Landmark
Penn Quarter
Historic downtown crossroads built over a buried creek and canal, prone to sudden flooding.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Penn Quarter in Washington, D.C. follows the buried creek beneath these streets, the Tiber, which fed a marshy fish market before the city tried to tame it into the Washington City Canal, and which engineer Adolph Cluss finally sealed underground in 1871. It centers on what happened eighteen years later, in June 1889, when the buried channel gave the water back and Pennsylvania Avenue vanished underwater. Look down at Constitution Avenue and picture the water still moving beneath it.
This audio guide was created using AI.