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Washington D. C.: Past and Present
With 127 pairs of matching photographs, "Washington, D.C., Past and Present" takes the reader on a journey through time. Author and photographer Peter R. Penczer has selected 127 fine vintage photographs of Washington, D.C., and the Virginia and Maryland suburbs and has rephotographed each site from exactly the same vantage point. Readers will be astonished by how much, and in some cases how little, the city has changed. Many of Washington's great monumental buildings are still with us today, but in dramatically different settings. Others, such as the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, site of President Garfield's assassination, have since been demolished. Today the site is occupied by the National Gallery of Art. On every page, then and now photographs appear side-by-side. A photograph of workers putting the finishing touches on the Tivoli Theater in 1923 is shown alongside the Tivoli today, a magnificent ruin. Where a row of houses stood in Southwest Washington in the 1950s we now see the Southwest Freeway. The Virginia and Maryland suburbs are covered here as well. Early photographs of Clarendon, Falls Church, Alexandria, Fairfax, Herndon, Chevy Chase, Rockville, Hyattsville, and many other localities appear alongside recent photographs of exactly the same view. Accompanying the 254 then and now photographs are 127 lucid, thoroughly researched captions describing the forces that have transformed Washington, D.C., and the metropolitan area. "Washington, D.C., Past and Present" is fascinating reading for anyone interested in Washington, metropolis and capital city, and its environs.
264 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1998
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June 1, 2020
Washington, D.C., has changed like few other American cities over the course of its history. A planned city, Washington was set down as a conscious act of will; even its location at a midpoint of the young American republic, between Maryland and Virginia, was meant symbolically, as an affirmation that Washington would constitute a political center and focus point for a new, strong, and indivisible Union. Yet the stresses and strains of American history, and the demands of an expanding federal government, have left their impact on the life and the look of the city, as Peter R. Penczer chronicles in his 1998 book Washington, D.C., Past and Present.
Penczer, as author and photographer, organizes this book in a refreshingly straightforward manner. Treating in turn different parts of Washington, D.C., and its environs, Penczer places on each even-numbered page a photograph of a D.C., suburban Maryland, or Northern Virginia scene at an earlier time in history – and, on the facing odd-numbered page, a more recent photo of the same scene, photographed from the same perspective. Sometimes, the “past and present” photos have a great many elements in common; more often, the changes brought by the passage of time are apparent and dramatic.
When looking at the early parts of the book that focus on the National Mall and Capitol Hill, I was struck by a photo on page 50, taken around 1890, of a building on New Jersey Avenue, Southeast; the photographer is looking northwest toward the U.S. Capitol. The heavy, blocky, Gothic-looking building that dominates the frame was constructed in 1874 by Benjamin F. Butler, the Massachusetts congressman who served, controversially and not very effectively, as a Union general during the Civil War.
But if you were an admirer of Butler (his anti-slavery principles were admirable, even if his generalship was atrocious), you’d not be able to see that building now; it is long gone, demolished in 1929 to make room for the Longworth House Office Building where current members of Congress, and their office staffs, seek to accomplish the work of the federal government for the people of today.
Sometimes, the content of the photographs is of mainly historical interest. As one makes one’s way from the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue through Federal Triangle and Judiciary Square, one eventually arrives at a paired set of pictures from downtown, with the photographer looking west on E Street from 11th Street, Northwest. What is likely to catch the reader’s eye in the “Before” picture, from 15 October 1928, is a zeppelin, floating gigantic and serene in the skies above the Nation’s Capital. A zeppelin!
The Hindenburg? No. As Penczer explains, it is a different zeppelin – the Graf Zeppelin, then flying on behalf of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, not the Nazi regime. As Penczer dutifully sets forth what happened to the Graf Zeppelin – it continued to fly passengers after Hitler’s seizure of power, but was retired from service in 1937 after the explosion that destroyed the Hindenburg – the modern reader, surveying the “after” picture of the same E Street urban corridor from 29 June 1996 (my 35th birthday), may find that the zeppelin-free sky looks oddly empty.
Many of the changes that Penczer chronicles in Washington, D.C., Past and Present are disruptive. The entry of the United States of America into the Second World War in 1941, and the onset of the Cold War in 1945, brought many new people into the city and the region, and many splendid structures of old Washington, D.C., were hastily torn down in order that new buildings and highways could be built to serve the new national-security needs of the Atomic Age.
