Initially incorporated under the name Union Town, Anacostia began as a working-class community removed from the city and dominated by Navy Yard employees. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Union Land Association controlled the property and restricted land deeds to white owners only, making it an appealing place for individuals who resented the “encroachment” of Black individuals and families in other areas of the city. Shipbuilders, boilermakers, plumbers, carpenters, and blacksmiths filled the area, in addition to enlisted/commissioned Navy personnel. The Civil War altered the fabric of the community through an influx of Union soldiers—and waves of the formerly enslaved, many of whom sought freedom and refuge in the Union capital. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Anacostia became a hub of Civil War activity by providing space for soldier’s healing and care, in addition to becoming a source of employment for those in the surrounding area. In 1867, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (most commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau) purchased a sizeable amount of property located south of Uniontown. The space became a resettlement site for African Americans (particularly the formerly enslaved), with cheap plots of land and often a provision of lumber for building a modest home. Known initially as Barry Farm, the community grew quickly and was referred to by various names (Barry’s Farm, Potomac City, Hillsboro) before residents officially chose Hillsdale in 1874. Three years later, the esteemed orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass purchased Cedar Hill, the former property of John Van Hook (owner of the Union Land Association). Initially nine acres, the home and property eventually expanded to fifteen, and became a site of both solace and social calls for Douglass. In 1886, the popularity of the name “Uniontown” across America prompted Congress to officially change the name of the suburb to Anacostia. This designation included the original Uniontown property and the surrounding subdivisions. Streetcar lines provided transportation for residents into the city center, and commercial development expanded steadily to meet increasing demand. Businesses proliferated along Nichols Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Ave.) and Good Hope Road, including bakeries, drug stores, laundries, cobblers, warehouses, and grocery stores. Development in Anacostia did not always extend from the majority-white center into the surrounding communities such as Hillsdale, which was majority-Black. Living conditions were not equal—as many individuals in Hillsdale continued to lack access to public water and electricity. However, the construction of an African American School in Hillsdale in 1901 (one of only two schools built for Black students that year) provided educational opportunity to surrounding children in the area. During the 1930s and 1940s, land development of the area continued alongside increased racial diversification of the region. At the end of World War II, white flight into suburban Maryland and Virginia resulted in a majority-Black Anacostia. Damaging urban renewal programs, continued lack of access to basic living necessities, and highway construction that demolished established neighborhoods led to the area’s association with rising levels of poverty and crime. However, Anacostia also operated as a center of community organizing, civil rights activism, and Black activism. Continued investment in the community by its members is a defining aspect of Anacostia’s longer history, and the evidence is seen in neighborhood programs, restoration of historic buildings , and the preservation of public space.
The Anacostia Historic District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978—with approximately 550 buildings comprising the historic district, dating from 1854 to about 1930. Most of the early houses in the historic district are free-standing or semi-detached frame structures with front porches and Italianate detail. Some larger, brick row houses and two business streets with early 20th century commercial buildings reflect the early history of the Anacostia community. In October 2021, the historic district was expanded and additional documentation was published. The historic district’s period of significance now extends through 1948. DC Inventory: November 27, 1973 (expanded February 3, 1978)
DC Inventory (Additional Documentation and Boundary Increase): October 28, 2021
National Register: October 11, 1978
]]>The Capitol Hill Historic District, which encompasses approximately 8,000 contributing buildings, grew from a small boarding house community for members of Congress to an area of more than 150 squares spread out over several different neighborhoods.
The first Capitol Hill neighborhood was a small community of residences, inhabited mostly by government workers. With DC as the new seat of the federal government, many Congressmen found themselves needing to get to work but unwilling to establish permanent homes in the capital city. Many opted to stay in boarding houses close to the Capitol instead, and by 1801, most Congressmen resided on Capitol Hill. Within a few decades, more than 2,000 people were living on the Hill and building homes in the growing community there.
