Visitor Information: About Washington, DC
Washington, DC (District of Columbia), the capital of the United States of America, was founded on July 16, 1790. The design for the city of Washington was largely the work of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-born architect, engineer and city planner, who was commissioned in 1791 by President Washington to plan the layout of the new capital city. The District of Columbia is divided into four quadrants of unequal area: Northwest (NW), Northeast (NE), Southeast (SE), and Southwest (SW). The axes bounding the quadrants radiate from the U.S. Capitol building. All road names include the quadrant abbreviation to indicate their location. In most of the city, the streets are laid out in a grid pattern with East–West streets named with letters (e.g., C Street SW) and North–South streets identified by numbers (e.g., 13th Street NW).
With its roughly 600,000 residents, Washington, DC is also home to many historic sites, monuments, and excellent museums. Most of the nation's official museums and galleries in Washington are maintained by the Smithsonian Institution, an educational foundation chartered by Congress in 1846.
Many of the museums and monuments are located around the National Mall, an open-area roughly bordered by the White House to the North, by the US Capitol building to the East, the Potomac River to the South and the Lincoln Memorial to the Wast, and centered around the Washington Monument. Among the most visited Smithsonian museums on the National Mall are the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of American History. Also on the Mall are the two buildings of the National Gallery of Art. Both the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art are open to the public free of charge.
Northwest of the National Mall is the historical neighborhood of Georgetown, incorporated as a town and first regularly settled in 1751, before Washington was founded and when the area was part of the British colony of the Province of Maryland. Georgetown became part of the District of Columbia after the American Revolution, and lost its independence in 1871.
Other interesting sites around the city include Union Station, the National Zoo, also part of the Smithsonian, the National Cathedral, and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Besides Georgetown, the areas of Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Penn Quarters and Capitol Hills offer ample cultural, shopping and dining opportunities. Finally, well worth a visit is Old Town Alexandria, incorporated in 1779, and located approximately 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) south of downtown Washington, DC.