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 Armed Forces Retirement Home Historic District includes a collection of 19th- and early-20th-century buildings, as well as an extensive historic landscapes. Dating from 1842 to 1951, the focal point is Lincoln Cottage, the centerpiece of the property. The Gothic Revival-style cottage was originally known as Corn Rigs, as it was built between 1842 and 1843 for George Riggs. In 1852, following a push to establish a soldiers' home in DC, Congress purchased the cottage to use as a home for retired and disabled U.S. Army Veterans. The asylum continued to develop with the construction of surrounding buildings in the years that followed. In addition to the buildings, the historic grounds -- and the statuary and war relics that decorate them -- comprise part of the historic district.
The historic district includes 140 contributing properties, as well as Soldiers’ Home National Historic Site (United States Military Asylum). Lincoln Cottage has been designated a National Monument.
DC Inventory: May 22, 2008
National Register: December 5, 2007
]]>This historic district of residential, commercial, and service structures is notable for the network of alleyways enclosed behind a facade of middle-class residential streets. In isolated and cramped conditions, amid the stables and warehouses, such alleys provided habitation for the working poor. Blagden Alley in particular inspired humanitarian reformers to eradicate the deplorable living conditions that these alleys came to embody.
While African Americans were disproportionately represented in the alley population, the area developed as an economically and racially mixed neighborhood with a rich variety of architectural styles and diverse quality. The district includes dwellings of freedmen, examples of Black real estate ownership prior to emancipation, and houses like the home of Senator Blanche K. Bruce, the first African American to serve a full term as U.S. Senator. There are approximately 150 buildings, dating from about 1833 to 1941, as well as sites with archaeological potential.
DC Inventory: September 19, 1990 (effective November 13, 1990)
National Register: November 16, 1990
National Register (amendment, boundary increase): July 22, 1999 (effective September 7, 1999)
National Register listing amended September 8, 1999 to create a larger Mount Vernon West Historic District; original DC designation reinstituted December 16, 1999
]]>The Bloomingdale Historic District is a group of 1,692 contributing resources bounded by Channing Street to the north; North Capital Street to the east; Florida Avenue to the south; and 2nd Street to the west.
Bloomingdale is significant for its status as one of DC’s largest cohesive row house neighborhoods. Its development began with the arrival of a streetcar line and was continued rapidly by a small group of speculative developers and builders. It boasts a large stock of row houses of high-quality design and materials, houses intended to attract stable middle-class residents. The size and quality of the architecture illustrate that the success of speculative development for DC’s rising middle class was all but assured during the years in which the neighborhood was built.
Bloomingdale also demonstrates the architectural transition of DC’s row houses away from fanciful three-story Victorian buildings of the early 1890s to the more regular, two-story, front-porch row houses of the 1910s. Bloomingdale is also one of the first large developments in DC laid out in conformance with the Permanent Highway Plan of 1893, which standardized the layout of new subdivisions beyond the city’s original boundaries.
These factors, along with Bloomingdale’s prominent role in the struggle to abolish racially restrictive housing covenants in the District and nation from 1907-1948, make the neighborhood significant. The Bloomingdale Historic District’s period of significance is 1892-1948.
DC Inventory: July 26, 2018
National Register: November 26, 2018
]]>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 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
]]>As the seat of the Union at the intersection of the North and the South, Washington D.C. played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Throughout the progression of the conflict, D.C. constructed numerous fort sites around the city center to protect the Union capital. By the end of the war, this extensive 37-mile defense system included 68 enclosed forts and batteries, 20-miles of trenches, and 93 unarmed batteries. The Civil War Forts Sites include Batteries Kemble and Ricketts; and Forts Bayard, Bunker Hill, Carroll, Chaplin, Davis, DeRussy, Dupont, Greble, Lincoln, Mahan, Reno, Slocum, Stanton, Stevens, and Totten. In the 1890s, during a national era of parkway construction, a “Fort to Fort Drive” was proposed. As the city was growing in all directions into these former fort sites, the 1902 Senate Park Commission Plan (McMillan Commission) proposed that 17 of the sites be converted into open parkland, with two portions of Fort Drive (one west of the Anacostia River and another east of the Anacostia) connecting most of the sites. However, despite these grand plans, Congress failed to comprehensively act. Action finally took place following the establishment of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (NCPPC) – now the National Capital Planning Commission – in 1926. By the early 1930s, a majority of the historic sites and the land needed for Fort Drive had been purchased by NCPPC. However, because of eventual funding issues, surface streets had to suffice for portions of the “parkway” – as opposed to a formal, newly-constructed Fort Drive parkway. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) constructed some sections of Fort Drive. The CCC also established picnic areas at some of the new parks – at former fort sites – and even constructed an amphitheater at Fort Bunker Hill Park. Most notably, the CCC reconstructed Fort Stevens – the site of DC’s only Civil War battle and, today, the most famous of the fortifications. Despite not being fully realized, the planning resulted in various open spaces across the District – from Battery Kemble in Northwest to Fort Circle Park in Southeast. Additionally, portions of the parkway can be seen, for instance in Southeast (Fort Davis Drive, Fort Dupont Drive, and Fort Drive), Northeast (Fort Totten to Barnard Hill Park), and Northwest (Fort Drive near Fort Reno Park). Most importantly, residents can now enjoy the outdoors in numerous parks and witness history at the reconstructed fortifications at Fort Stevens. The properties are currently administered by the National Park Service and are utilized as educational and historical resources.
DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
(Amended June 19, 1973)
National Register: July 15, 1974 (Documentation revised September 13, 1978)
]]>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
]]>In the 1930s, Colony Hill – near Reservoir and Foxhall roads – emerged as a distinctive suburban development built in an architectural style that echoed the Georgian and Federal styles of the early American nation. In the decade between 1931 and 1941, notable real estate firm Boss & Phelps collaborated with renowned architect Horace Peaslee, landscape architect Rose Greeley, and local architect Harvey Baxter. Early residents were primarily upper middle-class citizens, including physicians, businessmen, military officers, and government officials.
The historic district includes 50 houses, 37 of which are contributing properties. Distinctive elements of the single-family residences include cornice detailing, rhythmic fenestration, and simple massing. Colony Hill planners integrated revivalist architecture with naturalistic landscape design in a style that is still clear today—as current residents continue to preserve this vision in their neighborhood.
The Colony Hill Historic District includes the homes of Hoban Road, Hadfield Lane, and 45th Street NW. It is bounded by Glover Archbold on the east, Reservoir Road on the south, and Foxhall Road on the west.
DC Inventory: February 4, 2021
National Register: May 21, 2021
]]>The Commercial National Bank, also known as the Western Union Building, designed by noted Washington architect Waddy B. Wood in 1917, is an excellent early example of the simplified and stylized classicism that distinguishes some of DC’s most noteworthy early-twentieth century buildings. Commercial National Bank was among the first major buildings in Washington to embody the characteristics of this Stripped Classicism.
The abstract classical vocabulary displayed here in 1917 appeared repeatedly through DC’s architectural landscape in the 1920s and 1930s. However, the originality of Commercial National Bank’s stylized classical vocabulary and the subtlety of its expression makes it unique for this early date. This powerful building marks an important transition from Wood’s earlier, more literal use of traditional architectural forms to the boldness and abstraction of his later buildings.
DC Inventory: July 16, 1986
National Register: October 11, 1991
Within Financial Historic District
]]>