Adams Morgan Backstreets

The Potter's House sits behind a modest storefront on Columbia Road, distinguished by its weathered green exterior and the heavy wooden door that opens into a combined café and bookstore. Founded in nineteen sixty, this space began as a…

The Ontario features a sprawling, seven story red brick facade that stretches across the entire block, punctuated by white stone trim and rounded bay windows. Built in nineteen oh six as a luxury apartment hotel, it promised residents a…

The red brick facade of Engine Twenty-One features an ornate arched doorway framed by decorative terra cotta. Built in nineteen oh eight, the station served a neighborhood that had recently transformed from a quiet suburb of row houses…

The Walter Pierce Park athletic field sits in a sunken depression that once functioned as the City Refuse Crematory. In the early twentieth century, this site housed the Adams Morgan incinerator, where the city burned its trash in large…

The Biltmore in Kalorama is an apartment building defined by its sprawling, u-shaped brick facade and distinctive arched entrance. Built in nineteen twenty-three, it provided luxury residences for the city elite who favored high-end…

A concrete wall, painted with a sprawling, vibrant mural of jazz musicians, rises sharply above the sidewalk at the intersection of eighteenth and Columbia Road. For decades, this plaza functioned as a rare stretch of open space where…

A large, painted mural of a woman playing the organ covers the brick facade of this building. Bill Duggan opened the club in nineteen ninety-two, naming it after a bawdy blues song about a house of ill repute. He started it as a place to…

Kalorama Park occupies the exact footprint of the old Kalorama estate, a grand property once owned by Joel Barlow, the poet and diplomat. When the city began to fill in around the area, developers eyed the mansion's grounds for rows of…