The Alexander Crummell School, built between 1910 and 1911, is located in Ivy City. Municipal Architect Snowden Ashford designed the building in 1910 in a personalized Renaissance style, and construction was carried out the following year by Allan T. Howlson. As built in 1911, it was an early extensible six-classroom building, and the addition of a second story at the rear of the building, built according to the original plans, followed in 1932. The school was named in honor of Alexander Crummell, the noted African American clergyman, activist, educator, and founder of the American Negro Academy.
The red brick Alexander Crummell School is two stories high and three bays wide with high English basement and full attic. Entrances are located in these central pavilions in the nearly identical northeast and southeast elevations, the former for girls and the latter for boys. The girls' entrance serves as the primary entrance, and the southeast facade, facing Gallaudet Street, is the principal facade. The Alexander Crummell School graduated its last class in 1972.
For years, the Crummell School sat vacant and in a neglected and deteriorating state. It is currently slated for renovation into a community center for the Ivy City area.
DC Inventory: May 23, 2002
National Register: July 25, 2003
]]>Named in honor of Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841-1848), the first African American to serve a full term as an elected U.S. senator, the Renaissance Revival-style Bruce School served generations of African American elementary students during the era of segregated schools. Bruce also served as a neighborhood cultural and community center from its opening in 1898.
The Bruce School is an Italian Renaissance Revival style building of red brick with stone and pressed metal trim, designed by architect William M. Poindexter and constructed in 1898. The eight-room school was designed with a conventional floor plan with four rooms on each floor arranged around a central hallway. In 1927, the overcrowded conditions of the school were relieved by the construction of an eight-room extensible annex to the west, designed in the Colonial Revival style by municipal architect Albert L. Harris.
DC Inventory: November 20, 2014
National Register: March 31, 2015
]]>Established in 1883, Bunker Hill Elementary School's first building, a one-room brick structure, was used to educate white students before being reassigned to the city’s “colored” school division. A slightly larger building, erected in 1911, quickly proved inadequate for the growing Michigan Park community. After years of advocacy and a switch back to the segregated white division of the District’s schools in 1926, the current building was erected in stages through funding provided by the New Deal.
"Extensible" schools, which were popular in the District from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, were designed to allow for incremental additions as needs arose. The first section of this school building was completed in 1940, and subsequent additions were made through the 1960s.
The Colonial Revival style building exemplifies the chosen style of school architecture then mandated by the DC Office of the Municipal Architect. Accomplished local architect Arthur B. Heaton worked with the office in executing the school's design.
Today, the Bunker Hill Elementary School building remains in operation as part of the Brookland Education Campus.
DC Inventory: April 26, 2012
National Register: May 5, 2014
]]>Designed by Nathan C. Wyeth, Calvin Coolidge Senior High School (Coolidge High School) constitutes a significant example of Georgian Revival architecture in the District—and remains part of the District’s early efforts to improve local education.
Coolidge High School is particularly important as one of the last revivalist architectural style structures constructed for the purpose of local schooling. In addition to the rise of modernist architecture, economic constraints in the following decades ultimately led to the local government’s movement away from stylistic detailing and elaborate designs for public schools. Built prior to these restrictions, Coolidge High School’s Georgian Revival style is distinguishable in its hipped roofs, elaborate door surrounds, a wide pavilion and portico, and the crowning cupola atop the main block.
Constructed between 1937 and 1940, Coolidge High School’s establishment was a result of school overcrowding in the developing areas of the District. Increasing population growth and the expansion of residential development in the early 20th century led to the Board of Education’s Five-Year Building Plan proposal in 1924 and its passage in 1925. Despite building interruptions due to the Great Depression and an influx of even more District residents following the expansion of federal jobs through the New Deal, numerous schools were constructed under the Five-Year Building Plan--notable examples in the city include Thomas Jefferson Junior High School and Woodrow Wilson High School.
Coolidge High School opened its doors to the Takoma Park neighborhood in 1940, for at least 750 students on their first day. The school continues to serve the surrounding area under the same name and in many of the same spaces as dedicated teachers and students did over 75 years ago.
