In the Loop, and Next to the Vice President

Observatory Circle in northwest Washington is filled with people who live by the clock.

They are many of Washington's movers and shakers, and they live in spacious houses around the rim of the U.S. Naval Observatory's 72-acre circle of land.

It is even fitting that the observatory is America's official timekeeper, based on dozens of independently operating atomic clocks in the middle of its campus.

"I don't think this is a neighborhood where people visit each other," said Bill Hindle, a radiologist. "People are busy."

Busy professionals, to be precise. "A lotta lawyers, a lotta lawyers," said his neighbor Joseph Rieser, a lawyer who had just returned from a Sunday spent at Arent Fox, where he is a partner.

The Colonials and Tudors in Observatory Circle are 70 to 80 years old, according to William F.X. Moody, a real estate agent with Washington Fine Properties.

Moody described it as "probably the closest-in community that looks and feels like a suburban neighborhood, with sidewalks and detached houses with space between them. Dupont and Kalorama or Georgetown or the Hill are all a little closer in, but the houses are attached, and there's a little more cement and less green."

The leafy tranquility is a magnet for joggers and for nannies pushing strollers. Bill and Carol Hindle liked to take long walks through the neighborhood when they lived in Glover Park in the early 1990s.

That's when they started admiring a 1925 Dutch Colonial on Davis Street. "The porch out front had something to do with it," Bill Hindle said. "We always thought, 'Wow, it's a great house.' "

But there were kids' toys in the front yard, an indication to the couple that the house's occupants would stay awhile.

One morning in 1992, the Hindles were thumbing through the real estate section when they saw an ad for that house they fancied. It was listed for about $560,000. They signed a contract within hours.

"It was serendipitous," said Bill Hindle, a medical director at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital in Alexandria. Now, he said, "I have a fabulous commute. I just go down here to get on Rock Creek Parkway -- 20 minutes each way."