DC By the Book

Excerpt: Seede looked past his friend, down the narrow, one-way street - cobblestone sidewalks, bay windows, Second Empire mansard roofs, everything faithfully restored. It was just after eleven P.M. on the third Tuesday of December 1992. From where they stood - on the elevated front landing of a brick Victorian, on the south side of Corcoran Street NW, in Washington, DC - the White House was ten blocks away. The traffic crawled eastward, bumper to bumper - engines revving, music blaring, the night abuzz with need and opportunity.

Excerpt: Through the windshield, Jamal could see the Central Union Mission, a landmark Victorian warehouse converted during the Depression into a shelter for men, part of a ministry founded after the Civil War to assist the homeless veterans who were living on the streets of Washington. Atop the five-story building - the tallest in the area, which was zoned for residential and light industrial use - was a ten-foot neon cross. Beneath the cross a row of pink and white neon letters spelled out the words of the Savior: COME UNTO ME.

Excerpt: Since he'd divorced his high school sweetheart and quit his job as the youngest schools superintendent in the history of Newport News, Virginia -- bound for Washington and the love of a good man -- Freeman had worked tirelessly to make Corcoran Street and its surrounds into an island of gay gentility: a Georgetown for Marys, as he liked to say.... A perennial member of his real estate firm's Million Dollar Sales Club, who'd moved properties all over town, Freeman considered the thirteen hundred block of Corcoran his own personal fiefdom - over the last decade, he'd sold thirty-two of the forty houses, some of them more than once. As was befitting, Freeman's own house was the jewel of the street -- the centerpiece of an ornate Second Empire terrace that occupied the entire north side of the street, a post-Civil War take on what would be called, in more modern times, a townhouse development, built during the heyday of the neighborhood, when nearby Logan Circle was the most fashionable address in Ulysses S. Grant's bustling capital reserve.