DC Inventory: September 23, 2021
National Register: April 12, 2022
]]>Built between 1914 and 1916, Cardozo High School is the work of William B. Ittner, a nationally prominent school architect from St. Louis. The Elizabethan-style building and athletic facilities were constructed on an on extraordinary terraced and landscaped site with commanding views over the city.
The school's extensive specialized facilities reflected the progressive educational philosophy of fostering student health and social welfare in addition to academic needs. It served as the prototype for subsequent public schools, and embodies the origins of the city's high schools. It is a building of extraordinary architectural significance characterized by a large site incorporating extensive recreation areas, flexible design facilitating future expansion, open plan allowing for natural lighting and ventilation, and restricted building height. It was the sixth building in the District constructed as a high school, according more attention by the national press than any other school in the District. Also, Central High serves as a microcosm of public school history in the Nation's Capital, reflecting the evolution of the schools from a racially dual to a unified system.
In 1950 the DC Board of Education had transferred the Central High School building to Cardozo High School, then housed in crowded conditions at the old Business High School building (9th Street and Rhode Island Avenue, NW). Central High School became Cardozo High School starting the fall of 1950. Black students were admitted on the eve of desegregation in Washington, DC. By the time Cardozo High School moved into the Central building, it was still predominantly a business school. Expanded facilities permitted the school to bolster its technical and academic programs as well as its student activities and after-school clubs. By the 1960s, with the abolition of the track system, Cardozo High School became a comprehensive senior high school.
Cardozo Senior High, today known as Cardozo Education Campus, serves as a memorial to Francis L. Cardozo, the prominent late-19th century African American educator and principal of M Street High School.
DC Inventory: June 19, 1991National Register: September 30, 1993
]]>One of only a few extant rural schools in Washington, this four-room schoolhouse, built in 1923, serves as a link and memorial to the vanished post-Civil War community of Black refugees and freedmen that grew up around the city’s Civil War fortifications. Built across from Battery Kemble on a road that still retains its character as a rural lane, the Chain Bridge Road School replaced an 1865 frame schoolhouse on the site.
Although a product of the prominent and prolific Municipal Architect Albert Harris, the school is atypical of his work, and much plainer than its contemporaries. The hip-roofed building is poured-in-place concrete on the first story, and frame on the upper story, uniformly clad in stucco, with large ganged multi-pane windows and a Colonial Revival entry surround.
In 1940, the 17-year-old building was closed, and its students transferred in mid-year to the Phillips-Wormley School in Georgetown, following a petition that had circulated among the white residents of the suburbanizing area, which cited dubious claims of declining enrollment and poor conditions.
DC Inventory: June 27, 2002
National Register: December 9, 2003
]]>The Sumner School is one of three post-Civil War Black schools in DC and is named in honor of Charles Sumner, a Massachusetts Senator and ardent abolitionist who attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban segregated schools and public facilities in the city. Since its construction in 1871 and 1872, the Sumner School has housed a broad spectrum of the developing Black educational opportunities in the city. The school was one of the first public school buildings erected for the education of Blacks in Washington. Sumner School is built on the site of a school constructed in 1866 under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau, with lumber salvaged from barracks.
It is one of a series of award-winning, modern public school buildings constructed by the District of Columbia government during a period of intensive municipal improvement which culminated in Alexander R. Shepherd's remarkable transformation of the city in the early 1870s. The architect of the building was Adolf Cluss, whose work had a major visual impact on the city during one of its most significant periods of development and included virtually all of the public buildings constructed by the city government between 1862 and 1876, as well as a large proportion of both federal and private buildings constructed here in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s.
The school was awarded the medal for design at the 1873 Vienna Exposition. It served as the headquarters for the Superintendent and Board of Trustees for Colored Public Schools of Washington and Georgetown. It reflects the Second Empire style and was renovated between 1984 and 1985.
The school is the oldest Black public school building still extant that has remained substantially unaltered on both the exterior and interior. The school now houses a museum and archive for DC public school records and artifacts.
