Living in Woodley Park, Washington DC

The Smithsonian's National Zoo stretches along Connecticut Avenue at Woodley Park's northern edge, its 163 acres drawing a steady stream of visitors past the giant panda habitat that has anchored the zoo's reputation for decades. The Taft Bridge carries Connecticut Avenue across Rock Creek Park just south of the zoo, guarded at each end by concrete lions sculpted by Roland Hinton Perry in 1907 and recast from the same molds decades later. The Wardman Tower, an eight-story annex built in 1928 for the old Wardman Park Hotel, still stands nearby and is now divided into condominiums, one of the few surviving pieces of a hotel complex that hosted foreign ambassadors and members of Congress for most of the 20th century; the hotel itself closed in 2020 and was demolished, and new apartment towers have since risen on the site. The Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan Metro station puts the Red Line at the center of the neighborhood, connecting Adams Morgan across the Duke Ellington Bridge as well.

Zoo traffic and tour buses can back up Connecticut Avenue on weekend afternoons, and Woodley Park's restaurant scene leans toward the hotel and convention crowd of years past rather than the kind of destination dining found in neighborhoods like Logan Circle.

Quiet apartment buildings, old and new, sit beside a single well-used Metro stop and one of the city's most-visited attractions next door, giving Woodley Park a split identity — a peaceful residential address that still draws tour buses to its own front step.