When Dean & DeLuca moved into their new Georgetown location on M Street in 1993, they joined in a grocery tradition stretching back to the Eighteenth Century.
The space was built in 1969 at the height of the Cold War for a very different purpose: this is where the Federal Reserve stockpiled billions of dollars in cash for use after a war with the Soviet Union.
The National Park Service has jurisdiction over Washington's many parks, plazas and traffic circles. They got into a nasty bureaucratic turf war with WMATA in the 1970's as Metro was being built.
Metro opened for service to great fanfare in 1976. The initial line included just five stations stretching from Farragut North to Rhode Island Avenue, and it had taken seven years to built.
The Geography and Maps Division at the Library of Congress is one of the more interesting rooms on Capitol Hill. Their hoard includes 5.2 million maps, 80,000 atlases and over 500 globes; it is the largest cartographic collection in the world.
WMATA pamphlet from 1967: "SERVICE WILL BE FREQUENT. Air conditioned trains will run every two minutes at peak hours. The system will carry 281 million riders by 1990."
A water-filled boat elevator used to lower barges from the C&O Canal down to the Potomac River. It was one of just two projects that were selected as the best representations of American engineering at the 1878 Paris Exposition (the other project was the Brooklyn Bridge).
