Old Woodley Park Historic District

The neighborhood now known as Old Woodley Park is a distinct urban neighborhood, characterized by stately queues of dignified 20th-century rowhouses carefully articulated in the classical language of architecture, embellished by the rich greenery of the street landscape, and bordered by sweeping parklands. Its current boundaries were first delineated in the mid-1870s as a subdivision of rural property by the anonymous A.E. Kervand. Later, the noted land speculator Thomas Waggaman acquired Woodley Park and, after his untimely demise, the numerous rows of refined dwellings were built, tangibly forming the singular 20th-century neighborhood that retains its 19th-century name.

Woodley Park's history is thus bonded with the risks inherent in the process of suburban development within the District of Columbia. An unrealized early suburban plan and the bankruptcy of a major Washington financier are critical to the story of its development and tie this small area into the major events of Washington's past. The unique architectural character of Old Woodley Park is formed by strings of handsome, 20th-century rowhouses and townhouses set upon the rolling topography of verdurous woodland. These residences were designed and constructed by a variety of notable local builders and architects, men who shaped residential Washington in the early decade of the 20th century including Middaugh and Shannon, Harry Wardman, Clarke Waggaman, Albert H. Beers, A.H. Sonnemann, Hunter and Bell, William Allard, Joseph Bonn, and George T. Santmyers. The neighborhood's visual coherence--the buildings' similarity of massing, style, the color of materials, height, and relation to the street-- delineates Woodley Park, and it is the subdued interpretation of Classical and Colonial Revival styles as inherited from British and American sources--so important to the early years of the 20th century--that marks it.