Several of these earliest houses still stand. The oldest is The Maples, also known as Friendship House, a grand late Georgian style estate built between 1795 and 1797 for the wealthy merchant William Mayne Duncanson (1754-1812). Several houses that reflect the Federal style popular on Capitol Hill in the early nineteenth century also remain, including the Carbery House, built in the Federal style around 1803 and since altered, the George Watterston House, a rowhouse built between 1802 and 1819 by an early Librarian of Congress, and the Mountjoy Bayly House, built in 1822 for the second Sergeant at Arms of the Senate. These structures mix a Federal style with design elements characteristic of Georgian architecture, as well as later styles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In addition to the growing Congressional boarding house community, the construction of the Navy Yard and the Marine Barracks attracted many workers and businesses to the area. Few buildings from this early neighborhood remain standing. The Gothic Revival style of Christ Church (built between 1806 and 1807), although altered significantly over the past two centuries, still stands as a reminder of the early Navy Yard community. Another significant religious institution was the Little Ebenezer Church, built by Capitol Hill’s earliest African American congregation in 1838. The original frame structure no longer stands, but the congregation continues to own the site, where they built a new church in 1897.
The neighborhoods around the Capitol building and the Navy Yard had been growing slowly but gradually for the first half of the nineteenth century, but construction slowed significantly during the Civil War. The Italianate and Greek Revival style of the Old Naval Hospital is one of the only structures built during this period that remains.
In the 1870s, the leadership of DC Territorial Governor Alexander Robey Shepherd led to a period of rapid construction and civic improvement throughout the city, renewing the growth of Capitol Hill. It was during this time that the Capitol Hill area became a predominantly middle-class neighborhood, as Shepherd’s public works projects established Northwest DC as the city’s most fashionable quadrant, leading wealthier residents to abandon the Southeast.
As a result, the last decades of the nineteenth century in Capitol Hill saw the construction of many of the modest row houses now considered characteristic of the historic district. As the federal workforce expanded, many of these homes were purchased by middle-class government workers. The neighborhood became more and more of a federal center as new government buildings went up nearby: the Library of Congress in 1897, Union Station in 1907, and the Russell Senate Office Building and Cannon House Office Building in 1909. Eastern Market, built in 1873 and expanded in 1908, represents one of the commercial centers constructed to support the increasing number of Capitol Hill residents.
As the early twentieth century saw significant population growth citywide, developers had to adapt to the influx of new residents arriving in DC. While Capitol Hill had for years been dominated by single-family residences, more than 100 apartment buildings were constructed within the historic district between 1900 and 1930, including George Santmyers’ Lexington Apartments at 1114 F Street NE, built in 1928. As the Great Depression devastated much of the country, DC saw little slowdown in comparison, with New Deal programs drawing even more government workers to the city and to Capitol Hill.
Instead, Capitol Hill’s slowdown occurred in the aftermath of World War II. While the Navy Yard had drawn many workers to the neighborhood during the wars, it declined dramatically after 1945. Production slowed, work was contracted out to private agencies, and technological advances rendered the Navy Yard’s operations largely obsolete. What had once been a workforce of tens of thousands shrank to just a few thousand. At the same time, increasing numbers of middle-class residents were giving up Capitol Hill for the suburbs. Many of the Victorian-era row houses they had occupied were subsequently divided up into apartments, which ushered in a new population, lower-income and more transient than the previous set.
Social reform and urban renewal efforts of the mid-twentieth century also altered the landscape of the neighborhood. New construction, often following the destruction of historic buildings, invited new residents, especially people with lower incomes looking for affordable housing. Unfortunately, in the past four decades, there has been little effort to ensure these residents can remain in their homes as wealthy residents move in, resulting in widespread displacement, particularly for African American residents. Until its eradication in 1941, alley dwellings like Navy Place SE had been home to many poor African Americans. The construction of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway in the 1960s was another of the major mid-century changes to the neighborhood’s built environment, separating Capitol Hill from the Navy Yard and destroying a number of Federal and Greek Revival-style houses.
The DC preservation movement rose around this time to preserve DC’s historic sites and architecture. At a time when most wealthy government officials were still living in Northwest DC, Justice William O. Douglas (1898-1980) purchased, renovated, and restored a nineteenth century row house near the Capitol, which inspired more of the wealthy elite to do the same. This led to the preservation of many of the historic row houses that had once faced decline and destruction.
DC Listing (preliminary identification): November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
DC Inventory: June 19, 1973; boundary expansion on January 20, 1976; boundary expansion on February 7, 2002 (effective April 21, 2002); boundary increase on May 28, 2015
National Register: August 27, 1976; boundary expansion on July 3, 2003; boundary increase on October 21, 2015
]]>Platted in the mid-1870s, Woodley Park was originally conceived as a residential suburb which its promoters described as the finest country seats ever offered for sale near the urban center, a mere 20 minute walk from Dupont Circle. Construction in Woodley Park did not begin until the early 20th century. As the subdivision evolved, it became an urban neighborhood characterized by townhouses and rowhouses set within a lush, park-like setting. The architecture, the repetition of common stylistic elements, the scale of the buildings, and landscape plan, which are consistent within the traditional boundaries of Old Woodley Park, give the district a distinct visual identity.
