Georgetown was a port before Washington existed and the street plan is older than the rest of the city. The blocks are small and the houses are close to the pavement. In most of the residential streets the sidewalks are brick.
The housing runs from plain federal rowhouses, two and three stories in painted brick, to larger Victorian houses on the streets near the river bluff. Many of the blocks have no visible modern construction at all.
O Street still has its cobblestones and its streetcar tracks, left in the roadway when the line closed in 1962. Streetcar rails in a residential street are rare enough in an American city that the block is worth knowing about.
runs through the middle of the neighborhood, below street level, with towpaths on both sides and a series of locks. It is dry in sections.
M Street and Wisconsin Avenue are the commercial streets. The building fronts are nineteenth century, and the shops behind them are mostly national chains.
The steps at the west end of Prospect Street drop about seventy five steps to M Street. They are the ones from The Exorcist. The city made them an official landmark in 2015 and there is a plaque at the bottom, so expect people on them.
