Qualla: Foggy Bottom

Foggy Bottom: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Loren, Public domain. The fog was real. The low ground between the White House and the Potomac sits only a few feet above the river, and in the days before the riverbank was hardened, before the swamps were drained, before the gas works and the breweries closed, the air at the eastern end of Pennsylvania Avenue carried a constant mix of river mist and industrial smoke. Reporters at the State Department headquarters that moved into the Harry S. Truman Building in 1947 started calling the agency Foggy Bottom as a joke, and the joke stuck. American foreign policy is still made under that name. The neighborhood itself was named for the same fog two centuries before any State Department arrived.

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Image: Loren | Public domain

Foggy Bottom: Hamburgh and Funkstown

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OhanaSurf, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before it was Foggy Bottom, it was Hamburgh. A German settler named Jacob Funk bought 130 acres at the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac in 1763 and subdivided them as a town. The official name on the plat was Hamburgh. Everyone called it Funkstown after its founder. Germa...

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Image: OhanaSurf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Foggy Bottom: The Industrial Riverside

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OhanaSurf, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1856 the Washington Gas Light Company built the West Station Works, a coal-gas plant, at 26th and G Streets NW on the riverbank. Coal barges unloaded directly from the Potomac. The plant attracted unskilled laborers, who moved into the alleys behind the rowhouses. The Christia...

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Image: OhanaSurf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Foggy Bottom: The Moons of Mars

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, CC BY 3.0. Just up the hill, on what was then called Potomac Hill, the United States Naval Observatory operated from 1844 to 1893. On the nights of August 11 and August 17, 1877, the American astronomer Asaph Hall sat at the Observatory's 26-inch refractor and discovered, on successive even...

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Image: Sebastian Wallroth | CC BY 3.0

Foggy Bottom: Watergate and the Kennedy Center

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. The West Station Works was torn down in 1948 to make way for the Watergate complex, the riverfront mixed-use development of luxury apartments, offices, and a hotel that opened between 1965 and 1971. On the night of June 17, 1972, five burglars hired by the Committee to Re-Elect t...

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 3.0

Foggy Bottom: A University Town

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0. George Washington University, founded in 1821 as Columbian College, moved its main campus to Foggy Bottom in 1912 and now occupies forty-two acres at the center of the neighborhood. The university's presence transformed Foggy Bottom from a working-class riverside community into a...

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Image: ajay_suresh | CC BY 2.0