Living in Penn Quarter, Washington DC

Ford's Theatre still stages productions a few steps from the flag-draped box where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in 1865, and the Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln died the next morning, remains open to visitors as part of the same historic site. The Old Patent Office Building, one of the oldest federal office buildings in the city, now houses both the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum beneath a single glass-canopied courtyard roof added in 2007. Capital One Arena, which opened as MCI Center in 1997 and changed names twice before Capital One bought naming rights in 2017, sits atop the Gallery Place Metro station and hosts the Capitals, the Wizards, and Georgetown basketball. The neighborhood's Chinatown gate, a 1986 archway covered in more than 7,000 glazed tiles, marks the blocks around Sixth & I, a Moorish-Byzantine former synagogue turned event space that has cycled through several congregations over the past century. Gallery Place (Green, Red, Yellow) and Archives (Green, Yellow) sit in the neighborhood, and Metro Center's Blue, Orange, and Silver trains are a few blocks northwest, putting all six Metro lines within a short walk and giving Penn Quarter some of the best rail access anywhere in the city.

Event nights at the arena flood the surrounding blocks with crowds and closed streets, and the tourist traffic around Ford's Theatre and the museums can make the sidewalks feel more like a convention floor than a residential block.

Few residential addresses anywhere in the city put a presidential assassination site, two Smithsonian museums, and an NHL arena within the same easy walk, and that density of landmarks keeps Penn Quarter's sidewalks busy well past the hour nearby office towers empty out.