I'm going to bust five Washington DC myths so that you know the truth when you come.
Hello! Welcome to Trip Hacks DC my name is Rob,
I'm a tour guide here in the nation's capital. If you're coming to Washington DC
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afterwards, to see the tours that I offer. If you've heard any myths about Washington
DC, leave a comment on this video and let me know what it is, and if it's false
I'll bust it. That said,
let's get to the myths... My Uber driver
told me that the reason DC doesn't have any tall buildings is so that the Washington Monument won't be overshadowed.
The Washington Monument is
555 feet tall. The tallest residential and office buildings are only about
200 feet tall. A building as tall as the Washington Monument would be about 50 stories,
which I'm sure there are plenty of real estate developers who would be
salivating over the idea of building something that tall. The reason that we don't have any tall buildings in Washington DC is because of the
Height of Buildings Act of 1910
The law came into existence
because of a building that you probably have never heard about. The Cairo opened as a one hundred sixty four foot tall hotel in the
1890s. It was hugely controversial when it opened, because the neighbors who lived nearby thought it was outrageous that this new
"skyscraper" opened up next to their houses. They hated this building so much that they went to Congress and asked them to pass a bill
preventing any future tall buildings from being built. The law actually says a lot
but the gist of it is that most buildings in Washington DC
cannot be taller than the width of the street that they're on plus 20 feet, so
basically if a building were to tip over it couldn't cross the street by more than 20 feet.
There are a few other specific regulations and exceptions that I won't get into in this video
but I will leave a link in the description to the actual text of the bill in case you're curious. So
ultimately even though this law does prevent any building from being taller than the Washington Monument, the
actual purpose of the bill had nothing to do with monuments at all.
My cousin who interned for a senator last summer told me that Georgetown is obviously named after the founder of the city: George Washington.
The area of DC currently known as Georgetown was founded in
1751 in the province of Maryland. This was more than 20 years before the American Revolution and almost forty years before George
Washington selected the area to be the capital of our new country. Since King George II was ruler of the British Empire at the time,
including the American colonies, you will occasionally hear the myth that the area is actually named for him.
However, according to Dex Nilsson, author of the book the names of Washington DC,
Georgetown was actually named for neither of these Georges.
Georgetown was actually settled by Scots who fled to the American colonies to avoid wars in Scotland.
Maryland allowed these Scots to buy or condemn about 60 acres of land that were currently owned by two other men: George Gordon and
George Beale. When these Georges refused to sell their land, the community made a bargain with them that they ultimately
would so long as the new area would be named after them. Thus the name:
Georgetown. At happy hour some 20-somethings were telling me that nobody's actually from DC.
Washington DC has a bit of a reputation for being a transient city. A place where people come,
work for a few years, and then leave and go back to where they came from. There are actually two different things to unpack with
this myth. First is that Washington DC is a city where people are always coming and going.
It's certainly true that many people have moved to Washington DC from other places; some temporarily and some permanently.
But that's just true of any big city. There are a few different ways of measuring this
but people who have studied the issue have found that Washington DC has about the same rate of migration as other big
American cities. The second part of the myth is that no one in DC is actually from DC,
and this is just completely false.
I think the reason that this myth seems believable is because so many people associate Washington DC with politicians,
but the reality is that the number of politicians and their staff is so small that it's basically a rounding error on the general population.
When I was standing in line for cupcakes yesterday the person behind me in line said the reason we had to take a bus to
Georgetown is because the neighbors prevented a metro station from being built because they wanted to keep riffraff out of the neighborhood.
When you come to DC and go to visit Georgetown you will discover that is actually a pain to get to because there's limited transportation
options. In the 1960s and 1970s when Metro was being planned and built,
Georgetown was one of the highest end neighborhoods in the city. Many of the area's wealthiest residents chose to live here
including famously
John and Jackie Kennedy. The myth when it comes to Metro is that the neighbors fought and stopped a station from being built because they
thought it would bring crime to the neighborhood; and while it's probably true that at the time some Georgetown residents protested on these grounds,
the reality is quite a bit different. In Zachary Schrag's book the Great Society Subway, he writes that the real reason
there's no Georgetown metro station is purely geographic. The center of Georgetown where you'd practically place a metro station is
really close to the Potomac River. The way
it was ultimately designed is that from the Foggy Bottom station, Metro
gradually tunnels down until it's actually underneath the river. A station in Georgetown would have either required an
extremely deep station or a really steep tunnel to get down under the river.
Now whether Georgetown residents could have actually stopped a metro station from being built is certainly debatable,
but the reality is that it was never a consideration. My mom's friend who knows a guy whose cousin works in DC
told her that the city totally changes every time there's a new president.
This one is similar to the myth that no one is from DC. The reality
is that a very very tiny percentage of the total population works for a presidential administration, so this idea that when one president leaves office
there's some kind of mass exodus from the city, and when the next president starts his term
there's a huge influx of new people is a bit overblown. Even in the federal government almost all
employees are civil servants,
which means that they serve no matter who is in office. While things might feel quite a bit different on a national level,
the local vibe is actually a lot steadier than you might imagine. And that's it!
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that will take you over to www.triphacksdc.com where you can see the tours that I offer. Enjoy your trip!