The sections on Southeast and Southwest Washington show how devastating the building of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway was to the life of diverse neighborhoods whose residents had proudly called that part of Washington, D.C., their home for generations. And if you ask some Washingtonians of a certain age about what happened to Francis Scott Key’s house on the Potomac River in Georgetown, or to the Rhodes Tavern in downtown, you’ll still get an angry response.
And then there was the damage from the riots that occurred following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968. One of the images that I found most moving on this return to Washington, D.C., Past and Present was from the Shaw neighborhood of Washington back in that fateful month. In the “before” picture, one lone man looks stricken as he walks through a wrecked neighborhood; smoke rises from the rubble of a destroyed building, and a couple of other people mill about on the empty streets. On the facing-page photo, from November of 1995, nothing has yet been built on the block where the buildings were destroyed; it is just a fenced-off area where a few random trees have grown over the intervening 27 years.
In the decades since this book was published, there has been some development of areas that were damaged in the 1968 rioting. This development has brought in new business and residential construction – and has generated concerns that “regentrification” may drive away poorer residents, in an area that already has some of the highest housing costs, and highest costs of living generally, in the U.S.A. Where will those people go? How will they find access to affordable housing, accessible and sustainable employment, an equal opportunity to attain their share of the American Dream? As always, the life of Washington, D.C., combines the hopeful and the troubling, like the life of the nation of which it is capital.
Along with photos from a wide range of Washington, D.C., neighborhoods – Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, Columbia Heights, Brookland – Penczer’s Washington, D.C., Past and Present also ventures out into the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. It is appropriate that the book does so, as the differing jurisdictions of what has come to be called “the DMV” seem ever more integrated – a fact that was brought home to me in the years 2020 and 2021, when I saw how closely and how well D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam worked together to help the area respond to the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.
As I used to work summers in the Rosslyn area of Arlington County, moving boxes and sorting mail at the office of my father’s trade association, I was struck by a set of photos from Rosslyn in 1922 and 1996. In the “before” photo, Rosslyn looks like the middle of nowhere, with a brewery and a meat-packing plant the only large buildings in what is otherwise a vacant, dusty-looking landscape of telephone poles. The “after” picture, by contrast, is dominated by the sterile, blocky futurism of the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel, the construction of which made necessary the demolition of the old buildings in 1958. And the dusty road of 1922 has been replaced by a smooth three-lane highway that can swiftly get you where you're going -- or can leave you stuck in traffic for who-knows-how-long.
And as I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, and have fond memories of living in Bethesda and working in Glen Echo and Rockville, I took particular interest in two photos from Rockville – one from 1917 and one from 1996. The 1917 photo shows what looks like a bucolic, Bedford Falls type of scene: a three-way intersection, low-slung and vaguely classical buildings, lots of trees providing shade along the sidewalks, Model T automobiles keeping clear of the trolley tracks. In 1996, by contrast, a brick streetscape seems to lead nowhere; amid the concrete emptiness, there are more examples of blocky futurist skyscrapers, along with a parking lot and a fenced-off bit of green space gone to seed.
Penczer explains well the disastrous bit of urban planning that brought about these grim results – “an urban renewal project that transformed the city center. The project demolished 111 buildings covering 46 acres and housing over 150 businesses. Replacing them was Rockville Mall, which opened in 1972 with only ten stores!” (p. 250)
When I was growing up in Montgomery County, just saying the phrase “Rockville Mall” was an effective way of denouncing this outrageous example of bad urban planning; if a dubious-looking project was going up somewhere in Silver Spring or Gaithersburg, an unhappy onlooker might say, "I see the county's going all 'Rockville Mall' again." The mall never had more than a few stores, and many Rockville residents considered it unsafe.
The mall, fortunately, is long gone; and on the basis of a visit to Montgomery County earlier this year, I would say that what Penczer describes as the city’s “plans to reconfigure the site yet again, restoring the streets and shops that were demolished in the 1960’s, albeit in a different form” (p. 250) seems to have worked well, and to portend a more promising future for that part of the Washington area.
Washington, D.C., Past and Present, published by Arlington-based Oneonta Press, has sentimental value for me, because it was a gift from my mother – one of the last gifts that she gave me before she passed away. She was a life-long Washingtonian, who grew up on Garrison Street in Friendship Heights, and attended the Immaculata and Visitation schools and Dunbarton College; she would go watch the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium, and her favorite player was third baseman Eddie Yost.
