post about Cathedral Highlands, but it was too good. This deserves it’s own post. Trust me when I say this is crazy. We learned from the advertisement in the previous post that Matteson worked in the Colorado Building on G St. Side note … Thomas […]

We haven’t done a “Three Things…” post in a while, so let’s go to the far reaches of the District, up to the Maryland line, and talk about some things you didn’t know happened there long ago. 1. The tragic suicide of a local tailor There’s always a macabre story when doing one of these […]

You can’t walk past the Tivoli Theater in Columbia Heights and not admire it, imagining what the surrounding streets were like in the late 1920s. The arrival of Harry Crandall’s new theater was a big deal for the area and let’s not forget that just a couple of years earlier, his Knickerbocker Theatre was the […]

You may be aware of the blight that lined Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1970s with the proliferation of sleezy strip clubs and adult shops, but did you know that over 100 years ago, you could head to the old Chinatown and indulge yourself into a opium-induced stupor? That’s right, our very own city had opium […]

I was researching a couple of stories and I came across an article that was so sad that I had to share it with you. It’s from the Washington Times on October 19th, 1918. The world was in the middle of the greatest pandemic in the history of the planet. Between 50 and 100 million people […]

Every time I see an old photo like this on Shorpy, I want to know more about the person staring back at me. Where did they live? What was their occupation? Who were their family members? Who were their neighbors? I started this blog eight weeks ago (wow, feels a lot longer than that) with […]

There were a couple of requests a short while back to do a post on The Cairo, the most famous residential building in the city. You can Google it or check it out on Wikipedia, so no need to do the building’s history. I want to dig up the more anonymous stories of people associated […]

Curious about Smith Commons on H St. in DC? Check out our latest “If Walls Could Talk” post. The winner of our second IWCT poll is the H Street hot spot, Smith Commons (I don’t think I like that acronym). I came across some interesting stories related to the spot at 1245 H St. NE, […]

Before Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals, we had Barkley, Morrow, Harrison, W. Whiting and H. Whiting

This photograph from 1908 caught my eye. It is of 28-year-old Mary A. Bliven (wife of Frank S. Bliven) and Bertha, her 7-year-old daughter, sitting in a 1907 Franklin Model D.

This next installment of “If Walls Could Talk” will be the Petworth watering hole, The Looking Glass Lounge. This is one of my favorite places for a Sunday afternoon beer, especially in the warmer months, out on their back patio. I imagine the place will be packed this evening, and now you guys have another […]

If you’ve spent any time in Rock Creek Park, you have seen or crossed over this bridge. Below is a little history on it from a plan documenting the structure in 1995. And to the right is a photo I found of Lansing H. Beach, the man that was in charge of the design and […]

This is a wild advertisement that I came across in The Evening Times (back then they’d publish the paper a couple times each day). Coke Dandruff Cure? Okay, my interest is piqued … what is that?

I guess D.C. has always had bad drivers. This one is from December 7th, 1930. A dizzy clockwise circle of an automobile around Dupont Circle, which caused several crashed last night, was climaxed when the driver, arrested and jailed at the Third Precinct Station, attempted to hang himself in his cell.Leon Woodrow Rice, 21 of […]