Warning: This post took hours to write because we wanted to click all the things.
Between 1948 and 1952, a Bureau of Standards statistician named John P. Wymer walked the District, camera in hand, and took around 4,000 photos as part of a personal mapping project.
Wymer donated his collection to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. in 1978. In 2015, an intern named Jessica Richardson Smith discovered the photos, and as her thesis project, she overlaid the photos on Google Street View. As you can see above, this was a massive undertaking, and the result was Wymer’s DC, which features an interactive map just begging to be explored.
The Atlantic’s CityLab has a great writeup.
Wymer took several photos in our neighborhood. After all, as a Bureau of Standards employee, he worked here.
From there, it’s a short walk south to Tilden Street.
To the north, at the southeast corner of Connecticut and Nebraska, we see familiar buildings next door to a corner service station.
Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Washington, Wymer Collection.
The same corner today.
And if you lose a lot of time to this site, don’t say you weren’t warned.