The neighborhood features flat-fronted houses in predominantly classical styles, with front porches and light-toned materials common. There are many commercial and apartment buildings along Connecticut Avenue.
Within the historic district are the works of many notable local architects and builders, including Middaugh and Shannon, Harry Wardman, Clarke Waggaman, Albert Beers, A.H. Sonnemann, Hunter and Bell, William Allard, Joseph Bonn, and George Santmyers.
The district includes approximately 395 buildings, dating from about 1905 to 1938.
DC Inventory: April 18, 1990National Register: June 15, 1990
]]>The C&O Canal Company was chartered in 1825, the same year as the opening of the Erie Canal. The groundbreaking was celebrated by President John Quincy Adams at Little Falls in 1828. The canal was completed to Seneca by 1830, to Rock Creek by 1831, to Harper's Ferry by 1834, and to Cumberland by 1850. Four Aquia Creek sandstone locks were built in Georgetown in 1830 by contractor Dibble, Beaumont & McCordin.
The canal was used as a source of water mill power from 1837 and reached peak tonnage in 1871. The canal included the world's largest boat incline, used for lowering barges to the Potomac River near Georgetown, which was completed in 1876 but destroyed by flood in 1889.
The canal served as the major commercial artery in the Potomac Valley. Along the canal, significant quantities of food, fuel, and building materials were transported to supply the growing national capital. As a result, an adjacent business district was created and expanded, and many of these businesses utilized the canal for water resources.
The C&O Canal ceased commercial operations after a 1924 flood. It was acquired by the Department of the Interior as a historic site in 1938.
By the 1950s, many individuals saw the canal as an artifact of days gone by and wanted to build a scenic highway along the Potomac River, layered directly over the canal itself. Yet one man, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, worked to defend the integrity of the canal, which he had grown up with as a child and continued to hike into his adulthood. Through community organizing, the support of conservation groups, and Douglas's status as a Supreme Court Justice, the National Park Service dismissed the idea of a scenic highway in 1956.
Justice Douglas continued to organize community hikes and lobby for the preservation of the canal throughout the 1960s, with his efforts culminating in the designation of the C&O Canal as a National Historical Park in 1971. The park was dedicated to Mr. Douglas, the "man who saved the canal."
The Georgetown Historic District includes a portion of the C&O Canal Historic District and a portion of the national historical park, which extends to Cumberland, Maryland.
DC Listing: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
DC Inventory: January 23, 1973
National Register: October 15, 1966
National Monument (prior to National Historical Park designation): 1961
Designated as National Historical Park: January 8, 1971
National Register (Boundary Increase): February 3, 2015
]]>The Cleveland Park Historic District is an intact community integrating residences, apartment buildings and neighborhood retail shopping located on a hill overlooking the city center but separated from it by Rock Creek Park, a deep geological chasm.
A distinguishing feature of the district is the large number of frame houses with local Rock Creek granite foundations, in a city of predominantly brick structures, representing a full range of architectural styles popular around the turn of the century including, but not limited to: Carpenter Gothic, Italianate, Queen Anne, Shingle, Dutch Colonial Revival, Mission Revival, Colonial Revival, Neoclassical, and Tudor revival houses in various styles, such as Beaux Arts, Art Deco, International style, and modern or contemporary. Subsequently, brick and some stone houses were built in the 1910s and 1920s. Stylistically, the neighborhood is a veritable museum of changing tastes, representing the overlay of history in a continuous line of development from 1894 to 1941.
Cleveland Park's initial growth was in direct response to the opening of the electric streetcars connecting this area with downtown. Streetcar service began in 1890 on Wisconsin Avenue and 1892 on Connecticut Avenue. The community grew rapidly, continuously reflecting changing aesthetic tastes, housing needs and lifestyles.
The houses of the historic district were largely constructed between 1894 and 1930, overlapping with the most intense period of apartment and retail/commercial construction between 1920 and 1941. The district also includes two estates that predate the development of the streetcar suburb. Two additional estates were established after the initial phase of the suburb was completed. All four estates have maintained the integrity of their buildings and grounds including some of the original landscaping schemes.
