DC By the Book

Excerpt: [Gardner's] studio and gallery was in the top floor above Shepard and Riley's stationery and Bookstore at 511 7th Street. Two huge wooden signs covered most of the building's brick facade over the second and third stories, and were visible from several blocks away: PHOTOGRAPHS and VIEWS OF THE WAR.

Excerpt: Outside [Surratt's boarding house] I found the same familiar, dreary H Street... An early morning rain had passed, and there was a weak sunlight, but the unpaved city street in front of our house remained more a brown liquid of mud and horse manure in the sunlight rather than dry dirt. Already carriage wheels have left deep ruts on both sides of the street.

Excerpt: The sidewalks on either side of the avenue were lined with rows of wooden booths of the fruit and vegetable vendors, padlocked for the night. Across the avenue was the city market building itself. When my father was alive, my sister, Anna, and I would ride in his wagon here when he went to Washington City to sell the produce from our farm in Maryland.

Excerpt: At the corner of 10th and Pennsylvania, I cast a look up the street to the darkened hulk of the building that was once Ford's Theatre. The facade had collapsed near the turn of the last century, killing a number of government clerks who worked in offices there. The government had seized the property after the assassination, and the three-story building had not been used as a theatre since the night of Lincoln's murder.

Excerpt: We stood outside the National Theatre... Behind us a jitney cab backfired at the curb, and a party of officers and ladies getting out of the automobile laughed in nervous excitement. There seemed to be officers in military dress uniforms everywhere in the crowd in front of the theatre. The ladies wore fashionable richly caped dresses and plumed hats. Tomorrow a military parade for what President Wilson had called Preparedness Day was scheduled ...

Excerpt: We walked onto the Capitol grounds. Around us stood the wooden shanties used by the Irish workmen during the day, and beyond the workmen's huts the abandoned piles of huge, squared granite stone with which they were building the dome and the new wings to the Capitol Building. Close by was the railyard of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which had brought the Union soldiers I had seen marching earlier this week.

Excerpt: Our cab pulled up at the entrance to Ford's Theatre on 10th Street and took its place along the curbside in the line of carriages discharging passengers. The giant gas lamp in front of the theatre brilliantly lit the crowds of people outside, many of them Union officers arm in arm with the ladies they escorted. Wooden benches had been placed outside the theatre by the treasurer, Harry Ford, so that the Union noncommissioned soldiers and the plainer laboring class of civilians in the city, not able to attend the theatre, could sit and watch the arrivals of the well-dressed theatre-goers.

Excerpt: As we reached the entrance to the curving, block-long facade of the Willard Hotel, I saw miniature U.S. flags snapping in the night air from their mountings at the second-story balcony of the hotel. A few figures stood there outside their rooms watching the evening drama of traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Excerpt: Gardner steered the rolling darkroom toward the Long Bridge, the military's direct route of supplies over the Potomac River and into the Virginia war theatre. ... It took at least a quarter of an hour to cross the Long Bridge. The military vehicles ahead of us stretched in an unbroken succession across the wooden planks to the Virginia shore, and all traffic out of Washington City was restricted into one column to our right. I saw ahead two enormous signs nailed between the gatelike pylons at the center of the bridge: one, over the lane leading into Virginia, read NO PACE FASTER THAN A WALK. The other, hung so as to face the lane of soldiers and civilians returning from the battlefields, read NO SOUVENIRS.

Excerpt: The single sentry guarding the approach to the bridge casually glanced at my credential from Gardner, and waved Sarah and me across the wooden planks of the Navy Yard Bridge over the [Anacostia]. ... The military seems much less watchful over civilian traffic now that the war is effectively won. ... The road from the [other] side of the bridge was a good one , partially paved with stone, and it ran directly down the countryside past Surrattsville before ending at the Virginia [??] boundary.

Excerpt: I ... walked the remaining two city blocks to our old house at H Street. The neighborhood has been greatly altered by recent immigration; our former boardinghouse now operates ... as a Chinese restaurant. Except for the garish lights in the front windows, the exterior of the house was unchanged. The drab, red-brick walls faced H Street blankly as if, after a half century, there were no secrets to be revealed. Perhaps there are not.

Excerpt: I turned onto Ohio Avenue. I had passed by three or four of the narrow, frame houses along the block before I noticed each had at its window a red-glassed lamp, or, in places, red window curtains only partially drawn on the scene within. Shadows moved on the stone steps of one house ahead of me, and as I walked nearer the streetlamp I made out a trio or women sitting outside on the steps in the night air.

Excerpt: To my amazement, I stood at the L-shaped alley at F Street that led to the rear entrance of Ford's Theatre. There were half a dozen heavily built men in civilian clothes prowling about, shining bull's-eye lanterns into the alley's shadows.