DC Inventory: November 21, 1978
National Register: December 20, 1979
]]>Typical of DC's post-Civil War red brick schoolhouses, the Daniel Webster School shows how mass-production and technology influenced the design of civic buildings in an era of great public works. It is an efficient standardized design developed by the Office of the Building Inspector, with austere Romanesque Revival facades by Architect of the Capitol Edward Clark.
Erected in 1882, the building soon became stranded in a growing business district. From 1924 to 1949, it housed the Americanization School, a specialized branch of the public schools with a curriculum based on English and citizenship classes. This institution reflected a national movement after World War I to support the assimilation of immigrants into American society; it was central to the lives of thousands of new citizens naturalized in Washington.
The building is three stories, red brick with a corbelled cornice, hipped slate roof, multi-paned windows, and heavy brick and stone portal. It was named in honor of the celebrated orator Daniel Webster.
The General Services Administration sold the historic school in 2025.
DC Inventory: February 25, 1999 (reconfirmed October 26, 2000)
]]>Established in 1906 as Cardozo Elementary School, the building became the home of Elizabeth G. Randall Junior High School in 1927, and was repeatedly expanded to meet the educational needs of Southwest DC’s African American community. Originally named the Francis L. Cardozo Elementary School, after the celebrated African American educator (1836-1907), the school adhered to the policy of racial and gender segregation in the District of Columbia school system.
In 1927, the newly-established Randall Junior High School switched places with Cardozo Elementary School in a strategic move to accommodate its growing student body, and two wings (east and west) were constructed. Designed by Municipal Architect Albert L. Harris, the wings added space for classrooms and a combined auditorium and gymnasium. This expansion was part of the nationwide trend in the 1920s to convert elementary schools to junior high schools.
Randall Junior High School stands as one of the few extant buildings associated with the pre-urban renewal history of Southwest Washington. The original building and its 1927 wings illustrate an important aspect of the history of African American education. The school is an excellent example of a 20th-century African American school that continuously served the community of Southwest Washington during its years of operation. Additionally, the building serves as a reminder of the cultural and social role that schools played in the 20th-century development of African American communities. The building not only exemplifies early design standards for school buildings, but it also reflects the transition in the school system from elementary to junior high schools.
From the early-1980s to the mid-2000s, the former school was used as a city men's shelter and as a community/arts space. The former Corcoran Gallery of Art owned the one-time school building for a number of years, starting in 2006.
In October 2022, the Rubell Museum opened in the building's center portion and east wing. One of the contemporary art museum's initial exhibitions is What's Going On, a nod to Washingtonian Marvin Gaye, as the famous musician once attended Randall. The museum's opening followed an extensive restoration of the historic building's features. Additionally, new housing was constructed north of the former school building. This is the second private museum founded by the Rubell family — the other being in Miami.
DC Inventory: March 22, 2007
National Register: December 22, 2008
]]>Constructed in 1933, architect Anthony A.F. Schmitt designed Holy Redeemer College as a residential home for members of the Redemptorist religious order while they pursued studies at nearby Catholic University of America (CUA). The building has been continuously owned and operated by the religious order since its erection.
The college is architecturally significant as a prominent example of the Romanesque Revival style in the District. Located in the Edgewood neighborhood of DC, the building is distinguishable by a solid masonry exterior, a central tower, and its placement on an artificial rise that echoes the noble stature of a Medieval Italian palazzo.
Historically, the institution is associated with the rise of Catholic establishments and religious culture in the neighborhoods around CUA. The prominence of a thriving Catholic university, various catholic businesses, and an increasingly Catholic demographic in Northeast DC prompted the nickname “Little Rome” for the surrounding area. Between 1900 and 1940, more than fifty Catholic institutions popped up around CUA in the neighborhood of Edgewood.
Holy Redeemer College contributed to the history of this “Little Rome” within the city, and continues to serve its religious community through offering mass and housing clerical workers.
DC Inventory: March 28, 2019
National Register: May 17, 2019
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