The area we now call Cleveland Park in Washington D.C. was once part of a massive 800 acre estate owned by Colonel Ninian Beall. After Beall’s death in 1717, his property was divided among his 12 children and a tract of it was bought by a man whose name is lost to history. This man built a small stone cottage on the property around 1740 and called his estate Pretty Prospects. In 1793, the property was acquired by General Uriah Forrest, who had been the mayor of Georgetown and was then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a large wood-framed house was built onto the front of the stone cottage. Forrest renamed the property Rosedale. When his son inherited this land, he built an even bigger home nearby and called it Forrest Hill. In 1886, Forrest Hill was purchased as a country retreat by then-president Grover Cleveland who converted the house into a Victorian mansion and renamed it Oak View. It is from President Cleveland that the current neighborhood takes its name.
After Cleveland lost his reelection bid in 1889, the land was purchased and converted into housing subdivisions. The neighborhood’s early success was made possible by the Rock Creek Railway line which ran up Connecticut Avenue from downtown all the way to Chevy Chase Lake in Montgomery County, Maryland. In order to make this streetcar line happen, a massive bridge had to be built over the Klingle Valley and Rock Creek connecting the area to the rest of the city. The neighborhood developed around the natural contours of the land, with a little help from the firm of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, and you’ll find more winding roads here than in most parts of the city. Many of the houses were built to be unique to those around them and many were designed by renowned architects of the day. The result was that Cleveland Park was once heralded as the “prettiest suburb of Washington”, and many of those beautiful houses survive in the neighborhood today.
This photo essay focuses on the commercial district which grew up on the eastern edge of Cleveland Park along Connecticut Avenue. The colonial revival Connecticut Avenue Firehouse was the first commercial building along that strip, built in 1916. In 1923, the Monterey Pharmacy moved into the neighborhood and others soon followed. In 1930, construction began on the Park & Shop which embraced the emerging automobile craze. Art Deco was in vogue at the time and many of this strip’s buildings were built in that style, culminating in what many of us think as the centerpiece of the neighborhood: the circa-1936 Uptown Theater. Large apartment complexes started to go up during this period as well, including the massive medieval revival Broadmoor, and Sedgewick Gardens, the “Queen of Connecticut Avenue”.
I grew up not too far up “The Avenue” from Cleveland Park and remember many of these buildings fondly from my childhood. The Uptown Theater was the biggest and best theater in the city when I was a kid, and it breaks my heart to see it closed now (beyond the coronavirus closures, it has sadly shut its doors for good). Next door to the fire station, the Yenching Palace survived for many years and while it has been replaced by a Walgreens, I am glad you can still see the ghost of the old restaurant in the building design. While Club Soda is long gone as well, I love that they have kept the old sign on the building. Also long gone is the old Four Provinces, a massive Irish pub which was a neighborhood institution for many years. Across the street, Nanny O’Briens is still hanging on, and many “new classics” have sprouted up as well. You can also see the brand spanking new Cleveland Park Public Library. It’s had a fascinating past, and Cleveland Park is still the great neighborhood it was intended to be.
D.C. Quarantine Quarters is a series of photo essays from around my hometown, Washington D.C, in the time of our quarantine here due to Covid 19 in 2020. Washington D.C. is itself is divided into four quadrants or quarters, and people from the city strongly identify with which quadrant they grew up in. As a visual storyteller, my normal photo essays are long, but this series aims to be more succinct and include only 25 photos in each post, hence “quarters”. I hope you enjoy these photos of my hometown neighborhoods. Click on any photo to enlarge it. All photos are available for purchase and licensing, please contact me at the link below for more information. For more on the history of Cleveland Park, check out the brochure HERE.