Washington DC Hidden Gems: Secret Spots Locals Love

Washington DC's tourist circuit runs almost exclusively through the monumental core of the National Mall, leaving the city's genuinely distinctive neighbourhoods, independent institutions and local culture almost entirely to the 700,000 residents who actually live in what amounts to a small, intensely political city with the cultural infrastructure of a metropolis. Takoma Park — a neighbourhood straddling the DC-Maryland border — is DC's most bohemian and independent community: a tree-lined neighbourhood of Victorian houses, independent bookshops, a Saturday farmers market attended almost exclusively by neighbourhood residents, and a political culture so progressive that it declared itself a nuclear-free zone and sanctuary city decades before either concept became mainstream. The community's boundary-crossing informality (DC residents and Maryland residents shop at the same market, use the same Metro station, drink at the same bars) makes it feel like the genuinely neighbourhood city that DC's monumental core obscures.

The Kreeger Museum in the Spring Valley neighbourhood houses a private collection of Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and African art assembled by insurance magnate David Lloyd Kreeger in a Philip Johnson-designed house — admission is by advance reservation only, groups are small and the experience of viewing world-class modern art in a private home rather than an institutional gallery is unlike anything available on the Mall. The National Building Museum near Judiciary Square is housed in one of Washington's most extraordinary interior spaces — a vast Pension Bureau building with eight 75-foot Corinthian columns creating a Great Hall that served as the inaugural ball venue for every president from Grover Cleveland to Bill Clinton — and covers American architecture and urban design in a permanent collection of genuine intellectual depth. The National Arboretum in northeast DC is 446 acres of managed landscape containing the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum, a stand of original US Capitol columns relocated to a meadow setting after the Capitol dome reconstruction, and azalea collections of extraordinary beauty in spring — a visit attended primarily by DC families with dogs and birdwatchers.

For the most locally beloved hidden DC experience, the Eastern Market neighbourhood's Barracks Row on 8th Street SE is Capitol Hill's independent restaurant strip — a concentration of locally owned seafood, Ethiopian, craft beer and American cuisine restaurants occupying the historic commercial strip between the barracks and the market. Used almost exclusively by Capitol Hill residents and congressional staffers, it is less than a mile from the Capitol Building but absent from virtually every tourist itinerary. The city's network of Embassy Open House events (many embassies open their chancery buildings to the public on specific annually scheduled days) offers access to architectural interiors, national art collections and cultural programming that combines privileged access with genuine cross-cultural encounter — a specifically Washington experience unavailable in any other American city.