Penn Quarter and Chinatown

Ford's Theatre features a whitewashed brick facade and a wide, arched entrance that stands out along Tenth Street. John T. Ford built this structure to house his acting company in eighteen sixty-three. On the night of April fourteenth,…

The Petersen House is a narrow, three-story brick row house with a plain wooden front door and a low set of stone steps. It served as a boarding house in eighteen sixty-five when William Petersen, a German tailor, operated it. On the night…

The Old Patent Office Building occupies two city blocks with heavy Greek Revival columns and massive granite walls. In eighteen sixty-two, this building served as a makeshift hospital for Union soldiers wounded in the Civil War. Clara…

The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office features a narrow, unassuming brick facade on a busy street in downtown Washington. Behind these walls, Clara Barton spent the years after the Civil War identifying twenty-two thousand missing…

The National Building Museum is a massive block of terracotta-colored brick, defined by a colossal interior courtyard surrounded by eight Corinthian columns that rise seventy-five feet high. Originally commissioned in the eighteen eighties…

The three-story brick townhouse on H Street is unremarkable among its neighbors, save for the blue historical marker near the entrance. In eighteen sixty-five, Mary Surratt operated this building as a boarding house, renting rooms to…

The Friendship Archway stands forty-seven feet tall, covered in seven thousand colorful tiles and two hundred hand-painted dragons. It is a traditional Chinese paifang gate that marks the entrance to Chinatown. Built in nineteen…