Qualla: Capitol Hill

Capitol Hill: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Slowking4, CC BY-SA 3.0. Thomas Jefferson named it. Serving as George Washington's Secretary of State in 1793, he looked at the rise of ground where the Congress House was going up and reached back two thousand years for an analogy. The Capitoline was one of the seven hills of Rome, the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, where Roman triumphs ended and where the city's most sacred archives were kept. Jefferson grafted the name onto a wooded hilltop seven blocks east of the Anacostia, the highest point in the new federal city. Pierre Charles L'Enfant had called the same hill Jenkins Heights in his 1791 plan, after a livestock pasture that turned out to be in the wrong place anyway. The Carrolls of Maryland had owned the land for generations and called it Rome. Jefferson's name stuck.

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Image: Slowking4 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Capitol Hill: A Boarding House Town

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY-SA 3.0. The neighborhood emerged between 1799 and 1810 because the federal government needed somewhere for its temporary employees to sleep. The Capitol was rising at the western edge of the hill; the Washington Navy Yard, established in 1799, was operating along the Anacostia just south...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY-SA 3.0

Capitol Hill: Rowhouses, Layer by Layer

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaxGiglePhoto, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk a single block on Capitol Hill today and you can read a century of American architectural fashion in the housefronts. Early 19th century manor houses and Federal-style townhouses survive from the boarding-house era. Italianate brackets from the 1850s sit between simple frame...

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Image: MaxGiglePhoto | CC BY-SA 4.0

Capitol Hill: The Buildings the Name Refers To

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK is like a firecracker. He makes it hot., CC BY-SA 3.0. When people in news broadcasts say Capitol Hill, they almost always mean Congress. The U.S. Capitol sits at the western edge of the neighborhood on its namesake hill, with the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Senate and House office buildings clustered around it. T...

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Image: APK is like a firecracker. He makes it hot. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Capitol Hill: Eastern Market and Barracks Row

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Fitzgerald, CC BY 3.0. The center of Capitol Hill's daily life, the part that has nothing to do with Congress, is Eastern Market on 7th Street SE. The market was built in 1873 to a design by Adolf Cluss, the same German immigrant architect responsible for Calvary Baptist Church and much of the Smithson...

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Image: Peter Fitzgerald | CC BY 3.0

Capitol Hill: Parks and Memory

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0. Capitol Hill is full of small squares laid out in the L'Enfant Plan and the streets that converge on them. Lincoln Park, east of the Capitol on East Capitol Street, holds Thomas Ball's 1876 Emancipation Memorial, which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freedman, a ...

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Image: Ted Eytan | CC BY-SA 2.0