I am calling the residential area immediately south of the Library of Congress, Garfield Park, even though the residents there don’t use that name. Most just say they live on Capitol Hill, but the Hill is so big and so diverse that it breaks down into a series of villages, and the center of gravity in this area is this lovely, sprawling park.

Look at the area south of the library (about C Street SE) to the Southeast Freeway, and between South Capitol and . . . Fourth Street? Fifth? Somewhere about there. That is the neighborhood I’m talking about.

Garfield Park is the large, irregularly shaped park to the south, a wonderfully informal place with plenty of room for dogs, children and those looking for a quiet place to meditate – all at the same time. It has a new playground, a tennis court, flower beds, benches and neat stone steps heading to the underworld below the freeway on the south (with basketball courts down there and stables for the horses that pull carriage rides for tourists).

You will find dog-walkers at the park any time of day or night – and a friendly group they are. You will also find the industrious Friends of Garfield Park, planting, weeding, watering and making their plans. The improved state of the place (it used to have the pleasant, neglected feel of a Hawthorne novel) is not all their work – the city helped, too, but the Friends spearheaded the effort.

The park originally stretched westward to South Capitol but lost everything west of New Jersey Avenue to the Capitol Power Plant in the early years of the 20th century. There used to be giant railroad marshalling yards south of Virginia Avenue – that is, the Freeway – at about the same time, making the area to the south as much of a no-man’s-land as it is today. That will change soon, of course, with the development going on there.

Our neighborhood contains two other parks as well: Folger (named after a 19th-century Secretary of the Treasury, not the library founder) and to its immediate south, an open block of land where Providence Hospital stood until the 1960s – now owned by Congress (a staffer told me they have no immediate or even medium-term plans there) – that is usually called Providence Park by the many touch-football player who use it. Folger is rather formal in design, and art deco, though it needs a freshening up. Neighbors say it gets more readers than dogs. To the east lies Marion Park, and then you come within the influence of Barracks Row on Eighth Street.

This area is one of the most charming in Washington – what a profusion of churches, old schools, firehouses, tiny (Duddington Place) and wide (New Jersey Avenue) streets, all with their original L’Enfantian proportions (check out the lone stretch of South Capitol south of D Street and imagine the street like that on both sides). There are very few apartment buildings, and only a sprinkling of offices and shops, all up near the Library of Congress corner. (These include the Democratic Party’s national headquarters.)

But the real charm of Garfield Park is its extraordinary sense of community and easy living. Here’s an example:

Duddington Place is a one-block street just north of Garfield Park. It is a pretty little street of pretty little houses, none of which are pretentious but all tidy and attractively done, with a special garden at the corner of Second Street. There are other such streets in Washington. But what are those benches doing along the entire south side? They are just that – benches put there by the various residents for people who walk down Duddington to sit on.

“Are they this way for people to talk?” I asked one homeowner who had two benches in front facing each other.

“Yes,” was the simple reply.

And further down the street was a young couple, sitting on their benches (also a facing pair), reading the morning newspaper. They said hello as I walked by.

Hayden Wetzel, a licensed DC tour guide, is an active volunteer for the DC Preservation League. He can be contacted at haydenwetzel@hotmail.com