It's a stunning spring morning in Washington, and men and women cluster in a small group at Second Street NE and Constitution Avenue, listening to a man wearing a battered fishing cap. He is about to lead them, Pied Piper-like, all the way to the White House, tracing the route of the British troops who burned Washington.
Across town, some 20 people gather at 3051 M St. NW in Georgetown as a passionately gesturing woman tells the story of this building, the Old Stone House, built in 1766 and reputedly the oldest building in the city. When she has finished, the group steps off to tramp through a section of Georgetown alive with stories.
It's the walking-tour view of Washington. Whether it meanders through neighborhoods as different as Adams Morgan and Georgetown or down streets bejeweled with embassies or amid nature's greenest gardens, it's a style of tour that abounds here.
Why shouldn't it? Such jaunts through the centuries offer an up-close-and-personal, anecdotal way of looking at sections of the capital steeped in lore, led by people with a passionate - and carefully researched - love of history.
Both Anthony Pitch, pointing the way down Pennsylvania Avenue, and Mary Kay Ricks, guiding the historic walk through lower Georgetown, are examples of a Washington presence, the one-person guide, the history buff sharing a passion (for a modest fee), the storyteller and tour guide all rolled into one.
Their style of tour is one that's more intimate, lingering, full of stories and details that a visitor - and even a long-time resident - might not get on more conventional and expansive bus tours or other tourist excursions.
Not to mention the fact that on a perfect Washington spring day, it's great exercise.
The best of these 'alternative' tour guides - such as Mr. Pitch and Mrs. Ricks - differ in style and method but share a love of history and an expertise acquired through meticulous research and avid interest.
Mr. Pitch, 60, still sporting an accent that identifies him as a native-born Englishman, schedules a variety of two-hour tours for 11 a.m. on Sundays. Two of them - a walk around Lafayette Park and the White House and a trek down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House - feature anecdotal material from his recent book, 'The Burning of Washington: The British Invasion of 1814.' Another of Mr. Pitch's tours is a walk through the Adams Morgan neighborhood. The fourth centers on historic Georgetown.
Mrs. Ricks, 51, is a self-described 'recovering lawyer,' a free-lance writer and mother of two who decided to take up walking tours after researching a story on the Underground Railroad in Georgetown. She conducts two Georgetown tours on alternate months, one featuring the C&O Canal and historic N Street NW, the other centering on Q Street. She also is planning to start a Dupont Circle tour in the fall.
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Follow either of them on their tours, and ghosts will fall in step beside you. Lafayette Park gives us the violence-prone Gen. Dan Sickles, who as a congressman shot and killed his wife's lover in the park; historian and novelist Henry Adams and his doomed wife, Marian ('Clover') Hooper, who committed suicide in 1885 and is commemorated by Augustus Saint Gaudens' shrouded figure of 'Grief' in Rock Creek Cemetery; Major Henry Rathbone, who was Abraham Lincoln's guest in the box at Ford's Theatre the night John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in the president's head; and Stephen Decatur, a hero of the war against the Tripoli pirates in 1804.
You'll hear the footsteps of British troops and feel the panic of what was left of Washington's population in 1814 as you walk toward the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue.
In Georgetown, entrepreneurs, freedmen, society arbiters, builders and the son of Lincoln make spectral appearances, along with American Indians, the usual clerks and contemporary faces such as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
To go on these walks is to know how the past and the present coexist and intermingle, sometimes the one commenting on the other. After hearing Mrs. Ricks' story about how pioneer businessmen rolled barrels of goods down Wisconsin Avenue to get them to the Georgetown waterfront, one never looks in the same way at a brightly painted Budweiser delivery truck.
'History is not dead,' Mr. Pitch says emphatically. 'It just keeps on going on and on. It is carried forward. It just continues to live in every colorful story.'
Mr. Pitch, who has lived in Washington since 1980 and is a naturalized citizen, started doing tours seven years ago as a way of luring people into the District. As a publisher of tourist guidebooks, among other things, he saw it as a way of supplementing and promoting his main business.
'Truly, it started out as a hobby of sorts, although a passionate one,' he says. 'The first two years or so, I didn't charge at all. Finally, my wife objected.'
He now charges $10 per person.
