The City's Past, Still Present

The City Museum of Washington, D.C., may be history, but the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., isn't history.

Or, rather, it is history -- it's a historical society, after all -- but it isn't, you know, gone. And the best part of its not being gone is that its library isn't gone, either. The library is open -- 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday -- to anyone who wants to peer into the past.

You don't have to make an appointment, and you don't have to be a "scholar." I'm certainly not one, and the library's staff has helped me plenty of times.

The library was always the best thing about the renovated Mount Vernon Square building that housed the doomed City Museum. Maps, deeds, city directories, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, reference books -- it's all there.

Gail Rodgers McCormick, the society's vice president in charge of the library and collections, showed me around on Wednesday.

"No matter what you're researching . . . if it's here in Washington, find yourself on a map first," said Gail.

That's the advice Gail gives to anyone dipping into the collection, whether it's a high school student curious about what used to be across the street from her apartment building or a genealogy buff tracing his family roots. History is meant to be pictured, imagined, and nothing helps like locating yourself in the city of the past.

Perfect for this is the library's set of real estate maps that show D.C.'s plats and subdivisions. The oldest is from 1887, the newest from 1967. In between, you can watch the city grow.

Gail flipped through the massive volumes in search of my grandmother's Brookland house, on Otis Street NE. It wasn't on the 1913 real estate map. Nor the 1922 one. But there it was on the 1927 map, marked by a faint brown square signifying that it was built of stone. (So that's what's underneath the stucco.) Brick houses were rendered in pink, clapboard ones in yellow.

We couldn't find a photo of Momsie's house, but there might be one of yours. It might have been taken by John Wymer, a statistician who from 1948 to 1952 took it upon himself to walk around the city snapping pictures right and left. The library has thousands of his photographs. Your house might be there. Somewhere out of the frame, Truman is president and the Senators are losing.

You can poke around the collection from the comfort of your PC. That's what the archivist at the Rolls-Royce company in England did. A Google search had turned him on to www.citymuseumdc.org, where he came across a reference to a Rolls-Royce custom made in 1926 for Harry Wardman, Washington's British-born real estate magnate. In Container 4, Folder 49 of the Wardman archive were two photos of the gigantic car. Copies are now in the Rolls-Royce archive.

Staffers and volunteers are engaged in a constant crusade to catalogue new (well, old) material that comes into the library, deciding just how to index it so it can be found easily. On a table in a downstairs room was a pile of documents from the Bundy family, including oral histories, obituaries and Della Bundy's 1905 school autograph book. She'd asked her classmates to sign it, and then years later updated each entry with "Married" or "Deceased."

"We want people to know that we're still looking for this," Gail said. "This is lost Washington history if we don't preserve it."

Gail took me behind another locked door, where shelves were covered with long, skinny wooden boxes that looked as if they held bazooka parts. The handmade "coffins" were donated recently by the Segal family. Inside was the inventory of the Capitol Photo Studio, a business the Segals had run since 1955, lugging special panoramic cameras around town to take those wide, skinny photos beloved of high school graduating classes.

There's a shot from the 1920s of 13 flappers on roller skates crossing F Street and countless rubber chicken dinners of fraternal organizations spread out in hotel ballrooms and a whole box of Washington Redskins teams.

There are hundreds and hundreds of photos, each telling a story, or a part of a story, or a part of a hundred stories.

It's all at the library.

A Challenge Is Issued

An anonymous donor has issued a challenge in our Children's Hospital fundraising campaign. This person has pledged $25,000 in the hopes that other new donors will step forward and match the generous gift or that those who have donated regularly in the past will up their contributions.

That could mean $50,000, or a twelfth of the $600,000 we need to raise by Jan. 21.

We're closing out the first week of my inaugural effort with $28,466.13. If you're a fan of my column, or you recognize the good work done at Children's, I hope you'll contribute. Here's how:

Make a check or money order payable to "Children's Hospital" and mail it to Washington Post Campaign, P.O. Box 17390, Baltimore, Md. 21297-1390.

To contribute by credit card online, go to www.washingtonpost.com/childrenshospital and click on "Make a Donation." When you get to the Children's Hospital Foundation site, click on "Donate Now" then follow the instructions for online donation. Make sure to click on "Washington Post" in the pull-down designation window when you complete the form.

To contribute by Visa or MasterCard by phone, call Post-Haste at 301-313-2200, then punch in KIDS and follow the instructions.

Why don't you chew the fat -- or gum the lean -- at my online chat, today at 1 p.m.? Simply go to www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.