Anacostia Community Museum

Founded in 1967 as the Smithsonian's first neighbourhood museum, established in a former cinema on Nichols Avenue at the request of local residents and later moved to a purpose-built site on a wooded hill in Fort Stanton. Admission is free, as at all Smithsonian museums. Exhibitions deal with the social history of Washington east of the Anacostia River and with wider questions of urban change, migration, environmental justice and community organising, drawn substantially from material collected locally. The scale is modest and visits are short by Mall standards. The surrounding Historic Anacostia district contains the Frederick Douglass house and a good deal of nineteenth-century housing. Anacostia Metro on the Green Line is the nearest station, with a bus connection uphill.