'In some ways, I'm in seventh heaven,' he says. 'I research everything carefully and exhaustively. I spent five years researching the book on the burning of Washington. And if you love research - and I love it passionately - this city is a treasure, an absolute treasure. You have the Library of Congress, the Archives, the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Library.'
His Adams Morgan tour pays tribute to the eclectic nature of the neighborhood.
'It's one of the most cosmopolitan neighborhoods in the city,' he says. 'It's vibrant, very alive. I think I helped put it on the map.'
He discovered that Watergate lion Carl Bernstein used to live at one of the many apartment buildings in the area, on Biltmore Street, paying $190 a month rent. He dubbed Lanier Place, a relatively quiet residential street two blocks off mercurial Columbia Road NW, 'the radical street' because a number of '60s radicals used to live there, including Renny Davis.
Still, being a veteran journalist and book author is one thing. Standing up in front of complete strangers and getting them to follow you and listen to you is quite another.
'I would have to say I was pretty putrid at the start. I was a little petrified the first time,' Mr. Pitch says. 'But you learn. Somebody said to me, just be yourself. And I think I found myself a little bit. You'd be surprised. People want to know, to learn, to experience history at a closer view.
Tour guides are licensed through the Business and Regulation Administration of the District's Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and are tested on federal and District history.
On the tours, Mr. Pitch has a little bit of the air of a self-deprecating but down-to-earth professor. He doesn't lecture. He tells stories.
'Somebody told me I popularize scholarship, and I think that's pretty accurate,' he says.
Sickles, Rathbone, Decatur, Adams and the Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to assassinate President Harry S. Truman all figure prominently in his Lafayette Park tour.
He tells how Lewis Payne, a fellow conspirator of John Wilkes Booth's, broke into the home of Secretary of State William H. Seward and stabbed him in the throat. In vivid terms, he tells how the two would-be Truman assassins converged on the guards outside Blair House on Oct. 31, 1950, as Truman watched from above, and describes the shootout that ensued.
On a different Sunday, Mr. Pitch takes an eclectic group along the route of the 1814 British invaders of Washington. He describes what the Capitol looked like, how clerks tried to save documents, how the remaining populace was in a panic, fearful of British burning and looting. Only 100 British soldiers burned the Capitol and marched toward the White House, he says. People were terrified.
Marching along behind Mr. Pitch are Guy Harriman, 64, a lawyer from Howard County who brought his 14-year-old son, Jason, for the tour, and Quinton Jones, a carefully turned out Library of Congress retiree and history buff (magnificently white-haired) who can remember dining in long-gone cafeterias along the route, drinking nickel cups of coffee.
Behice Ertenu, a Turkish business consultant here for a week on business, is bemused and delighted by the tour.
'I like to walk, and when I found out about this tour, well, I decided to come,' she says. 'I find it so fresh that Americans . . . find this war with the British, the burning, so horrific and terrifying. Or that they would not bear a grudge over time. In Europe, people never forget.'
That's another thing about walking tours: They're parades of American as well as international types. Mrs. Ricks calls the most avid of her companions on tours 'my gifted and talented.'
'They immerse themselves,' she says.
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Mrs. Ricks, who is in her third spring of Georgetown tours, had wearied of her job as a lawyer with the Department of Labor. She was doing free-lance writing, including historical articles on Georgetown, and had built up a storehouse of stories, anecdotes and information, when she decided to do a tour.
'It's hard to break into,' she says. 'You have to find the best ways of marketing yourself, get your brochure into hotels, that sort of thing.
'I was really nervous the first time,' she says. 'Three people from a trolley tour decided to come with me, and that's how it started.'
Mrs. Ricks is keen on architecture in her tours, and by the time you have completed one of her walks, you're pretty sure to know the difference between Federalist and Victorian styles of houses.
She's also an enthusiast.
'I guess you could say I'm emphatic,' she says. 'But you've got to realize, I've got the best gig in town. At our house, history lives. My children are history buffs. My husband is Pentagon reporter for the Wall Street Journal. So history is a subject at the dinner table.'
Mrs. Ricks' husband, Thomas Ricks, is also the author of the recent book 'Making the Corps,' which advances the idea that military and civilian societies are drifting dangerously far apart.
