Georgetown on a Tuesday

Georgetown was a tobacco port before D.C. was a swamp with ambitions. Two and a half centuries of brick row houses on M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, carrying that weight with practiced ease. Tuesdays the students are in class and the neighborhood reverts to its real personality: quiet, old, and faintly superior.

Baked & Wired on Thomas Jefferson Street makes cupcakes that have beaten Georgetown Cupcake in every locals' poll. The espresso powers policy debates. The C&O Canal towpath on the western edge is a time machine — 1830s canal, stone locks, sycamores, and 184 miles that stretch to Cumberland, Maryland. Even two miles west to Fletcher's Cove makes you forget you're in the capital.

The Georgetown Waterfront Park on the Potomac faces Roosevelt Island and the Kennedy Center. The benches at sunset are Georgetown's best free entertainment, which in a neighborhood where parking costs more than dinner, matters.