A D.C. Building Mystery
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #47
I saw a thread about this old building in Washington, D.C. on Twitter the other day, and it was too good not to share as an entry in this series. Unfortunately, the building in question is no longer standing—the whole block was torn down when one of the convention centers was built (I believe the first one, in the 1980s, but I’m not positive.)
Here’s how it started:
Here’s another image of that building:
It’s a single, fairly tall building with a very distinctive turret/tower feature on the corner. There are a few different guesses as to what building/street corner it is in the thread. But one fellow does incredible, detailed detective work and figures it out. I wish I’d written this!
More images of the severely redone building:
This might look confusing—you click through to view the tweets and photos in full if you want. But what you’re looking at is a single building that 1) lost a couple of floors, 2) lost its circular turret feature, and 3) had its bottom floor redone into what looks almost like a strip mall. If you’re not seeing it, look at the really gutted area at the corner, in the first picture in the tweet directly above. That’s the corner where the tower was.
The person who figured this out used old property maps as well, and the handwritten description on the original postcard photo—a misspelled name—tipped him off to which corner we might be looking at.
So much history and so much change in our everyday surroundings. Fascinating.
This is not the kind of research you can google. It takes knowledge of, and access to, stuff like these old photo archives, maps, and records. And it also helps to have deep, granular knowledge of a specific place. This is true of this early 20th century/late 19th century building in downtown Washington, D.C. It’s also true of the Pizza Hut in suburban Maryland I wrote about last month.
Another point here: it’s sad to see a beautiful building chopped up like that, but it’s also kind of cool, in a way. It demonstrates how buildings used to be—and still are—raw materials and tools, more than products with a definite lifespan. Cities are habitats, and people adapt them in lots of different ways.
When buildings are built to the cheapest possible specs with the expectation of being torn down wholesale when their “design life” is over, I think we lose something. All of this building, rebuilding, renovating, and retrofitting happened at a scale where ordinary people and local businesses could be involved. This kind of built environment was participatory, in its physical and economic scale alike.
This is why I think old fast food buildings and similar structures that have had many different uses over the years are so interesting and kind of meaningful. They show that the basic use, reuse, and evolution of the built environment still operates in suburbia, which I see as a good thing.
This is related to a couple of pieces I’ve written on strip malls that have evolved to be more like town squares or community anchors than simply shopping centers. (Here, and here.) When we resist this, when we rigidly separate uses and look down on informal commerce—flea markets in old box stores, vendors in underutilized parking lots—we’re really trying to hold back the very human tendencies that allow us to build cities in the first place.
But this post is about an old building on an old postcard. Hope you found it interesting!
Related Reading:
The Architectural Public Domain
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #24
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