Chrome-era postcard of the Hotel Continental at 420 North Capitol Street NW, Washington D.C. — the eight-story Beaux-Arts brick hotel filling the right foreground with its rooftop sign and street-level luncheonette, while the US Capitol dome glows white in the distance at left behind summer trees. Designed by prominent Washington architect Appleton P. Clark Jr. and completed in 1911, the Continental was built to capture the wave of travelers arriving at newly opened Union Station a block away — one of half a dozen hotels that sprang up in the neighborhood in the 1910s and 1920s to serve the new gateway to Washington. The card presents it at its postwar peak: 250 rooms, AAA-rated, air-conditioned, advertising itself as the practical man's Washington — between the train station and the Capitol, reasonable rates, coffee shop, guest parking.

• Caption: "Hotel Continental — 250 rooms, 250 baths, air-conditioned. Located between Union Station and the U.S. Capitol Building."
• Publisher: Silberne Souvenir Sales, Inc., Washington, D.C. (Mirro-Krome Card by H.S. Crocker Co., Inc., Baltimore, Md.)
• Status: Unposted