Frank Lloyd Wright’s Crystal Heights: DC’s Lost Glass City
Frank Lloyd Wright drew Washington a glass city of twenty-one towers on a Connecticut Avenue hill. The height limit refused to let it rise.
Architecture
Washington’s built environment is the product of grand ambitions, fierce debates, and brilliant (and sometimes terrible) ideas across more than two centuries. These posts dig into the buildings, architects, and design decisions that shaped the city we know today.
Army and Navy Club: 140 Years at 17th and I in DC
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.
The Willard Brother Who Built the Ebbitt House
Three Willard brothers ran the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. The fourth, Caleb, ran a hotel just as big a block away. He just had the misfortune of calling it the Ebbitt House.
Korea’s Logan Circle Legation: Sold for $5, Bought Back
In 1891, King Gojong paid $25,000 for a Victorian townhouse on Iowa Circle to house Joseon’s first mission to the United States. Nineteen years later, after Japan forced the protectorate, the empire sold the building for five dollars. Korea bought it back in 2012 for $3.5 million. The museum opened in 2018.
The Cairo Hotel: How One Apartment Tower Wrote DC’s Skyline Law
A 35-year-old architect built 164 feet of Moorish-fantasy hotel into a Dupont rowhouse block. Congress hated it so much it made a law.
The Surprising History of Luther Place Memorial Church on Thomas Circle
The congregation built pews dedicated to Generals Grant and Lee, in the same sanctuary, five years after the war ended.
The Duo Who Built D.C.’s First Freeway: Archie Alexander, Maurice Repass, and the Whitehurst Story
A four-year-old cut the ribbon on the Whitehurst Freeway on October 8, 1949. It was Washington’s first elevated highway.
The Godey Lime Kilns: Washington D.C.’s Forgotten Industrial Relic
The stone arches near the Kennedy Center are the Godey Lime Kilns, Washington’s last 19th-century industrial ruin.
The Old Glass House of Washington
In 1807, two brothers named Andrew and George Way opened a glass factory on the Potomac, where the Lincoln Memorial stands today.