The historic district includes approximately 1000 buildings that date from about 1880 to 1941.
DC Inventory: November 19, 1986 (effective April 27, 1987)
National Register: April 27, 1987
]]>The original four and one-half acre tract of Congressional Cemetery was purchased from the Government for $200 on April 4, 1807 as a private burial ground. On March 30, 1812, several years after Christ Church was built, Ingle, one of the buyers, deeded this tract to the church under the name of "The Washington Parish Burial Ground." On May 30, 1849, the vestry changed the name to "Washington Cemetery" which is its correct name today, although it has long been known as Congressional Cemetery because of its associations with the national legislature.
Congressional Cemetery's original plot, east and south of the Superintendent's lodge, contains many of the oldest and most interesting graves. Of particular note are the two large groupings of cenotaphs, one on the east side of the square, and one on the west. These cenotaphs, reportedly designed by Benjamin Latrobe, consist of square sandstone blocks on sandstone slabs and surmounted by short segments of columns topped with a squat cone.
From the time of its establishment in 1807 until the end of the Civil War, three Presidents, two Vice Presidents, seventy-five Senators and Representatives, as well as many high-ranking executive, judicial and military officers and Native Americans were interred in Congressional Cemetery. There are perhaps more early historical figures buried within this "American Westminster Abbey" than in any other cemetery in the country.
LGBTQ+ History
Congressional Cemetery is also home to an LGBTQ+ section known as “Gay Corner” — one of the only cemeteries in the world to have one. Leonard Matlovich was the first to be buried in this section. Matlovich was a closeted Air Force Sergeant who became the face of a Time magazine cover in 1975, following Dr. Franklin Kameny’s search for a case to test the military’s ban on gay service members. Matlovich’s name is not inscribed on his headstone. Instead, the headstone proclaims: “A Gay Vietnam Veteran: When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” Alongside Malovich are other LGBTQ+ figures, such as Kameny and Barbara Gittings, both of whom were leading activists against the federal government’s anti-LGBTQ+ policies, as well as Alain LeRoy Locke, a prominent 20th century African American philosopher.DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
National Register: June 23, 1969
National Historic Landmark: June 14, 2011
This is a stop on the DC's LGBTQ+ History Tour.
For more information about DC's LGBTQ History, please see the Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.
]]>The nation's first naval yard and first home port began development in 1799 and eventually became the center for naval operations during a critical period of expanding nationalism in the early 19th century. From about 1850 onward, the Navy Yard was the major site for U.S. naval gun manufacture, and it became the center of a nationwide naval weapons production system during World Wars I and II. It saw the development of important ordnance technology, including the manufacture of the largest-caliber naval guns ever produced in America. Ultimately, the Navy Yard grew to a massive complex of industrial buildings and supply yards with much heavy equipment—the city’s largest concentration of industrial architecture.
At the end of the 19th century, the Navy Yard was expanded westward to accommodate more gun and ordnance manufacturel. Major naval construction campaigns led to spurts of growth in the Navy Yard, including the building of Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet" after the Spanish-American War and the arms race that culminated in World War I. Expansion continued during World War II, when the Yard played a major role as the command center for naval ordnance production. The Navy Yard was renamed the U.S. Naval Gun Factory in 1945; production stopped in 1962.
The Navy Yard Historic District includes about 40 contributing buildings dating from about 1799 to 1920, as well as sites with archaeological potential.
DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks) and February 28, 2008 (Boundary Increase)
National Register: June 19, 1973 (Boundary Increase I: January 3, 2008 and Boundary Increase II: June 29, 2023)
National Historic Landmark: May 11, 1976
]]>The Washington Heights Historic District contains one of the most eclectic, yet cohesive collections of historic buildings in the Adams Morgan area. Platted in 1888, the neighborhood features intact groups of late 19th-century row houses along its grid streets, early-20th century luxury apartment houses framing the larger avenues, and an eclectic mix of commercial structures (both purpose built and modified) along both sides of 18th Street.
The development of Washington Heights illustrates the neighborhood’s architectural evolution from a streetcar suburb on the outskirts of the original city limits to a vibrant urban neighborhood and commercial corridor. Once a bucolic setting on the breezy heights at the northern boundary of the city, the area was first attractive for its easy walking distance to the horse-drawn streetcar line that terminated at Connecticut and Florida Avenues. But its major growth was spurred by the electric streetcars extended through the subdivision along 18th Street in 1892, and along Columbia Road in 1896.