My mom was pleased that I came to love Washington as she always did; and when she gave me this book, it seemed like her way of expressing happiness that she and I could share an appreciation for the good fortune of living in the National Capital Area. For any resident of the Washington, D.C., region who has an appreciation for life in the DMV – and particularly for those who have lived in the area long enough to see how much things have changed over time – Washington, D.C., Past and Present is a helpful book to have.
Penczer, as author and photographer, organizes this book in a refreshingly straightforward manner. Treating in turn different parts of Washington, D.C., and its environs, Penczer places on each even-numbered page a photograph of a D.C., suburban Maryland, or Northern Virginia scene at an earlier time in history – and, on the facing odd-numbered page, a more recent photo of the same scene, photographed from the same perspective. Sometimes, the “past and present” photos have a great many elements in common; more often, the changes brought by the passage of time are apparent and dramatic.
When looking at the early parts of the book that focus on the National Mall and Capitol Hill, I was struck by a photo on page 50, taken around 1890, of a building on New Jersey Avenue, Southeast; the photographer is looking northwest toward the U.S. Capitol. The heavy, blocky, Gothic-looking building that dominates the frame was constructed in 1874 by Benjamin F. Butler, the Massachusetts congressman who served, controversially and not very effectively, as a Union general during the Civil War.
But if you were an admirer of Butler (his anti-slavery principles were admirable, even if his generalship was atrocious), you’d not be able to see that building now; it is long gone, demolished in 1929 to make room for the Longworth House Office Building where current members of Congress, and their office staffs, seek to accomplish the work of the federal government for the people of today.
Sometimes, the content of the photographs is of mainly historical interest. As one makes one’s way from the White House down Pennsylvania Avenue through Federal Triangle and Judiciary Square, one eventually arrives at a paired set of pictures from downtown, with the photographer looking west on E Street from 11th Street, Northwest. What is likely to catch the reader’s eye in the “Before” picture, from 15 October 1928, is a zeppelin, floating gigantic and serene in the skies above the Nation’s Capital. A zeppelin!
The Hindenburg? No. As Penczer explains, it is a different zeppelin – the Graf Zeppelin, then flying on behalf of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, not the Nazi regime. As Penczer dutifully sets forth what happened to the Graf Zeppelin – it continued to fly passengers after Hitler’s seizure of power, but was retired from service in 1937 after the explosion that destroyed the Hindenburg – the modern reader, surveying the “after” picture of the same E Street urban corridor from 29 June 1996 (my 35th birthday), may find that the zeppelin-free sky looks oddly empty.
Many of the changes that Penczer chronicles in Washington, D.C., Past and Present are disruptive. The entry of the United States of America into the Second World War in 1941, and the onset of the Cold War in 1945, brought many new people into the city and the region, and many splendid structures of old Washington, D.C., were hastily torn down in order that new buildings and highways could be built to serve the new national-security needs of the Atomic Age.
The sections on Southeast and Southwest Washington show how devastating the building of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway was to the life of diverse neighborhoods whose residents had proudly called that part of Washington, D.C., their home for generations. And if you ask some Washingtonians of a certain age about what happened to Francis Scott Key’s house on the Potomac River in Georgetown, or to the Rhodes Tavern in downtown, you’ll still get an angry response.
And then there was the damage from the riots that occurred following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968. One of the images that I found most moving on this return to Washington, D.C., Past and Present was from the Shaw neighborhood of Washington back in that fateful month. In the “before” picture, one lone man looks stricken as he walks through a wrecked neighborhood; smoke rises from the rubble of a destroyed building, and a couple of other people mill about on the empty streets. On the facing-page photo, from November of 1995, nothing has yet been built on the block where the buildings were destroyed; it is just a fenced-off area where a few random trees have grown over the intervening 27 years.
In the decades since this book was published, there has been some development of areas that were damaged in the 1968 rioting. This development has brought in new business and residential construction – and has generated concerns that “regentrification” may drive away poorer residents, in an area that already has some of the highest housing costs, and highest costs of living generally, in the U.S.A. Where will those people go? How will they find access to affordable housing, accessible and sustainable employment, an equal opportunity to attain their share of the American Dream? As always, the life of Washington, D.C., combines the hopeful and the troubling, like the life of the nation of which it is capital.
