Washington, D.C. Part of the Places of a Lifetime series from Traveler magazine

^{Photograph by Dan Westergren}

Designed by an idealistic Frenchman, constructed (largely by slave labor) upon dredged marshland, named for a fledgling nation’s founding father, and established as the seat of the U.S. government, Washington, D.C., is a fitting Main Street for an upstart nation. Today’s Washington is a capital of interconnected neighborhoods and identities, a quixotic place of grand boulevards and marbled monuments seaming into age-worn cobblestone streets and gossiping-on-the-front-stoop neighborliness. At the heart of this so-called “capital of the free world” is a small town far more romantic than most politicians would admit.