Begin at Christ Church Georgetown, a brick Episcopal church with Gothic arches, on the southwest corner of 31st and O Streets NW. This 1818 church is home base for the annual Georgetown Garden Tour, run by the Georgetown Garden Club. Founded in 1924, the nonprofit club invites visitors each spring to tiptoe near the tulips of about eight masterfully designed gardens to help fund its beautification projects. Tickets include afternoon tea at the church. There’s no winter tour, but some Georgetown gardens even light up in January with sunny-yellow winter jasmine vines and little white snowdrops pushing up through the crackled dirt and snow.
On the southeast corner is the private Queen Anne–style mansion from 1870 where Jacqueline Kennedy’s mom, Janet, and her stepdad, Hugh Auchincloss, lived. When “new” owners Jennifer and Laughlin Phillips, of the Phillips Collection museum, put it on the market in 2000, Hillary Rodham Clinton toured the nine-bedroom, 12-fireplace, three-car-garage mansion for more than an hour, The Washington Post reported. She and hubby Bill wound up choosing a more secluded home on a dead-end street.
Turn right to walk south on 31st Street NW and turn left on storied N Street NW, with its brick herringbone sidewalk. On the right at 3038 is the split-level brick house of former New York governor and Under Secretary of State William Averell Harriman and his second wife, Marie. After her death, he married British-born Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward, who became a big Democratic fundraiser and then an ambassador to France. A few doors down at 3014 is the 1700s estate with a tennis court, where The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn lives. Her late husband, Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during the Watergate era and beyond, bought it in 1983, the Post says. President Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert, lived there in the early 1900s. Across the street at 3017 is the 1794 three-story brick house, with its four-columned white porch, where Jacqueline Kennedy dwelled for almost a year after JFK’s assassination. She also lived briefly at the Harriman’s mansion before she bought this house in 1964 for $175,000, news reports show.
Continue east on N Street NW and turn left on 30th Street NW. Turn right on O Street NW and right again on 29th Street NW for Mt. Zion United Methodist Church on the right. Founded in 1816, it’s D.C.’s oldest African American congregation, says Cultural Tourism DC’s African American Heritage Trail brochure. This 15-block Herring Hill neighborhood, from 29th and P Streets to Rock Creek Park, was once the center of Georgetown’s black community. Now blacks are a minority in Georgetown.
Continue south on 29th Street NW and turn left on N Street NW. Turn right on 27th Street NW to walk past the tail end of Rose Park, a flat stretch of green overlooking Rock Creek Parkway’s profusion of spring daffodils below. Turn right on Olive Street NW for the small, daffodil-yellow row house on the left, where cooking guru and onetime spy Julia Child lived. Julia “and her new husband, Paul, first moved to Olive Street in 1948, after they’d met in Ceylon, where both were posted for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),” says Washingtonian magazine. After a stint in France, they returned in 1956. For more than a year in the 1950s, Julia ran a cooking class for her powerful neighbors, including Kay Graham and Polly Wisner, wife of deputy CIA director Frank Wisner, says C. David Heymann’s book, The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club.
Continue west on Olive Street NW and turn left on 28th Street NW. Cross Pennsylvania Avenue NW for the Four Seasons hotel. It may not be 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but its White House–connected power players and celebrities sometimes luxuriate at this modern, brick hotel. Visitors don’t have to stay there to enjoy its quiet elegance, plush spa, and restaurants alongside Lock 1 of the C&O Canal.
With the hotel to the rear, turn left to walk west on Pennsylvania Avenue NW and turn left on 29th Street NW. Turn right on the brick towpath along the canal, which was completed in 1850 as a shipping corridor along the sometimes unnavigable Potomac River. Walk 1.5 blocks to Lock 3 for a bust of William O. Douglas in a brick plaza. In 1954, the Supreme Court Justice, then 55 years old, hiked from Cumberland, Maryland, to Georgetown on the 184.5-mile-long dirt towpath to help prevent it from becoming a highway.
Continue on the towpath across Thomas Jefferson Street NW for an Amsterdam-like block with a canal lock and colorful row houses. Turn right on 31st Street NW. On the left corner facing the canal is the brick building where IBM started. Herman Hollerith ran his Tabulating Machine Company there in the 1890s. It “was consolidated into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. in 1911, and CTR … was renamed IBM 13 years later,” says IBM. This “father of modern automatic computation” built the first punched-card tabulating and sorting machines and the first key punch. His ideas sprang from his stint as a statistician for the federal government’s Census Office, which hand-counted its census in 1880. Census put Hollerith’s new tabulating “machine to work on the 1890 census. It did the job in two years” (instead of seven to eight) and “saved the government $5 million,” says IBM and the United States Census Bureau. The Census used modified versions of his technology until computers took over in the 1950s, says the agency. His wife, Lucia Beverly Talcott Hollerith, who co-founded the Georgetown Garden Club, might be pleased with her hubbie’s old factory. Now it’s part of Canal Square, an award-winning rehab project by architect Arthur Cotton Moore. Part of it is the Sea Catch Restaurant & Raw Bar, which has a canal-side patio and a gardenlike view.
Continue north on 31st Street NW and turn right on M Street NW for the Old Stone House. Visitors can tromp up the narrow stairs in this rustic granite home to see how working families lived in the 18th century, with their big stone cooking fireplace and compact, Spartan sleeping quarters. The National Park Service says this 1765 house is D.C.’s oldest structure on its original foundation. When the government bought it in 1953, it was a used-car lot.
POINTS OF INTEREST
Christ Church/Georgetown Garden Tour 31st and O Streets NW, 202-333-6677, christchurchgeorgetown.org
(Private) former home of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother 3044 O St. NW
Private homes on N Street NW W. Averell and Pamela Harriman, 3038; Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, 3014; and Jacqueline Kennedy, 3017
Mt. Zion United Methodist Church 1334 29th St. NW, 202-234-0148, mtzionumcdc.org
(Private) former home of Julia Child 2706 Olive St. NW
Four Seasons hotel 2800 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 202-342-0444, fourseasons.com/washington
Bust of William O. Douglas Chesapeake & Ohio Canal between Thomas Jefferson and 30th Streets NW, 301-767-3714, nps.gov/choh/planyourvisit/georgetownvisitorcenter.htm
IBM’s birthplace (Canal Square Building) 1054 31st St. NW, www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV2027.html
The Old Stone House 3051 M St. NW, 202-895-6070, nps.gov/olst/index.htm
ROUTE SUMMARY
1 Start at Christ Church Georgetown, 3116 O Street NW.
2 Turn right on 31st Street NW.
3 Turn left on N Street NW.
4 Turn left on 30th Street NW.
5 Turn right on O Street NW.
6 Turn right on 29th Street NW.
7 Turn left on N Street NW.
8 Turn right on 27th Street NW.
9 Turn right on Olive Street NW.
10 Turn