In Mrs. Ricks' walks, a certain edge, an alternative history, slides in amid the gossip, the tidbits, the stories about Ben and Sally Bradlee and Jackie Kennedy and the house where she lived briefly.
'I think we don't talk about history enough,' she says. 'In Georgetown and elsewhere, there were always a certain percentage of people who were slaves. It's not something we should ignore.'
She doesn't ignore it, telling stories of the Underground Railroad, which figures prominently in the history of some Georgetown houses and the Mount Zion Cemetery adjoining Oak Hill.
Now, as she stands surrounded by people, mostly women, in the gardens at the Old Stone House, Mrs. Ricks throws in warring Indian tribes, Lord Calvert (Maryland's first governor), the rise and fall of tobacco and the rise and fall of the C&O Canal. She describes in vivid detail the lives of the canal workers and families who lived on the boats that moved slowly up through a series of locks, including the one in Georgetown.
She resurrects a prominent free black citizen of Georgetown, Dr. James Fleet. She brings back Robert Todd Lincoln, who ended his days after serving as Secretary of War in the 1920s and who walked the streets of Georgetown, where he lived on N Street.
'When I'm on a tour,' Mrs. Ricks says, 'I'm in heaven.'
This day is a bit like heaven, a clear-blue-sky, Bermuda-shorts day when even the normally reclusive Georgetown mansions cannot quite hide their splendor, and they reveal their past with the help of Mrs. Ricks.
The tour flows across Wisconsin Avenue, past the house once owned by John F. Kennedy and his young wife when he was a senator. It winds around a corner to the house where Mrs. Albright lives under the watchful eyes of police and the Secret Service.
When, at the end of this 1 1/2-hour tour, Mrs. Ricks has finished, the people around her applaud, giving up $12 and cheers. Mr. Pitch's group does the same as he concludes the story of British forces standing in front of a burned White House and of their commander, Adm. George Cockburn.
History, as Mr. Pitch and Mrs. Ricks will tell you - not to mention their fellow travelers on these walking tours - is very much alive.
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WHERE TO WALK INTO THE PAST
'Let your fingers do the walking' may get you through the Yellow Pages, but when it comes to learning about a neighborhood or an environment the byword is, 'Feet, do your stuff.' Here's a sampler of what is available:
Celebrity Georgetown Walking Tour: Author Jan Pottker leads tours from 10 a.m. to noon Thursday through Saturday. The walk includes the homes of John F. Kennedy, political cartoonist Herblock and gossip writer Kitty Kelley. $15. 301/762-3049.
Discover Downtown D.C.: Licensed guides lead a 1 1/2-hour tour of four blocks around the MCI Center, including museums, historic homes and the Discovery Channel Store. 1:30 p.m. Saturday, 11:30 a.m. Sunday. $7.50 adults, $5 children and seniors. 202/639-0908.
Doorways to Old Virginia: Two one-hour walking tours of historic Alexandria: 'Footsteps of George Washington' daily at noon (weekends only after July 5) and 'Ghosts and Graveyards,' 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $5. 703/548-0100.
Georgetown Walking Tours: Mary Kay Ricks alternates her lower-Georgetown tour with her Q Street tour monthly. May is Q Street, June will be lower Georgetown. 10:30 a.m. Thursday and Saturday. $12. 301/588-8999.
Guided Walking Tours of Washington: Anthony Pitch tours different sections of the city at 11 a.m. Sunday. May 16, Adams Morgan; May 23, the White House and Lafayette Square; May 30, Georgetown; June 6, Capitol Hill to the White House. $10 per person. Groups can go any time or any day for $200. 301/294-9514.
Life in Rock Creek Park: A park ranger leads a walking tour of the park. 2 p.m. Saturday. Free. 202/426-6829.
Mount Vernon Walking Tour: Tour of Mount Vernon estate grounds. Self-guided tours 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. $8. 703/780-2000.
Spring Wildflowers Along the C&O Canal: Biologist Marion Lobstein guides 2-hour walks in the Carderock and Marsden Tract areas of the canal for the Smithsonian Associates. 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. May 15. Members $12, others $16. No infants, children under 14 or pets. 202/357-1677.
A Tour de Force: Historian Jeanne M. Fogle offers specialized tours of little-known sites, neighborhoods and nooks and crannies. Groups of 15 or more only, by appointment. 703/525-2948.
