Capitol Hill Restoration Society • Washington, DC

The Capitol Hill Historic District

Roughly bounded by the Capitol precinct on the west, F Street NE on the north, 13th and 14th Streets on the east, and the Southeast Freeway on the south, with an expansion area south of the Southeast Freeway bounded by 7th, M, 10th, and 11th Streets SE.

One of the oldest and most architecturally diverse communities in the city, Capitol Hill reflects the social diversity and economic growth of the early capital. It includes early residential development clustered near the Capitol and Navy Yard, and much late-19th and early-20th century housing for mostly middle-class workers.

There is great variety of housing types, with elaborate ornamental pressed-brick structures adjacent to simple, unadorned frame buildings and small apartment houses. Many row houses were built either in long uninterrupted blocks or in small groups whose imaginative facades reflect the aspirations of the builders and residents. There are many fine commercial buildings, particularly along 8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and notable religious and institutional structures. The predominant architectural styles include Federal, Italianate, Second Empire, Romanesque, Queen Anne, and Classical Revival. There are approximately 8,000 primary contributing buildings dating from circa 1791-1945.

Map of Capitol Hill Historic District (PDF)

Looking Back on Capitol Hill

A Series of Historical Vignettes by Nancy Metzger

This year’s house tour includes a number of adaptive-use projects: apartments carved from the Little Sisters of the Poor building on H Street, Pierce School classrooms turned into loft-style apartments, a theater that started out as an automobile showroom. The leader on the Hill in adaptive-use projects was Bob Herrema, who started his real estate career in the 1970s by turning down-at-the heels boarding houses into renovated apartment buildings. He made his mark (but perhaps not a huge fortune) on his adaptive-use condominium projects: Logan School (southeast corner of Third and G Streets, NE), Carbery School (412 Fifth Street, NE), and Grace Baptist Church (Ninth and South Carolina Avenue, SE).

The Logan School Condominiums are located in the “old” Logan School, a red-brick Romanesque building built in 1891 for African-American children (the school system was segregated until 1954) of this fast-growing northeast neighborhood. It was almost 100 years later (early 1980s) when the building came to the attention of Bob Herrema, who recounts the story in an oral history interview with Steve and Nicky Cymrot, shortly before Bob died in 2003.

“… (My) first experience with the building, you know the American Rescue Workers were long gone. Because it sat vacant … after they basically pulled out. It sat vacant; Dac [Laqui] and his wife bought it … and he’d hired Bob Schwartz, an architect up in Northwest, to do plans to convert it to condos. And all of the sudden Dac and his wife couldn’t get any banks to do business with them because (they had) ‘no track record.’ ‘What? You want to borrow all this money to spend on this piece of junk in this questionable location? You know, what have you done before that can assure us that you are going to pay us back?’ Well … he had no track record. So he and his wife wined and dined Joannie and me and we struck a deal. I said, ‘I think we can make some money on this.’ And so we started to tear it apart and put it back together again. And what was fascinating is … in working on that … the first school, was the amount of usable space up in the attics. I mean, you had a big old building, you know, with a basement that had 10 foot ceilings, some below grade, some above grade, and then … the amount of space up in the attics and with the way the rooflines were … we really took advantage of … cutting holes in the roof to create patios … using skylight windows … we wound up getting 24 units in that building. There were six per floor, even six in the attic. And we found … no resistance for people to walk up a couple of flights of stairs, even though they were long flights of stairs to get to the top floor. Because the units were bright and as I said they had patios with [them].

“… (Y)ou know, we underestimated … the value of those units. And we sold them so fast that — well, I wouldn’t say so fast, but we sold them in a lot quicker time than I thought and … when it was all said and done, we looked back and said, ‘Oh, we could have gotten ten thousand more here, ten thousand more there, whatever.’ And it didn’t bother me so much because I had … pretty much of a fixed deal with Dac and his wife. But, with all said and done, and they counted how much money they had, that they made, … they made money; they got all the money they put into it back and made some money….”

The complete transcript of this oral history interview can be found at www.capitolhillhistory.org. The Capitol Hill Community Foundation also established the Robert L. Herrema Awards, which are given to individuals, businesses and organizations for enhancements of Capitol Hill’s urban landscape, including residential and commercial development, park and public space improvements, public art and other environmental improvements.

Click here for "Looking Back on Capitol Hill" archives

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If You Own a Building in the Capitol Hill Historic District...

