Issue No. 14 - Washington, District of Columbia
The city behind the postcard, walked one block at a time
Ward and Alley is a small journal about the nine tenths of Washington that never appears on anybody's postcard. No landmarks, no offices, no politics. Streets, water, trees, brickwork and the long habit of walking.
Most writing about this city is about the part of it that fits in a photograph taken from a bus. That part is real, and it is also about four square miles out of sixty eight. Everything else is a river, a creek, a canal, a grid of lettered streets with no J in it, and a couple of hundred thousand people going about a Tuesday.
This journal walks that everything else. It publishes when a walk is finished rather than on a schedule, and it says where it went, how long it took and what the weather was doing, so that anybody can repeat it.
What a walk here looks like
A route somebody actually took, on foot, on a named day, in whatever weather turned up. The distance is measured rather than estimated. The route can be followed without a guide, a booking or a ticket, because the whole point is that it is public ground.
We do not review restaurants, rank neighbourhoods, rate anything out of five or tell you where to stay. Other publications do all of that well. This one describes ground.
The frame, stated plainly
Washington has a photographed middle and a much larger everything else, and the everything else is what interests us. So you will not find that middle in these pages, and that is a choice rather than an oversight.
It follows that this journal has nothing to do with the business of the state, holds no affiliation with any public body, and speaks for nobody but itself. It is written by one person in a small office near Dupont Circle and published by Ward and Alley Editions LLC.
Why the address does not match the masthead
This journal is read at mydomainetravel.com, which is an address rather than a name. The old sense of a domaine is the ground one grower actually works, walks and knows, as opposed to the ground they own on paper. That is exactly the idea here: a patch of city, worked on foot.
The masthead is Ward and Alley, after the two units Washington is genuinely built out of. It is not connected to any other publication whose name resembles this address, and the about page says so at more length.
Reading, in order or not
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14 February 2026Rock Creek, northwest 4.25 miles, about 2 hours 20
The creek two days after rain
What a winter storm does to the water, the bank and the paths that run beside them, walked while the creek was still loud.
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7 March 2026Shaw and Logan, northwest 2.75 miles, about 1 hour 50
An afternoon in the alleys
Washington's blocks are hollow, and the hollow parts have their own architecture, their own light and, for about a century, their own population.
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4 April 2026Anacostia riverside, east 6 miles, about 3 hours
Six miles of the other river
The city has two rivers and everybody photographs one of them. The other has twenty miles of continuous path, two islands and far better birds.
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25 April 2026The canal towpath, west 5.5 miles, about 2 hours 40
The towpath in fog
A dead straight nineteenth century path, a river running beside it at a different level, and a morning when neither of them could be seen more than sixty yards ahead.
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16 May 2026Mount Pleasant and the ridge, northwest 3 miles, about 1 hour 40
The blocks the streetcar built
Whole neighbourhoods here were laid out around a tram line that stopped running in 1962, and the shape of them still says so on every corner.
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13 June 2026The avenues, northwest and north 3.5 miles, about 2 hours
Three and a half miles under the trees
This is one of the most heavily treed cities in the country, and the canopy is not an accident. It was planted, argued over, lost, and planted again.
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11 July 2026The northwest hill 4 miles, about 2 hours 15
Up to the high ground
The highest natural ground in the District is a school field with two water towers on it, and the walk up to it explains more about the city than the view from it does.
Ward and Alley · Getting out
Look up a fare out of Washington
Name both ends of the trip and the days. The search opens with a booking host that covers most airlines flying out of the three fields around this city. Reading the journal asks none of this.
The search behind this desk is run for us by a travel search company, not by the journal. Book something after searching and that company may pay us a commission. It costs a reader nothing, it moves no fare, and it is the only way this journal earns anything at all.
What this journal earns, and how
Nothing, from the walks. They are free to read, carry no advertising, and are not sponsored by anybody.
There is one exception and it sits further up this page. The flight desk is run for us by a travel search company, and if you book something after searching there, that company may pay us a commission. That is the only money in this operation, and the terms are printed beside the desk itself rather than buried at the bottom of a different page. The flight search page gives the long version.
Write in
Corrections are welcome and are printed. If a route has changed, a bridge has closed, a path has flooded or a block has been rebuilt, the desk wants to hear it. Letters go to the desk, or to alley@mydomainetravel.com, and the telephone is +1 (202) 483-6710.
The desk reads post Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm, Eastern Time. Letters sent on Sunday or Monday are read on Tuesday, and everything gets an answer.