New Guidebook With a Twist Gives the REAL Inside Story on the Nation’s Capital

WASHINGTON — Stand on 15th Street in downtown Washington between E Street and Constitution Avenue and you’ll see the gray walls of the Commerce Department.

If you’d been there between 1885 and 1918, you would have seen a 16-sided building, the Manassas Panorama Building. Inside, a huge mural of the Second Battle of Manassas was on display.

Vaudeville shows were staged there, too, and Thomas Edison’s surprising new machine--the phonograph--was demonstrated to the curious.

Paul Dickson, a writer who lives in the old Washington railroad suburb of Garrett Park, Md., and Douglas Evelyn, a Smithsonian Institution manager and Dickson’s onetime college roommate, have taken a look behind Washington’s facades.

The result is “On This Spot,” a guidebook with a twist: It leads the reader to what stood or what happened at ordinary places in Washington, a city whose history is not well known, even to Washingtonians.

With this book, you can look from the White House grounds toward the Smithsonian museums “and picture in your mind a notorious red light district, part of a squalid slum known as Murder Bay.”

Or you can stroll where Daniel Webster did his grocery shopping or by the house in which Mark Twain wrote “Innocents Abroad.”

You’ll learn that where the Internal Revenue Service now deals with your taxes once stood Carusi’s, a dancing academy. It was used for inaugural balls of almost every president from John Quincy Adams through James Buchanan.

At the July 4, 1848, cornerstone laying for the Washington Monument, report Evelyn and Dickson, the onlookers included 20,000 people and a 40-year-old American eagle.

Twenty-four years earlier, the same bird had witnessed the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphant parade through nearby Alexandria, Va.

Between the monument and the White House is the Ellipse, where people who come to Washington to march and demonstrate often assemble.

During the Civil War, that grassy acreage was called the White Lot, named after a white fence that separated it from the White House. Cattle grazed there while awaiting slaughter for Army beef.

Move downtown to 637 Indiana Ave. N.W.

You’ll see an ordinary furniture and antique store, Litwin’s. Inside is what is believed to be the oldest Otis elevator still in operation.

Installed in 1852, when Zachary Taylor was in the White House, the elevator is operated by pulling on a rope. Too shaky these days for people, it moves furniture from floor to floor.

The U.S. District Courthouse is in the neighborhood. Where it stands was a boardinghouse that catered to visiting delegations of Indians. Among the guests were Geronimo, Red Cloud, White Feather and Crazy Horse.

Over by the Potomac River, Watergate, the office building that lent its name to a scandal, was named after the Water Gate. It is an arc of stairs 206 feet wide, built to accommodate people who flocked to free outdoor band concerts performed on a barge.

The stairs remain, but the noise of air traffic at National Airport, across the river, has driven the concerts elsewhere.

The Kennedy Center was built in the 1960s on the site of the Christian Heurich brewery, also on the Potomac. The brewery performed its function until 1951, except for the Prohibition era, when it turned out ice, not beer.

Old man Heurich managed the business into his 103rd year. In its heyday, his operation turned out 100,000 barrels of beer annually. The brand name was Senate Beer. It was the beverage of choice, no doubt, at Griffith Stadium.

There the hapless Washington Senators of the American League played baseball, or something approximating it, until they went to Minneapolis. The same fate ultimately befell the second version of the Senators, a hastily installed expansion club that didn’t make it in Washington either. They became the Texas Rangers.

The last game at Griffith Stadium, now the site of Howard University Hospital, was between the old Senators and the new, on Sept. 21, 1961. The old guys won, 6-3.