Georgetown Time Machine: Waterfront

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM is featuring a photo recently featured by the fantastic Old Time DC account. It shows the Georgetown waterfront sometime in the 1980s.

For those relatively new to the city, you might be shocked at the appearance of a large surface parking lot taking space that is now a beautiful riverfront park. But you really don’t have to be that much of an old timer to remember it. It only fully disappeared about 2006 when construction of the park began in earnest. Here’s what it looked like from the sky in 2005:

It’s probably fair to say that until the new park was completed, it was literally centuries since the Georgetown waterfront was a calm and idyllic location as it is now. Before the large parking lot, it was a field of industrial plants and train tracks:

And before the factories arrived in the 20th century, the waterfront was a chaotic scene of docks and warehouses, as the shipment of tobacco dominated:

You’d probably have to go back before the town was established as a port town in the middle 18th century before you’d find it to be the quiet strip of nature it is today. Quite the cycle it went through…