Walking Georgetown at Twilight

Cobblestones and Contradictions: Georgetown After Dark

Georgetown was old before the District of Columbia existed. That is not a figure of speech - the neighborhood was established in 1751, a full forty years before George Washington chose the swampy banks of the Potomac for the nation's capital. I walked its streets on a Friday evening in October, when the air had that mid-Atlantic crispness - cool enough for a jacket, warm enough to keep walking - and the gas lamps along the C&O Canal towpath had just flickered on.

I started on M Street, which is Georgetown's commercial artery and also its most misleading introduction. The chain stores and cupcake shops give the impression of a neighborhood that has been fully domesticated, but turn north onto any of the numbered streets - 31st, 33rd, 34th - and the real Georgetown appears. Federal-era townhouses line the brick sidewalks, their facades flat and symmetrical, their doors painted in colors that suggest strong opinions: aubergine, forest green, a glossy black that reflects the streetlights.

I climbed the famous Exorcist Steps at 36th and Prospect Street - seventy-five stone steps plunging down to Canal Road, steep enough to make your quads protest and your film-history brain replay scenes you would rather forget. At the top, I caught my breath and looked out over the Potomac, where the Kennedy Center glowed on the far bank like a marble cruise ship permanently docked.

Dinner was at Martin's Tavern on Wisconsin Avenue, which has been serving Georgetown since 1933 and looks it in the best way - dark wood booths, brass fixtures, a bartender who remembers your drink from three visits ago. JFK proposed to Jackie in Booth Three. I sat in Booth One because Three was taken, and had the crab cakes, which arrived golden-crusted and were held together by almost nothing, which is the mark of a crab cake that respects its ingredients.

After dinner, I walked to Baked and Wired on Thomas Jefferson Street for a cupcake called the Strawberry, which was the size of a softball and frosted with the kind of baroque excess that would make a pastry chef in Paris either weep or applaud. I ate it on the canal towpath, watching the water move slowly between the old stone walls, and thought about how Georgetown has been a port, a university town, a political salon, and a shopping district, and somehow remains all of these things simultaneously.

The side streets get quieter the farther north you go. By the time I reached R Street, I was essentially alone with the brick and the gas lamps and the rustle of century-old magnolias. A cat watched me from a windowsill. I waved. It did not wave back, which felt appropriately Georgetown.