More diplomatic missions crowd each mile of Massachusetts Avenue, the stretch known as Embassy Row, than any street in the world.
Washington hosts one hundred seventy-seven foreign embassies, more than any city except New York. They concentrate along Massachusetts Avenue from Dupont Circle northwest toward Wisconsin Avenue, occupying the Gilded Age mansions that once housed America's industrial aristocracy.
The embassies are technically foreign soil. When an ambassador receives you inside those gates, you have — legally speaking — left the United States. This is the fiction by which diplomacy operates: a small piece of France exists behind the French embassy's walls, a small piece of Japan behind Japan's gates.
Embassy Row during the Cold War was a battlefield of a different kind. KGB agents shadowed American diplomats. CIA operatives watched Soviet embassy windows. Dead drops were made in Rock Creek Park. Encrypted signals hummed from rooftop antennas. Several large embassies had Soviet-era listening devices built directly into their walls during construction — discovered decades later.
The British Embassy, set back from the avenue behind iron gates, holds a bronze statue of Winston Churchill standing with one foot on British soil and one foot on American — the two countries he simultaneously claimed citizenship in. He is making the V-for-victory sign.
The Islamic Center of Washington, its white minaret rising along the avenue, has been here since 1957 — the first mosque in Washington, built on land donated by Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan at the height of American Cold War diplomacy in the Muslim world.