The 1910s brought World War I and a massive wave of federal construction that reshaped downtown Washington. The war brought hundreds of thousands of workers flooding into the city, straining housing, transit, and every civic institution to its limits. Woodrow Wilson’s Washington was also the decade when the federal government was formally segregated.
On Chinese New Year 1919, three Chinese diplomats were shot dead at the Mission house on Kalorama Road, and the case set in motion the Brandeis opinion that helped build Miranda.
The Northumberland at 2039 New Hampshire Ave NW is Harry Wardman’s 1910 luxury apartment house and DC’s oldest self-managed co-op. Inside its storied past.
The Maret School began in 1911 in a rented Washington apartment, founded by three immigrant sisters. The story of how it started, and of the school’s first student.
The Hechinger hardware empire began in 1911 as a Southwest DC wrecking crew. The story of Sidney Hechinger, the navy-blue H, and the bankruptcy that ended it in 1999.
Gordon Parks photographed Engine Company No. 4 in 1943: men trusted to run into a fire, and made to eat off separate plates.
Before the abdication crisis, the future Duchess of Windsor spent four quiet years in Washington as a young, separated Navy wife. She shared a small house in Georgetown, lunched at the Hotel Hamilton on K Street, and met an Argentine diplomat who would change her mind about her marriage. Her mother ran a boarding house on Woodley Road.
The Army and Navy Club has held the corner of 17th and I Streets NW since 1891, in a building that opened in 1912. In 1987 Shalom Baranes gutted everything behind that facade. The facade survived. Almost nothing else did.
From its 1914 opening to its 2023 closure, Hotel Harrington was DC’s longest-running hotel. Now KHP Capital plans to bring 436 11th St NW back to life.
How Count von Bernstorff left the German Embassy at 1435 Massachusetts Avenue in 1917, and what became of the seventy-room mansion before and after.
