DC -- Eckington neighborhood (incl Metro Yards):
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 3.145.77.114 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1] ECK_150131_03.JPG
|
[2] ECK_150131_06.JPG
|
- Wikipedia Description: Eckington (Washington, D.C.)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eckington is a neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C., located south of the Prospect Hill and Glenwood Cemeteries. Eckington is less than one mile (1.6 km) southeast of Howard University and exactly one mile north of the United States Capitol. Eckington is also the home of the District of Columbia office of Sirius XM Radio.
The boundaries of Eckington are Rhode Island Avenue to the north, Florida Avenue to the south, North Capitol Street to the west, and Washington Metro's Brentwood Yard to the east.
The closest metro stations serving Eckington are NoMa–Gallaudet U Station, located south of Eckington, and Rhode Island Avenue–Brentwood Station, located northeast of Eckington.
History
The land which became Eckington was the country home of Joseph Gales, Jr., owner of the National Intelligencer newspaper and Mayor of Washington from 1827 to 1830. Gales bought the Northeast tract in 1815, and in 1830 erected a two-story house on the hilltop, about where Third and U Streets intersect today. Gales named his estate Eckington after The Village in England in which he was born.
During the American Civil War, the house was used as a hospital for the 7th Regiment of New York. After the war, Eckington, commonly known as Gales Woods, was a popular picnic ground.
In 1887, Eckington was bought by George Truesdell and his wife Frances, who subdivided the property, improved it substantially for habitation, sold lots, and built several houses. Truesdell undertook extensive grading operations to level the landscape of his 87-acre (350,000 m2) Eckington subdivision. He laid down water and sewer pipes, paved streets in asphalt and concrete, and erected a stand pipe near the old Gales house. A steam pump brought water to the stand pipe, which distributed water throughout the new neighborhood. Truesdell erected five “pretty cottages” which, according to an 1888 newspaper account, were “all fitted up as city houses,” with steam heat and hot and cold running water. Eckington was wired for electricity in 1889, two years before electricity was installed in the White House. In three years Truesdell spent $500,000 improving the subdivision.
The contractor for Truesdell's houses was John H. Lane, who moved from Dupont Circle into one of those houses at 1725 Third Street. From 1889 to 1897, Lane developed nearly twenty properties in Eckington. None of Truesdell's original five houses exists today, although several detached houses from the late 19th century, by Lane and others, dot the streetscape of Eckington. The first three decades of the 20th century brought a boom in rowhouse construction to Eckington, as it did in many parts of the District.
Truesdell placed restrictive covenants in the deeds of Eckington's residential properties which required that each house cost at least $2,000 and be set back 15 feet (4.6 m) from the building line. There was to be no manufacturing. The Union Army veteran did not place racial restrictions in the deeds, although as late as 1930 there were no African American families living in Eckington.
The Eckington & Soldiers Home Railway Company began service on October 17, 1888. It was Washington's first electric railway and followed by just a few months the first practical electric railway in Richmond, Virginia. The line ran from Seventh Street and New York Avenue NW to Fourth and T Streets NE in Eckington, then was extended in 1889, up Fourth Street to Michigan Avenue and The Catholic University of America.
Col. Truesdell's subdivision straddled the narrow tracks of the Metropolitan Branch of the B&O Railroad. The Met Branch was a line which brought commuters into the city from Maryland beginning in 1873. In 1888 the B&O bought 13 acres (53,000 m2) just north of Florida Avenue and built a passenger station. Passengers were to disembark and ride the new electric line into the city. A few years later the B&O built a huge freight depot next to the passenger station. This freight center spurred the development of manufacturing and warehousing along the west side of the tracks from Florida Avenue north to Rhode Island Avenue, Truesdell's covenants notwithstanding. The National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) was at 4th and S Streets and Judd and Detweiler printers was at Florida Avenue and Eckington Place. There were as many as 20 warehouses, mostly for groceries and home and building supplies. When the tracks were greatly expanded after the construction of Union Station, the east side of Eckington disappeared under them, including two of Truesdell's original houses.
In 1907, a bridge at 4th and T St. NE was built over the tracks to connect Eckington with the Brentwood neighborhood to the east. It was designed to carry motor traffic and pedestrians. A trolley connection at the west end of the bridge stopped in 1962 and the bridge was demolished in the late 1960s.
Although the streetcar had been a community center for both Eckington and Bloomingdale, the adjacent neighborhood to the west, after the streetcar line was removed in the 1950s North Capitol Street was dug into a trench to facilitate high-speed, high-volume traffic. The entrenched highway created a stark separation between Eckington from Bloomingdale. North Capitol Street remains noisy and difficult to cross; this, along with the railroad tracks on its east, gives Eckington its relatively isolated quality.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].