DC Heritage Trails: City Within a City: Greater U Street Heritage Trail:
- 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: 3.15.4.244 -- 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]
 TRUST_170909_01.JPG
|
[2]
TRUST_170909_07.JPG
|
[3] TRUST_170909_10.JPG
|
[4]
TRUST_170909_13.JPG
|
[5]
TRUST_170909_16.JPG
|
[6]
TRUST_170909_19.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- TRUST_170909_01.JPG: City Within a City
Greater U Street Heritage Trail
12 A Prestige Address
The grand Beaux-Arts buildings near this corner stand witness to the status of this area in early 20th century Washington, and as tribute to the indomitable spirit of Mary Foote Henderson. The wealthy wife of Senator John B. Henderson, she lived one block from here at 16th and Florida Avenue in a Romanesque castle and spent decades promoting 16th Street as the prestige address in the nation's capital. In the 1980s, she was instrumental in having 16th Street extended into the still undeveloped land just north of here.
Developers followed, and in 1900 the Balfour Apartment building went across the street to the west at a cost of $100,000, making it one of the most expensive structures of its kind in the city. Designed by Washington architect George S. Cooper, it offered 36 large, luxurious apartments.
Prestigious apartments continued to spring up in this neighborhood providing popular accommodations for congressmen, military personnel, and other federal government officials. The Northumberland, just north of here on the east side of the street at 2039 New Hampshire Avenue, is a remarkably preserved example. Architect Albert H. Beers created its Renaissance-inspired design in 1909 for prolific Washington builder Harry Wardman. The building featured such innovations as a public dining room, trash chutes from each kitchen, wall safes, and a telephone switchboard which has operated 24 hours a day since the building opened in 1910.
The impressive Beaux-Arts building on the corner behind you was built in 1914 for the Congressional Club, founded in 1908 on another site as a non-partisan gathering place for the spouses of members of Congress. Mary Henderson provided the land, substantial construction funds, and her favorite architect, George Oakley Totten, Jr. He designed nine other mansions for Mary Henderson along 16th Street, which she rented to foreign embassies. She even encouraged the president of the Untied States to move from the White House into her 16th Street neighborhood, but in that she did not succeed.
- TRUST_170909_07.JPG: Architect George Cooper added elaborate detailing, above, to the Balfour Apartments, left, built in 1900 at 16th and U.
- TRUST_170909_13.JPG: Harry Wardman, right, built the prestigious Northumberland Apartments at 2039 New Hampshire Avenue, seen below and below right, decorated for the holidays.
- TRUST_170909_16.JPG: City Within a City
Greater U Street Heritage Trail
For the first half of the twentieth century, this U Street neighborhood inspired and sustained the rich social, civic and cultural life of Washington's African American community. Here in the shadow of the renowned Howard University, neighbors responded to the injustices of a segregated city by creating their own self-reliant culture as well as generating leaders for the city and the nation in science, medicine, law, the military, education, literature and the arts. Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, though only one of many celebrated residents, personifies their achievements. Follow this trail to the places that tell the story of this exceptional community in the heart of the nation's capital.
A tour booklet, City Within a City: U Street Heritage Trail, is available in English and Spanish at local businesses and institutions along the route. To learn more about other DC neighborhoods, please visit www.CuturalTourismDC.org.
- TRUST_170909_19.JPG: This stately building on the southeast corner of 16th and U Streets graced a quiet, residential neighborhood in the 1920s. In the 1960s the building became the headquarters of Pride Inc., a job-development organization founded by Marion Barry, later mayor of the District of Columbia.
- 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].
