Existing comment:
Roads to Diversity
Adams Morgan Heritage Trail
10 "Suburban" Development
By the 1890s the Rock Creek Railway Company's new electric streetcars made it easy to commute across town. The "country" settlements of this area became "suburban." One streetcar line followed 18th to Calvert Street, passed here, and then crossed a bridge spanning Rock Creek to the newly extended Connecticut Avenue. Next came new housing in Woodley Park and Cleveland Park, and their residents shopped at 18th and Columbia.
Thanks to streetcars, by 1900 dozens of houses and apartments occupied this hilltop. Franklin T. Sanner built his family home where the curving L'Aiglon building sits across 18th Street. (The elegant house is still there, hidden behind a façade built later for a nightclub and shops.) Sanner developed numerous apartments, including the luxurious Beacon (1910), ahead and to your left, and recruited small businesses.
When the Rock Creek bridge needed to be replaced in 1934, it was too important to close for long. So in a feat of engineering, 40 men and 5 horses detached it and rolled it along rails to new temporary foundations 80 feet downstream. Today's Duke Ellington Bridge, a short walk to your left along Calvert Street, soon replaced the old one. Just before the bridge is the old streetcar turnaround, where streetcars looped back to head downtown until service ended in 1962.
The mural behind you was painted by Chilean émigrés Carlos Salazar and Felipe Martinez. The tile translates: "A people without murals are a de-muralized people." It is one of many such markers of the Latino presence that have brightened the area since the 1960s. |