Albert Einstein Memorial

Landmark

This is the largest Catholic church in North America and the tallest habitable structure in DC — taller than the Capitol dome — yet it sits in a residential Northeast neighborhood most Mall-bound travelers never drive through. Inside, more than 80 chapels and mosaic domes represent immigrant Catholic communities from Lithuania to the Philippines, each one a small embassy of someone's homeland.

Hidden gem

A working carriage-house alley in Shaw hides DC's best open-air gallery: a rainbow L-O-V-E mural spread across four garage doors, a mosaic tribute to Sun Ra and Erykah Badu, and murals honoring the Black working-class families who once lived here — all painted directly onto everyday garage doors since 2015.

Outdoors

Every mile marker for the next 184.5 miles to Cumberland, Maryland counts up from this exact spot — a flat towpath that a mule once dragged coal barges along, now a flat, shaded, stroller-friendly walk starting steps from Georgetown's restaurants. Walk half a mile and you're already further from a car than most of DC ever gets.

Outdoors

Beatrix Farrand designed the famous formal gardens next door, but she also shaped this wilder 27-acre streamside annex — and then let it go, deliberately, into overgrown naturalism as a hidden coda to one of America's great garden designs. Walk down the sloped lane from R Street and the manicured Georgetown gardens dissolve into Rock Creek's forest within a few hundred feet.

Attraction

The last city-owned public market standing in DC, rebuilt board-by-board after a 2007 fire — Saturday mornings mean blue-corn pancakes inside and a flea market of five continents' worth of dealers spilling onto the sidewalk outside.

Outdoors

DC's largest wooded park east of the river hides a Civil War fort that never fired a shot in anger — and today its 10 miles of unpaved trail (the Fort Circle Hiker-Biker Trail) is the wildest, least-crowded hiking in the city, linking six Civil War forts along a forgotten green ring around the capital.