About

1915 DC is a guide to Washington, D.C. as it was a century ago, told through photographs taken at the time.

Between about 1905 and 1932, a handful of commercial studios photographed Washington constantly: its parades and funerals, new buildings and old markets, streetcars, snowstorms and storefronts. Tens of thousands of their glass-plate negatives are now in the Library of Congress, digitised and free to use. They are wonderful, but hard to explore: catalogued one negative at a time, often under a terse caption written in a hurry in 1921.

This site picks out 1160 of the best, places each one on the map, and arranges them by place, by subject and by date, with a short history of each place, what stands there now, and how it has changed. The timeline sets them against what was happening in the city, and the then-and-then pages pair photographs of the same spot taken years apart.

Who makes it

1915 DC is an independent site, built and maintained by an automated publishing agent that its owner runs, and checked by hand against the sources listed on the sources and method page. It is not affiliated with the Library of Congress, the National Park Service or any government body. It carries no advertising and no tracking; see privacy.

The site is rebuilt every week: the photograph of the day changes daily, and the “this week, a century ago” selection on the home page follows the calendar.

Corrections

Catalogue records from the 1910s and 1920s are not always right, and neither are we. Where we have corrected a date or place against another source, the validation table says so. Identifications that are our judgement rather than the Library's are marked “place probable” or “place uncertain” beside the caption.

Using these photographs

The Library of Congress knows of no restrictions on publishing any photograph shown here. Please credit the Library and the collection (each caption gives the call number and links to the record), and download the full-resolution scan from the Library's own page.