Along with photos from a wide range of Washington, D.C., neighborhoods – Georgetown, Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, Columbia Heights, Brookland – Penczer’s Washington, D.C., Past and Present also ventures out into the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. It is appropriate that the book does so, as the differing jurisdictions of what has come to be called “the DMV” seem ever more integrated – a fact that was brought home to me in the years 2020 and 2021, when I saw how closely and how well D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam worked together to help the area respond to the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.
As I used to work summers in the Rosslyn area of Arlington County, moving boxes and sorting mail at the office of my father’s trade association, I was struck by a set of photos from Rosslyn in 1922 and 1996. In the “before” photo, Rosslyn looks like the middle of nowhere, with a brewery and a meat-packing plant the only large buildings in what is otherwise a vacant, dusty-looking landscape of telephone poles. The “after” picture, by contrast, is dominated by the sterile, blocky futurism of the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel, the construction of which made necessary the demolition of the old buildings in 1958. And the dusty road of 1922 has been replaced by a smooth three-lane highway that can swiftly get you where you're going -- or can leave you stuck in traffic for who-knows-how-long.
And as I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, and have fond memories of living in Bethesda and working in Glen Echo and Rockville, I took particular interest in two photos from Rockville – one from 1917 and one from 1996. The 1917 photo shows what looks like a bucolic, Bedford Falls type of scene: a three-way intersection, low-slung and vaguely classical buildings, lots of trees providing shade along the sidewalks, Model T automobiles keeping clear of the trolley tracks. In 1996, by contrast, a brick streetscape seems to lead nowhere; amid the concrete emptiness, there are more examples of blocky futurist skyscrapers, along with a parking lot and a fenced-off bit of green space gone to seed.
Penczer explains well the disastrous bit of urban planning that brought about these grim results – “an urban renewal project that transformed the city center. The project demolished 111 buildings covering 46 acres and housing over 150 businesses. Replacing them was Rockville Mall, which opened in 1972 with only ten stores!” (p. 250)
When I was growing up in Montgomery County, just saying the phrase “Rockville Mall” was an effective way of denouncing this outrageous example of bad urban planning; if a dubious-looking project was going up somewhere in Silver Spring or Gaithersburg, an unhappy onlooker might say, "I see the county's going all 'Rockville Mall' again." The mall never had more than a few stores, and many Rockville residents considered it unsafe.
The mall, fortunately, is long gone; and on the basis of a visit to Montgomery County earlier this year, I would say that what Penczer describes as the city’s “plans to reconfigure the site yet again, restoring the streets and shops that were demolished in the 1960’s, albeit in a different form” (p. 250) seems to have worked well, and to portend a more promising future for that part of the Washington area.
Washington, D.C., Past and Present, published by Arlington-based Oneonta Press, has sentimental value for me, because it was a gift from my mother – one of the last gifts that she gave me before she passed away. She was a life-long Washingtonian, who grew up on Garrison Street in Friendship Heights, and attended the Immaculata and Visitation schools and Dunbarton College; she would go watch the Washington Senators at Griffith Stadium, and her favorite player was third baseman Eddie Yost.
My mom was pleased that I came to love Washington as she always did; and when she gave me this book, it seemed like her way of expressing happiness that she and I could share an appreciation for the good fortune of living in the National Capital Area. For any resident of the Washington, D.C., region who has an appreciation for life in the DMV – and particularly for those who have lived in the area long enough to see how much things have changed over time – Washington, D.C., Past and Present is a helpful book to have.
June 12, 2022
Although this book is now (2022) 24 years old and thus could use another update, it is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone who knows and loves DC. Each set of pages of this 8x11 book contains a photo of the exact image in DC, separated by time. Most of the "now" photos were taken in 1995-1997, but the "past" photos range from 1860s-1930s. There's a brief paragraph describing what you're seeing on each page. Some areas have changed substantially; others surprisingly little.
March 21, 2010
With this book, I've been able to slowly acquire a sense of change about DC. My love of our local land and lore, flora and fauna has been recognized with this work. Reach time I revisit Panczer's contrasting images and descriptions of streetcorners and shop venders, Polaroids with daguerreotypes, this love continues to mature and expand and grow and breadth and depth.
August 3, 2007
pretty fascinating for a new way to look at the same boring buildings in this damn town
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews