O Museum in The Mansion

About this audio guide

This guide to O Museum in the Mansion in Washington, D.C. follows the Capitol's chief architect Edward Clark, who built himself a rowhouse in 1892 riddled with pivoting bookshelves and disguised doors using tricks borrowed from his day job. You'll hear how the hidden rooms passed through unlikely hands: an FBI rooming house in the 1930s, home to student protest leaders in the 1960s noted by Norman Mailer, before an entrepreneur named H H Leonards began reopening doors nobody had touched in decades. Listen for the seam in the wall nearest you — it might not be a wall at all.