Stroll down the wide, leafy residential streets ofthe Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and you might notice some peculiar details on the homes around you: oversized bay windows, decorative overhangs, corner-facing doors. These are signs of the past lives of these buildings: as shops, grocery stores, and service businesses.

“Once you start to notice the ‘tells’ about these buildings, you see them everywhere,” says Jared Alves, a D.C. healthcare consultant who serves as a committee member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC)in northeast Capitol Hill. “It’s incredible—the amount of stores that have been lost and can’t be replaced.”

Alves and his longtime friend Maxime Devilliers—who works for a federal energy contractor and volunteers as an appointed member of the D.C. Transportation and Public Space Committee—started a Tumblr documenting these palimpsest-like edifices, D.C. Former Retail. The two spend weekends prowling District neighborhoods (mainly in Capitol Hill andNortheast D.C., but they’ve expanded to other quadrants), snapping pics of telling facades and checking their hunches against records kept by local historical societies.

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