TIM: Pierre L'Enfant designs the early drawings of Washington, DC.

He envisioned the neighborhood from the Capitol growing out towards the east.

If you've ever gone to, say, the Marais District of Paris, you have those arcades along the sides of the street, and we think that's what he intended, but the people didn't build around here.

The original plan was that Congress was gonna be the main focal point, but people wanted to be close to the presidency, so it was much more important to be closer to the White House than it was to the Capitol, so Hill East became a bit of a backwater.

The Civil War changed this area.

There was a huge influx of people, so that's where we become a city.

And now we need to bury the dead somewhere.

We need to have a jail somewhere, we need to have a morgue somewhere.

And so they look over here in Hill East.

No one's really living here and let's put some of that stuff along the Anacostia River.

You have a Pauper's Hospital, you have some cemeteries of which Congressional still exists.

Most notable, in the 1880s, the DC jail moves out here.

World War I really creates the real birth of this area as a neighborhood.

There's a tremendous infusion of people.

The Naval Act of 1916 drives the Navy to dramatically expand.

It has a lot more workers.

They're done living down by the Navy yard.

They come up this way.

They want to live somewhere a little bit nicer.

You also have the rise of the automobile.

More and more laborers at the Navy Yard can afford to have a car, so you're starting to see that growth in Hill East.

The trends that's happening recently that I find great is that we are seeing small businesses open and reopen in our neighborhood and I think that adds a lot of vitality as the city was originally designed.

SEAN: The Pretzel Bakery is a local bakery located in Hill East that specializes in soft pretzels and coffee.

I opened in 2012 because I'm from Philadelphia and pretzels are a big part of Philadelphia food culture.

Hi, good morning.

I saw an opportunity to bring something different to the neighborhood and I was like, "Where do I start?"

Well, let me learn how to make pretzels.

So I just started collecting pretzel recipes, as many as I could find, and worked the ingredients until I developed my own recipe and that's currently what we're making.

CUSTOMER: Thank you.

SEAN: One of the things that I'm most proud about is that we've been here long enough where kids that were coming here when they were six, seven years old are now working at the shop.

STAFF: Hi, Roger.

ROGER: Hey.

SEAN: And to them, the shop has always been here and that is what I set out to create when I opened The Pretzel Bakery.