Stroll down the wide, leafy residential streets of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and you might notice some peculiar details on the homes around you: oversized bay windows, decorative overhangs, corner-facing doors. These are signs of the past lives of these buildings: as shops, grocery stores, and service businesses.
“Once you start to notice the ‘tells’ about these buildings, you see them everywhere,” says Jared Alves, a D.C. healthcare consultant who serves as a committee member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) in northeast Capitol Hill. “It’s incredible—the amount of stores that have been lost and can’t be replaced.”
