Living in Southwest Waterfront, Washington DC

The Municipal Fish Market has sold fresh catch off the same stretch of the Washington Channel since 1805, predating New York's Fulton Fish Market by seventeen years and making it the oldest continuously operating open-air fish market in the country; vendors still work off floating barges tied to the wharf rather than a fixed building. The Wharf, a billion-dollar redevelopment that opened its first phase in 2017, rebuilt the rest of the waterfront around the market with restaurants, music venues, and a marina, replacing the seawall and parking lots that had lined the channel for decades. Arena Stage's angular, glass-walled building anchors the neighborhood's theater scene a few blocks inland, and the Titanic Memorial, a granite statue honoring the men who gave up lifeboat seats in 1912, has stood in Southwest Waterfront Park since 1968, relocated here when Kennedy Center construction displaced it from its original spot near Rock Creek. Both the Waterfront and L'Enfant Plaza Metro stations serve the neighborhood, covering the Blue, Green, Orange, Silver, and Yellow Lines between them.

The Wharf's event nights push valet lines and cover charges deep into the surrounding blocks, and rents along the water rank among the steepest in the city, well above the quieter co-op buildings set back from the channel.

A public fish market has outlasted every version of Southwest's waterfront redevelopment since 1805, and The Wharf's newest towers now share the same shoreline the market has worked for more than two centuries.