Rock Creek Park's Bridge at Piney Branch

A hundred years ago Rock Creek Park was just a park, a bucolic respite from city life, not a commuter route through the center of the city. The roads were narrow, winding, and inconvenient, occasionally even obliging travelers to ford the creek itself. The bridges, as we have seen, were designed to blend in to the rustic scenery, not expedite travel. One such bridge was along Beach Drive where the creek meets up with Piney Branch.

The Elegant Stoneleigh Court Apartments

By the opening years of the twentieth century, Washington was expanding in all directions. Well-to-do residential areas were spreading northwest from downtown, along Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. The stretch of Connecticut from Farragut Square to Dupont Circle was a particularly prime location for an elegant new apartment house, and Secretary of State John Milton Hay (1838-1905), who earlier in his life had been Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary, knew his $600,000 investment there would pay off. He reportedly wanted to uplift what he saw as the frontier-like crudity of Washington by showing the city what real Continental elegance could look like. However he only lived three years past the 1902 completion of his Stoneleigh Court Apartments, one of some dozen such luxury buildings that sprang up in the Farragut Square neighborhood.

Stoneleigh Court was designed by prominent Washington architect James G. Hill, who was also responsible for the original Bureau of Engraving and Printing building and the Washington Loan & Trust Company building, among many others. For this one he chose the leading architectural vocabulary at the turn of the last century: pressed red brick was out; the limestone look was in--stone-like tan brick, that is, augmented by actual limestone where it was most noticeable. The building's style had clear Beaux Arts leanings, including some wonderful sculptured terracotta panels high up on the eighth-floor facade, but it also harked back to the waning Romanesque Revival through its inclusion of a row of stolid semi-circular arched windows on the seventh floor.

Grogan's Furniture Store on 7th Street NW

After decades of neglect and decline, the 800 and 900 blocks of 7th Street NW, just above H Street, are now squarely in the heart of a lively entertainment district, with crowds often swarming the streets when an event is taking place at the nearby Verizon Center.  While the diversity may be new, the commercial activity is not. This once used to be "Furniture Row," and Peter Grogan's establishment at 819 7th Street was one of the more successful of the many furniture stores that concentrated in this area.

Grogan's store, as seen in an advertisement in The Washington Bee, December 28, 1907

Peter Grogan was an Irish immigrant who first established his furniture and carpet business in Baltimore in 1867. He opened a second store in Washington in 1883 and then moved all his business to Washington in 1888. The 819 7th Street store was built in 1891, designed as a furniture store for Mr. Grogan, although it was owned by another local merchant, Amnon Behrend.

A view of the building as it appears today.

Rock Creek Park's Old Rustic Log Bridge

Perhaps my favorite vintage postcard of Rock Creek Park is this one of the "Old Rustic Bridge." Such a lush scene, with dappled sunlight on the creek and that wonderful bridge! Where was it? The card states only that "Rock Creek Park is famed for the beauty of its Natural Scenery. The Old Log Bridge is one of the favorite spots for many people." The second postcard has no caption at all.

It turns out the bridge was located along the southern edge of the National Zoological Park. If you look at the Zoo's current map, you'll see a park service road ("Zoo Staff Only") that leads to a bridge over the creek heading to the south. That is the former location of the old rustic log bridge, and rather than a service road, it used to carry vehicular traffic through the lower area of the Zoo, providing a connection between the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway to the south and Beach Drive to the north, before the tunnel was constructed in the 1960s that now carries Beach Drive along the other (east) side of the creek. While the road is now closed to vehicular traffic, you can get to it easily on foot.