Living in Anacostia, Washington DC

Frederick Douglass bought Cedar Hill, a hilltop estate overlooking the Anacostia River and the Capitol beyond it, in 1877 and lived there until his death in 1895; the National Park Service preserves the house and its grounds today as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, with his library and furnishings largely intact. The Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum, founded in 1967 as the institution's first neighborhood-based museum, moved from a converted movie theater to its current Fort Place building in 1987 and continues to document the history of communities across the Washington area. Historic Anacostia's core, platted in the 1850s as one of the city's earliest suburbs, still holds blocks of Victorian rowhouses and freestanding houses that predate most of the housing found closer to downtown. The Anacostia Arts Center, a few blocks from the historic core, gives local artists and small retailers gallery and studio space along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. The Anacostia Metro station anchors the neighborhood's northern edge, putting the Green Line within reach of most addresses.

Restaurant and retail options remain thinner here than in neighborhoods with a longer run of investment, and reaching Cedar Hill's hilltop grounds from the Metro station means a walk or a short bus ride up a steep grade.

Anacostia's safety rating actually sits above several of the nightlife-heavy corridors closer to downtown, a fact that runs against the neighborhood's outdated reputation and is easy to overlook without walking its blocks of Victorian houses and Smithsonian galleries for yourself.