DC By the Book

Excerpt: The taxicab stopped before a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue above which, in four apartments, Clay and three other bachelors lived. The rent was low, and the location convenient: the Mayflower Hotel, where the movers and shakers met, was only a minute's walk away.... Clay's apartment was a single furnished room with a double window overlooking Connecticut Avenue, a wide thoroughfare whose trees and low buildings made it seem more like the main street of some small town than a principal avenue of a national capital. Clay had never got over his first surprise at discovering that Washington was not a city but a town. Except for the huge and pretentious government buildings, the streets were pleasantly familiar even to a provincial's eye. In fact, the capital of his own state seemed to him in many ways more of a city than Washington with its slow Southern ways.