The Exorcist Steps

The stairway was built between 1895 and 1897 as part of the Capital Traction Company's Union Station, a streetcar barn and turnaround on M Street NW designed by architect Waddy Butler Wood to consolidate four separate streetcar lines. Georgetown's terrain drops roughly 60 feet from Prospect Street to the Potomac waterfront, and the steps were cut into that hillside as a public pedestrian connector alongside the station, an engineering project that required moving more than 80,000 cubic yards of earth and building substantial retaining walls. Before 1973, Georgetown residents knew the 75-step stairway informally as the "Hitchcock Steps," after director Alfred Hitchcock's reputation for suspense.

That changed when William Friedkin filmed The Exorcist on location in Georgetown in 1973. Screenwriter William Peter Blatty, a 1950 Georgetown graduate, based his novel on a 1949 exorcism case he had learned about as a student. For the film's climax, the production padded the steps in rubber and built a false extension onto a house at the top of the stairs so Father Damien Karras's death fall would appear to begin from an upper window; the stunt was filmed twice.

The steps' film fame eventually outgrew their transit-history origins. On Halloween weekend in 2015, Mayor Muriel Bowser held a ceremony — attended by Friedkin and Blatty — recognizing the stairway as an official D.C. landmark and unveiling a plaque at its base. The Historic Preservation Review Board followed with a formal landmark designation in January 2019, covering the steps, the retaining wall, and the former streetcar station; the board's report specifically noted that the movie's fame, on its own, did not meet the standard for historic designation, and based the listing on the station's Romanesque Revival and Beaux-Arts architecture and its role as an early consolidated transit hub.