Except for the most routine maintenance and repair, you need to GET A BUILDING PERMIT for any work that is done on the exterior of your building within the Historic District.

When You are Thinking About Exterior Modifications:

PLEASE DO:

Consider repairing your original windows rather than replacing them.

Replace inappropriate elements that have been added to your building with historically accurate features. Leading candidates for such treatment will be shutters, permastone, aluminum siding, chain link fences in front yards, security iron, front stoops. Unless your house is in Colonial Revival style, cross-and-bible and six-panel front doors are inappropriate; so are most of the six-over-six sash windows on Capitol Hill.

Use historically appropriate paint colors on the exterior of your building.

Keep unpainted brick unpainted. If you are repainting already painted brick, repaint in the original brick color and use a matte finish paint. In most cases, brick red will be the appropriate color, but brown and tan brick was also used in the neighborhood.

Resist the temptation to “improve” original features of your property. “Improvements” to be avoided include bricking over front walks, adding brick to fences, adding shutters where there were none, and removing original fabric.

Use smooth faced (grade FBX) brick for any new construction on building facades, with mortar colored to match the brick.

Periodic inspections, and maintain your building appropriately and according to the best standards of work.

Keep all landscapes features intact, including ovolo or rounded curbs at the sidewalk, fences walks, and front yard grades.

Install semi-circular gutters and round downspouts on Victorian-era buildings.
Replicate building elements that are seriously deteriorated, using their original materials.

PLEASE DON’T:

Remove any original elements such as porches, porch roofs, or iron front stairs.
Sandblast.
Paint any previously unpainted elements, especially brick.
Change original window sash configuration or shrink door or window openings, if your doors or windows have to be replaced.
Install vinyl or aluminum replacement windows.
Paint window frames and sashes white, unless your house style is Georgian or Federal Revival.
Put siding over brick, permastone over anything, or brick over siding.
Use silicone or other non-breathing sealants on brick.
Install suburban-looking porch or deck rails.
Install six-panel, cross and bible doors, unless your building is Colonial revival style.
Be tempted by inappropriate leaded glass “Victorian” doors.
Apply roofing tar to your standing seam metal roof.
Put up new stockade fences. In most cases, iron “hairpin” fences in front and flat board fences in rear yards will be more appropriate.
Cut down or raise the grade when the front yard differs from the sidewalk, or cut through the front yard to a basement entrance.

DC Historic Preservation Office Handouts

The Historic Preservation Office has also developed a series of short handouts relating to repair and replacement of historic property elements. Clicking on a link below will open a PDF of the document in a new window.

In addition to these handouts, the HPO web site posts Historic Preservation Design Guidelines. These Guidelines provide useful guidance on many maintenance and repair problems encountered in historic buildings.

For more information go to the DC Historic Preservation Office web site.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Preservation Briefs include such subjects as repairing historic windows, historic masonry, and historic roofs. They are produced by the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, and are available at the D.C. Historic Preservation Office, 614 H Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20001, or for sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.

A subscription to The Old House Journal is a worthwhile investment (The Old House Journal, P.O. Box 50214, Boulder, California, 80321-0214). It is also available at the District of Columbia Public Library, Martin Luther King Branch.

Also see the Capitol Hill Restoration Society Guidelines, available on a variety of topics.

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Building Permits

If you want to install a fence, make any changes to the porch, garage, or exterior of your building, or even install sculpture in your front yard, you must get a building permit.

Getting the building permit is the owner’s responsibility, not the contractor’s; you are the one liable for a $500 fine for doing work without it. Without warning, a building inspector may walk up to your premises and issue you a civil infractions ticket.

All proposed work to building exteriors within the Historic District must be reviewed by the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board. The process requires submission of design drawings and photographs of the property and surrounding area. The review process can take four to eight weeks, since the Review Board meets only once a month.

Your building permit must be displayed in a window or another clearly visible place while the work is going on.

BEFORE YOU APPLY FOR A BUILDING PERMIT, PLEASE:

Familiarize yourself with the zoning regulations in effect for your property. Zoning regulations control lot coverage, setbacks, and allowed uses.
Study the neighborhood carefully, looking at original features and motifs, before considering any modifications or replacements to your building.
Understand the style and period of your house and plan modifications that are appropriate to that style and period.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The Homeowners Center in the Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs provides prompt and expert help to DC homeowners who need building permits for their home improvement projects. Start here.

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