Until the early 1920s, Washington Heights remained mostly white and middle-class, but in the 1920s and 1930s, European and Asian immigrants began moving into the neighborhood, many operating small businesses on 18th Street or working for the nearby embassies. These immigrants brought slow but increasing diversity to the neighborhood. Similarly, the neighborhood’s African American population, at first largely limited to servants or janitors living in the homes or apartments where they worked, became more diversified by 1930, with a large concentration along Vernon Street in particular.
The sweeping demographic and social changes that define the neighborhood today did not occur until after World War II, when a housing shortage in the city caused many of the single-family row houses to be transformed into rooming houses, attracting a majority African American population. The changing demographics and the declining value of the area’s real estate spurred the departure of many middle-class white families to the suburbs.
Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, the area became increasingly attractive to Spanish-speaking residents, due in part to its affordability and to its proximity to Hispanic embassies. As political turmoil afflicted Latin American countries in the 1960s, the Latino population grew. During the 1970s, in addition to increasing numbers of African Americans and Latin Americans, new ethnic groups, including Caribbeans, Southeast Asians, and Africans moved into the neighborhood, creating a multicultural and multinational community that is part of the neighborhood’s defining character. The district includes 347 contributing buildings, dating from 1891 to 1950.
DC Inventory: July 27, 2006 (effective September 10, 2006)
National Register: September 27, 2006
]]>DC's old downtown area is centered along the historic commercial arteries of 7th and F Streets, which intersect at the monumental Greek Revival Old Patent Office. The Downtown Historic District offers a rich variety of commercial buildings, including retail establishments, banks, department stores, dime stores, and some of city's earliest office buildings. It also includes notable synagogues and churches, remnants of downtown's residential neighborhood, and portions of Chinatown.
The department stores built within the downtown area reflected the needs of urban residents of all socioeconomic levels. This area served as the main shopping district within DC for decades prior to suburban development and residential movement away from the city’s core.
Incorporating approximately 200 buildings dating from about 1830 to 1940, the Downtown Historic District uniquely conveys the essence of downtown Washington City visually and historically as it developed from the early Federal period to the present. It is representative of a once extraordinarily well-integrated downtown urban area in which commercial, residential, and government elements were combined successfully.
DC Inventory: July 26, 1982 (effective October 5, 1984)
National Register: September 22, 2001
]]>Developed chiefly between 1928 and 1938, under the direction of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon's "Mellon Board," the buildings that comprise the Federal Triangle Historic District are a visible symbol of the tremendous growth of the federal government in the 20th century and a desire to create a grand capital city.
The oldest of the buildings in Federal Triangle, the Old Post Office, was designed by W.J. Edbrooke and constructed between 1891 and 1899, and was followed by the Beaux-Arts style District Building, designed by Cope & Stewardson and constructed between 1904 and 1908. The Mellon Board's Neoclassical ensemble consists of nine enormous federal buildings constructed around a series of outdoor plazas and inner courts. It is this country's most imposing example of the monumental civic center concept and City Beautiful Movement, popular among city planners in the early decades of the 20th century.
In addition to the Old Post Office and District Building, the historic district encompasses the following buildings: the Herbert Hoover Building, Department of Commerce (1932, York and Sawyer); the Department of Labor, Departmental Auditorium (now Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium), and Interstate Commerce Commission (1934, Arthur Brown, Jr.) (now the Environmental Protection Agency; the West Building; Post Office Department (1934, Arthur Brown, Jr.) (now the Environmental Protection Agency, East Building); the Robert F. Kennedy Building, Department of Justice (1935, Zantzinger, Borie & Medary); the National Archives Building (1935, John Russell Pope); the Internal Revenue Service (1936, Louis A. Simon); and the Federal Trade Commission (1938, Bennett, Parsons and Frost).
Federal Triangle was officially completed in 1998, with the addition of the Ronald Reagan Building. The construction of Federal Triangle led to the demolition of numerous buildings and structures, and the erasure of DC's first Chinatown (centered at Pennsylvania Avenue and 4th Street NW), which was forced to relocate in the early 1930s.
DC Inventory: March 7, 1968 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
Within the Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site
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