Featured Historic Districts
      Introduction
      Logan Circle
      Residential Architecture
      Religious Architecture
      Public Architecture
      Commercial Architecture
      Residents
      Greater 14th St. Area Today
      Logan Circle Comm. Assoc.
      Credits
   Designation Procedures
   and Criteria
   Frequently Asked Questions

Residential Architecture

Residential architecture in the Victorian era (1870-1900) drew on a variety of sources for inspiration. It was a period of creative design experimentation in which builders and architects moved away from classical styles, drawing on more picturesque, often medieval historical sources, such as the English Gothic and Queen Anne, the Romanesque, the Italiante, the French Second Empire, and even Japanese design motifs. Houses tend to have asymmetrical forms--emphasized by towers, turrets, bay windows, and oriels--and a dark, multicolored palette of red brick, brownstone, black cast iron, and wood and metal trim painted in somber tones. The finer buildings are richly detailed, both inside and out.

Rowhouses in the Greater Fourteenth Street area tend to be a floor or two taller than houses constructed before the Civil War, reflecting the increased affluence of the middle and wealthy classes. An additional floor was often gained through the use of an English basement, allowing additional living space on the narrow urban lots. While floor plans varied, a typical rowhouse in the historic district had its kitchen, and often its dining room, in the English basement; double parlor doors on the main floor; and bedrooms on the upper floors. Indoor plumbing, coal burning furnaces, and gas lighting were standard in new houses constructed after 1875.

Washingtoniana Division D.C. Public Library

In the late nineteenth-century, apartment buildings emerged as an alternative to rowhouse living. In the 50-year period from 1870 to 1920 population pressures had forced first the development of row houses, and later, as pressures intensified and land space became precious, the development and widespread construction of the apartment building.

By the 1920s, the land forming the Greater Fourteenth Street Historic District was fully developed and well-established as a residential area. The lack of unimproved lots forced apartment development northward, which caused the area to remain primarily a nineteenth-century residential neighborhood punctuated with examples of early-twentieth century architecture.