I love browsing old photographs on Shorpy: high resolution, interesting subjects — take any of them, dig a little and you'll unwind something and turn up a story.

Yesterday my eye caught on a building and a sign — there it is, in the middle, with the W.S. Thompson Branch board. Beautiful, slightly ornate, and definitely made with some soul.

According to the frame's description, this is 703 15th Street, at the intersection with New York Ave, circa 1920s, Washington, D.C.

We go looking for the spot on a modern map and don't find it: there's no 703, five minutes of driving back and forth on Google Street View bears no fruit, and 15th crosses New York in a slightly odd place. The closest match is on the left, but the building there is a different one, nothing like ours.

Fine — let's open the old maps. A couple of clicks finds an excellent 1919 Surveys of Washington atlas, and the place we need is easy to identify. Thank you, Library of Congress.

We want square 23; that's exactly where our corner falls. Look closer and there it is. Three numbers are clearly visible; ours is the middle one.

On the right side of the atlas you can see the "District Nat. BK" building — the bank that's also visible in the original photograph, sticking up in the middle of the background.

So the whole corner was demolished. This is what's there now:

Let's look for something about this drugstore, purely out of interest.

To start with, the sign tells us it's a Peoples Drug Store. Even Wikipedia knows about them, though the company has been gone for 25 years. It was a large chain that sold all sorts of things besides medicine, and its signage shared a common design. Here's store No. 5, for example, assuring us that "we always sell the best."

Given that cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola in 1903 and Peoples Drug wouldn't be founded for another two years, let's have none of that "things were better back then."

Back to our hero — let's look for more shots. There are some!

A slightly different angle, some of the signs have changed, and the upper awnings on the third floor haven't been removed yet (or haven't been fitted yet?); the shot was taken earlier (or later?). Keep looking!

And another!

Slim pickings. But a keyword search quickly turns up a close-up of the entrance and some gentlemen.

Black and white is all very well, but I'd like to understand the colour too. The only colour image is a postcard, and the building we're interested in is depicted with certain liberties taken. Well then, onwards.

Let's turn to the most advanced thing currently available in automatic colourisation of black-and-white frames — artificial intelligeeeence!

We feed the shots into a colouriser and get this output.

There's a distinctly Italian flavour to the building; it may well have been painted pink, like the reference below with the Tiger Hall sign. Their little rectangles are very similar indeed.

W.S. Thompson gets several mentions in the newspapers, jars and bottles bearing his name are still on sale today, and the drugstore on the corner was clearly there long before it was folded into the Peoples Drug chain.

And now let's go inside! A large marble counter, several lamps and ceiling fans.

The building turns up in a couple more frames: note the old sign and the complete absence of awnings up top. But there's a big, beautiful one down below!

Sadly, the entire corner of 15th and NY Ave would be cleared in 1927 to build The Washington Building. But that's another story entirely.