The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle is a quiet, serene place where worshipers drop in during the day for a peaceful moment. Yesterday, the devoted had company when Monsignor Ronald Jameson led a tour group through his Dupont Circle church, pointing out the altar of white Indian marble, the 2,500-pipe organ and the elaborate, mosaic mural in one of the chapels.
"I want to let you in on this little jewel," he told the two dozen tourist directors, tour guides and hotel concierges who trooped behind him. "St. Matthew's has a real place in history. The funeral of President John F. Kennedy was held here."
St. Matthew's was the first of three Washington sites the tourist professionals saw on a new tour devoted to residential and historic Washington. With the tour, created by the D.C. Heritage Tourism Coalition, which represents more than 50 house museums, historical societies and private art galleries, organizers hope to entice visitors to the Washington beyond the monuments.
Modeled after similar, successful historic tours in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York, the D.C. tour offers access to out-of-the-way sites with talks given by house museum directors or church leaders. Yesterday's tour was meant to introduce the concept to the professionals in the Washington tourist business who would then add it to their suggestion list of what to do while in Washington.
Kathy Smith, the coalition's history program coordinator, said the routes between the sites were as carefully chosen as the buildings. The tour driver's role is to learn a script that creates the context for the tour.
"This is a way to tell the story of our city -- what has happened here told by people who know the history," she said in an earlier interview. "We combined two house museums with a church for each tour. These are all private places."
The three tours offered under the name of Grand Homes & Gardens of Washington, D.C., include Dupont Circle-Embassy Row, Georgetown and Lafayette Park. Begun in early December, each four-hour tour is offered from Union Station once a week by Gray Line, a well-established Washington tour company that has a contract with the D.C. Heritage Tourism Coalition.
Five of Gray Line's drivers have taken a class -- and a test -- to qualify for the tours. Yesterday, driver Eric Anderson piloted the 40-passenger bus through the congested streets of Dupont Circle, past palatial homes in the Kalorama neighborhood and by the numerous embassies on Massachusetts Avenue.
Anderson rolled through the neighborhoods, throwing out terms such as Beaux-Arts, Italianate and Romanesque to describe the architecture of the significant buildings.
When the Carnegie Library building at Mount Vernon Square came into view, he told his passengers, "That is a good example of Beaux-Arts, in the Greek and Roman style." Later he showed the riders "Massachusetts Avenue's Millionaire Row. The house there is the Walkins house, a classic Italianate."
At the Woodrow Wilson House, Director Michael Sheehan walked the group through three floors of the home where President Wilson retired in 1921, past presidential souvenirs and family pictures. "Many houses are not as complete as we are," he said.
Later, Sheehan said the new tour promised to be particularly good for the Wilson house, located in a neighborhood where most of the parking spaces are taken by embassies. "This should be very good for us, because it will bring many more visitors to the house and good for the neighborhood because the customers are delivered by bus."
The final stop was the Christian Heurich mansion, now the home of the Historical Society of Washington. Members of the tour sipped tea and munched on decorated Christmas cookies, while watching a video interview with Heurich's last surviving daughter, who spoke of weddings and funerals held at the brownstone castle.
Smith said tea will be served at the last stop of each of the three tours, because "we are doing more here than just teaching history. We are welcoming people into Washington's historic homes."
Society Director Barbara Franco said all house museums in Washington have to struggle to be noticed in a city so filled with national treasures. "In any other city, we would be the gems," she said. "Here, we have to take second place."
Lynn Neff, sales manager for the Channel Inn Hotel in Southwest Washington, said she expected that the heritage tour would become very popular.
"After the second or third trip to the Mall, people are sick of that," she said. "This will be particularly good for the convention trade, when everyone is looking for something for the spouses to do."
So far, there have been few customers, Anderson said. On Thursday, he took one woman on the same tour he drove yesterday.
"She loved it," he said. "She had a private tour. We always promise to go if it's one or 100 who show up."
Cutline: Monsignor Ronald Jameson gives tourist professionals a tour of the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle.
Historian Kathy Smith waits by the bus after the tour of the cathedral.
Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.
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