Places phildzielski Wants to Go

The iconic D.C. restaurant where the Cuban Missile Crisis was negotiated, now a Walgreens.

This seemingly out-of-place gas station by the Watergate hotel was once described as the most expensive gas station in the world.

Before Metro, Washington had a robust streetcar network—and you see the remains of this infrastructure if you know where to look.

The first presidential bomb shelter was located in an old vault under the Treasury, connected to the White House via tunnel.

The monument's pointy aluminum tip has been melted down by repeated lightning strikes.

100 years later, they're still down there.

This poor little statue is the most vandalized memorial in Washington.

D.C.'s first central library was born out of a chance encounter with the philanthropist whose name it bears.

Decades before the scandal, this staircase on the river was a literal "water gate."

A diminutive memorial marks the site of a successful assassination by a right-wing death squad in America's capital.

A bas relief commemorates the "Nuns of the Battlefield" who cared for soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

A historic arena where the Beatles played their first concert in the U.S.

Members of Congress have traveled between the buildings on Capitol Hill for a century hidden from tourists, press, and storm clouds.

The most accurate timepiece in the world.

You could be standing at the site of one of D.C.'s most fatal tragedies and not even know it.

Fittingly, America's museum of architecture is itself a magnificently designed old building.

Helen Keller once broke ground on this historic center for the study of technologies to benefit the hearing impaired.

There just so happens to be a court even higher than the U.S Supreme Court: a basketball court in the building itself.

Where the U.S. government kept its actual treasure, before Fort Knox.

A painfully obvious spy house sits right across the street from the Russian Embassy.

A heroic pigeon that, through a barrage of gunfire, delivered a message that saved over 100 lives in World War I.

This sandwich shop has a century-old elevator behind a sheet of plexiglass.

An atomic bomb-proof strongbox protects the U.S. Constitution from terrorists and thieves.

A lovely aquatic park built by a one-armed Civil War veteran who made a fortune from lotuses.