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Organization of American States Headquarters Building
15m
Meet your guide outside the House of the Americas, built in 1910 with funds from Andrew Carnegie. Sign in, collect your Metro day pass, hear the ground rules, and get the day's big question: which Washington will you like better, the official city in stone or the lived city around it?
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DAR Constitution Hall
10m
Walk north up 17th Street past the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, where your guide works as a genealogist. Hear how Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall in 1939, and how her answer on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial became the more famous concert. Exterior view.
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Renwick Gallery
35m
Stand where the Renwick Gallery and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building face off across 17th Street, then walk past Blair House to Decatur House. Learn how a first lady's campaign saved these buildings from the wrecking ball, and meet the people whose stories the plaques leave out. Exterior views.
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Lafayette Square
25m
Circle the edge of the President's Park to St. John's, the Church of the Presidents, and the Hay-Adams, built where two lost masterpieces once stood. Look up 16th Street and talk about what a place keeps, and what it loses, when a famous mural is painted over. From the sidewalks around the square.
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Dupont Circle
20m
Walk up Connecticut Avenue, past the Mayflower Hotel, out of the office city and into the residential one. At Dupont Circle, see the fountain by the sculptors of the Lincoln Memorial, the Gilded Age mansions around the rim, and the speed-chess players who have made the circle their living room for generations.
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Embassy Row
55m
Follow Massachusetts Avenue past the mansions that Gilded Age fortunes built and foreign governments bought: the Walsh-McLean House, Anderson House, and the embassies around Sheridan Circle. Pause at a small marker that holds one of the city's most shocking Cold War stories, then cross Rock Creek to the Islamic Center, a mosque turned toward Mecca rather than the street.
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Washington National Cathedral
1h 15m
Ride a city bus up Massachusetts Avenue, past the British Embassy and the Vice President's residence, to the highest point in the city. Explore the cathedral's exterior and grounds: the west front, a hunt for its strangest grotesques (one is Darth Vader), and the walled Bishop's Garden. Outside only; the grounds are free and open to visitors.
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National Portrait Gallery
1h 30m
Ride the bus back through Georgetown, then take a 90-minute break on your own at the Old Patent Office, home to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Before you go in, hear how this Civil War hospital, where Walt Whitman read to the wounded, nearly became a parking lot. Free entry; lunch is on your own in the courtyard cafe or nearby Chinatown.
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National Building Museum
45m
Walk through Chinatown to the Friendship Archway and debate what makes a neighborhood's heritage real. Then step into the Great Hall of the National Building Museum, built to pay Union veterans and their widows: eight colossal columns, an endless terra cotta parade of soldiers, and a space where presidents have danced since the 1880s. Free entry to the Great Hall.
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Union Station
20m
Ride the Red Line one stop and come up into the gilded, barrel-vaulted main hall of Union Station. Discover how this building explains why the National Mall looks the way it does today, from a president shot in the old train station on the Mall to the plan that cleared the tracks away.
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Supreme Court
30m
Walk Capitol Hill's sidewalks past the Belmont-Paul house, headquarters of the suffragists who picketed the White House, to the marble temple of the Supreme Court. Ask why a court that met in borrowed rooms for 145 years finally built itself a Greek temple. Exterior view from the sidewalk.
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Library of Congress
45m
See the copper dome and Neptune Fountain of the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building and hear how Thomas Jefferson's own books restarted the library after the British burned it in 1814. Then walk east along East Capitol Street, past the Folger Shakespeare Library and blocks of Victorian rowhouses whose front gardens sit on public land. Exterior views.
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Eastern Market
20m
End the afternoon at Eastern Market, a public market hall that has fed Capitol Hill since 1873 and came back after a 2007 fire because neighbors refused to let it go. Browse the vendor hall, grab a snack, and on weekends wander the outdoor farmers' and flea markets. Purchases are on your own.
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Howard Theatre
15m
Take the Metro to Shaw, pausing under the coffered concrete vaults of L'Enfant Plaza station. Stop on the corner where go-go, Washington's own music, fought to keep playing, then visit the restored Howard Theatre, a premier stage for Black performers two decades before Harlem's Apollo. Exterior view.
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African American Civil War Memorial Museum
10m
Walk west on U Street to the African American Civil War Memorial, where Ed Hamilton's Spirit of Freedom stands before the names of more than 200,000 soldiers of the U.S. Colored Troops. Your guide, a genealogist, shows how families still come here to put a hand on an ancestor's name. Outdoor memorial; free.
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U Street
20m
Finish on Black Broadway: the True Reformer Building and its giant Duke Ellington mural, Ben's Chili Bowl, and the Lincoln Theatre, ending at 14th and U, where the city burned in 1968. Close the loop on the day's big question, stay on U Street for dinner if you like, or ride the bus back with your guide to the starting point.
