It is on the second floor, and Acheson doesn’t know he can be seen. This is to tip him off to what the whole neighborhood knows, first-hand and not confidential.
In the next block lives Justice Frankfurter. He and Acheson, fresh air fiends, walk to town every morning.
Another neighbor is Myrna Loy, out of films while on a special mission for the State Department. She is developing a “new type propaganda campaign.” Well, she played enough spy roles in the movies.
Georgetown is also the home of Georgetown University, oldest and largest Catholic school in the country. The broad acres of its beautiful campus were undoubtedly originally responsible for preserving the historic buildings of the community from the onward rush of modernity which swept over the rest of Washington.
But also in Georgetown is the Hideaway Club. It is known in local parlance as a bottle club. A bottle club is a resort which gets around the law which provides that all liquor dispensaries shall close at 2 A.M. Despite a murder at the Hideaway and a recent Congressional investigation of such enterprises and a flurry of activity by the United States Attorney, there are still at least 500 of these unlicensed places, some say more, in the District, a subject which will be covered in detail hereinafter.
The area’s favorite gathering place is Martin’s Bar on Wisconsin Avenue where New Deal and Fair Deal policy is made. It was the hangout of Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins, who changed the world over bottles while Georgetown students roistered around them.
Georgetown is relatively free of street-walkers who plague every other section. That is because there are no hotels and few transients. But what it lacks in ambulent magdalens is more than made up for by homosexuals of both indeterminate sexes. It seems that nonconformity in politics is often the handmaiden of the same proclivities in sex. Among the thousands known in the capital, a goodly proportion live in the storied ancient dwellings of the area. The fun that goes on in some is beyond words and was even worse when the staffs of the embassies of some of the Iron Curtain countries still found it feasible to travel about in society.
Some Washington policemen will tell you with a shrug of despair of the times the patrol wagons pulled up at particular homes as a result of complaints from neighbors, only to find the prancing participants in the unspeakable parties were Administration untouchables or diplomats sacred from interference.
Which, when you consider that Emmitt Warring also seems to be immune, makes Georgetown seem like a wonderful place to live in—nobody ever gets pinched there.