Walking Washington, D.C.. Barbara J. Saffir

       Start at the Georgetown branch of the DC Public Library, 3260 R Street NW. The stately brick building, which was renovated after a 2007 fire, is a lending library, and it preserves a Georgetown history collection. Its crown jewel is a rare 1822 oil painting of freed slave Yarrow Mamout. The library also hosts public events, such as talks by the neighborhood’s own celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley, who is penning a book on Georgetown. With the library to the left, walk to the corner and turn left on Wisconsin Avenue NW.

       Turn right on 33rd Street NW and right on Dent Place NW. Then Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy leased this narrow three-story brick duplex at 3321 in December 1953 after he married Jacqueline Bouvier in September, says the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Across the street at 3324 is the empty lot where freed slave Yarrow Mamout once lived. Originally from Guinea, West Africa, Mamout grew wealthy after gaining his freedom in 1807, says Cultural Tourism DC’s African American Heritage Trail brochure.

       Continue on Dent Place and turn left on 35th Street NW to walk past more elaborate row houses. On the left at Volta Place NW is the templelike Volta Laboratory and Bureau. Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell built this neoclassic yellow-brick structure in 1893 as a center of information for the hearing-impaired. He started the bureau at his dad’s four-story gray house across the street.

       Turn left on Volta Place. Next door to the lab is the suspected spy den where President George H. W. Bush once slept, says Pamela Kessler’s Undercover Washington. Bush stayed there when it was the home of his father, Connecticut Sen. Prescott S. Bush. Before that, the brick and clapboard house was one of three Georgetown homes that State Department aide and alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss rented. Georgetown “has a rich history of espionage and intrigue,” adds Carol S. Bessette, the retired Air Force officer who leads the popular Spies of Washington Tour that she founded.

       Continue east on Volta Place, past Volta Park, where the Kennedy clan played touch football. Turn left on Wisconsin Avenue NW and turn right onto Q Street NW. Turn left on 31st Street NW to walk uphill to Tudor Place Historic House & Garden on the left. The neoclassic mansion was built in 1816 by William Thornton, architect of the first U.S. Capitol. Since 1988, it has welcomed the public to its 5.5-acre landmark home and garden. It was built by Georgetown’s first mayor and his wife, a granddaughter of First Lady Martha Washington.

       Reverse direction on 31st Street NW for another former Kennedy home on the right at 1528. Kennedy rented this three-story, flat-roofed, brick home from 1946 to 1949 after his election to Congress. He lived with his younger sister, Eunice; an aide; a cook; and a butler, says WETA public television’s local history blog.

       Continue south on 31st Street NW and turn left on P Street NW for the two-story dark gray brick rowhouse on the right at 2808, which the Kennedys rented from January to February 1957.

       Continue east on P Street NW and turn left on 27th Street NW. Turn left on Q Street NW for the Dumbarton House on the right. Visitors can tour this elegant brick Federal-style home built around 1800. It’s the headquarters of The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America.

       Dumbarton’s next-door neighbor is a private three-story brick house with a gray balustrade where spymaster Allen Dulles lived. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Allen as director of the CIA and his brother, John Foster Dulles (the namesake of Washington Dulles International Airport), who lived nearby, as Secretary of State. Allen served from 1953 to 1961, the golden age for the spy agency—as its own history states, “a time of derring-do, when the public viewed the CIA as a patriotic organization of people fighting our Cold War enemies.”

       Turn right on 28th Street NW to pass the rear of Herman Hollerith’s former estate on the left (see cemetery below) and the beveled brick wall surrounding the landmark Evermay estate on the right. Its grand Federal-style brick home, with 12 fireplaces and a killer view downhill toward the Washington Monument, was built in 1801. In 2011, Sachiko Kuno and Ryuji Ueno bought the 3.5-acre estate. Now it’s the headquarters of their S&R Foundation, which “offers promising artists and scientists a place to perform and be inspired.”

       Continue north on 28th Street NW and turn left on R Street NW for the Oak Hill Cemetery on the right, which sweeps downhill to Rock Creek. Its Gothic chapel was designed by James Renwick Jr., who also created the Smithsonian’s Castle and its Renwick Gallery. The gray and red stone chapel sits next to the plain gray gravestones of the Washington Post’s former publishers, Katharine “Kay” Graham and her husband, Philip, who shot himself in 1963. Stark gray stones also mark the grave of Herman Hollerith, whose company morphed into IBM. (See Walk 7, Georgetown Southeast.) Some other notable graves belong to architect Adolph Cluss, who designed the Eastern Market, and Confederate spies Lillie Mackall and Bettie Duval. Banker William Wilson Corcoran is buried in a white marble pavilion with eight columns. He founded the cemetery in 1849.

       Across the street is the Grahams’ former three-story house on the left with a big green lawn. Kay bought the cream-colored brick home from “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s predecessor. Her home was a bipartisan hub. “In the life of Washington, [she] played a vital role: she was a convener,” Vernon Jordan told Newsweek magazine when she died in 2001. “She invited to her table people of vastly different views, men and women who otherwise would never have had a reason to sit in the same room.” In 2002, Washington Kastles tennis team owner Mark Ein bought the landmark.

       Walk west on R Street NW, past walker-friendly Montrose and Dumbarton Oaks parks to the Georgian-style brick mansion of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection/Garden on the right. National Geographic named its formal, terraced garden as one of the top 10 on the planet. Beatrix Jones Farrand, one of America’s first landscape architects, designed its garden rooms and rich architectural details with Mildred Barnes Bliss, heir to the Fletcher’s Castoria laxative fortune, after she and her husband, diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, bought the estate in 1920. Now it’s a Harvard University institute. Its free museum showcases Byzantine, pre-Columbian, and European art, and its Renaissance-style music room hosts public lectures and concerts. In 1959, celebrated architect Philip Johnson began concocting a masterpiece to display the Blisses’ gold, ceramic, and other pre-Columbian treasures. Johnson’s nearly transparent pavilion is composed of eight domed, circular, glass galleries supported by marble-clad, cylindrical columns surrounding a fountain-filled atrium.

       Turn right on 32nd Street NW and left on S Street NW for the private, two-story brick home on the left, where film legend Elizabeth Taylor lived with her sixth husband, D.C.-born John Warner. She and the Virginia senator lived next door to his first wife, Catherine Conover, the granddaughter of billionaire financier and National Gallery of Art founder Andrew Mellon. In 1976, Taylor, adorned in a fox-trimmed coat, and Warner, in a coat and tie, married in a cow-filled pasture at his roughly 2,600-acre estate near Middleburg, Virginia. Warner said he bought the S Street property after finding it in a three-line newspaper ad. Back then it had a small stone house and an active horse barn. Warner, a civil engineer, lawyer, and former Secretary of the Navy, built his family home in 1962 with concrete and steel. It had a greenhouse and an art gallery. “We were very happy there,” he reminisced on the last day of 2014. Now Dumbarton’s director lives in the Harvard-owned residence. Continue west on S Street NW and turn left on Wisconsin Avenue NW for the library on the left.