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Tours

Wednesday, May 19th

PRE-CONFERENCE TOUR:
The Evolution of a Federal Government Vernacular:
A Preservation Tour of GSA Sites

Round trip from Key Bridge Marriott, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm, limited to 45 participants

This all-day bus tour will highlight the preservation challenges faced by the General Services Administration (GSA) in its role as the Federal Government's realtor. Participants will tour such sites as St. Elizabeths Hospital in the District of Columbia's historic Anacostia and Congress Heights neighborhoods, and the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office and the U.S. Tax Court in downtown, Washington, DC, among others. St. Elizabeths Hospital was the first federal facility for the care and treatment of the insane; it is being redeveloped as the consolidated headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security. The recently rediscovered Clara Barton Office is a unique preservation partnership opportunity in the heart of the 7th Street cultural corridor. The U.S. Tax Court is considered architect Victor Lundy's Modern masterpiece and is one of the first federal buildings to embody the "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture," which were produced at the behest of President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Beth Savage, veteran VAFer and Federal Preservation Officer for GSA will lead the tour, along with other staff members. Lunch at a venerable local establishment included.

Thursday, May 20th

ALL DAY BUS TOURS:
DC Regional Neighborhood Development

Choose One: Tour 1 | Tour 2 | Tour 3

Round trip from Key Bridge Marriott, 8:00/9:00 am - 10:00 pm
Each tour has two buses, one each departing at 8:00 or 9:00 am. All tours include breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with continental breakfast served at hotel prior to scheduled departure. Buses will start returning to the hotel at approximately 9:30 pm.

Bus Tour Introduction

Thursday’s bus tours will take conference attendees to DC locations beyond Washington's monumental core and out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. The region’s growth accelerated in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II—a trend that occurred simultaneously with growing advocacy for the decentralization of urban populations. These factors have resulted in a highly suburbanized metropolitan area. While the District of Columbia, much of which is suburban in character, houses approximately 600,000 residents, the national capital region includes nearly five and a half million inhabitants, sprawling over twenty-one nearby counties and independent cities. In addition to sites in the District, the three bus tours will make stops in the adjacent jurisdictions of Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland, and Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia.

The three tours are crafted to be balanced in content. Each will highlight a wide range of housing types and approaches to residential development, and will direct much-needed attention to vernacular buildings and landscapes that are metropolitan in form and character as well as part of architecture's recent past. From federally funded garden apartment and row house communities to suburban subdivisions of detached, single-family houses, these sites will challenge conference participants to consider the confluence of idealism and pragmatism in the creation of residential environments. The locations selected for each of the three tours were nearly all developed at a time when the Washington region was segregated, making racial separation an underlying motive in how and where many residential neighborhoods emerged. The stable employment base provided by the government, as well as its related private-sector firms and organizations, encouraged the establishment of an expansive middle class, which in turn resulted in a breadth of high-quality housing across the region.

Sometimes forward looking, at other times strikingly conventional, housing in Washington reflects aspects of modern life as it was understood and interpreted by contemporaries. We know that you will enjoy your immersion in Washington's fascinating residential vernacular!

Bus Tour 1 Itinerary

• Langston Terrace, Washington, DC - Langston Terrace, the first public housing project in the District of Columbia and the second in the United States, is a tour-de-force of avant-garde architecture in Washington. Construction began in 1935 with an African American workforce implementing the design of a pioneering modernist, African American architect Hilyard Robinson. Intended as an up-to-date alternative to Washington's largely decrepit alley dwellings, Langston Terrace was an instant success.
• Greenbelt, MD - A model of community and social planning, Greenbelt (1935-37) was one of three realized "green towns" developed by the U.S. Resettlement Administration during the New Deal. Part public housing, part "make work" construction program, and part model for metropolitan growth, Greenbelt is considered one of the most significant experiments in modern community planning of the twentieth century. Greenbelt's design fuses American traditions and European modernism, featuring apartments, row houses, commercial, and institutional buildings arranged in a "superblock" layout that creates communal green space with separate automobile and pedestrian circulation routes.
• Lunch at New Deal Café - A buffet lunch will be served at a local restaurant housed in the Roosevelt Center, Greenbelt's historic commercial core.
• Hammond Wood, Wheaton vicinity, MD - Architect Charles M. Goodman helped to alter the concept of suburban living in the Washington area by designing individual houses and subdivisions that differed markedly from those around them. Through the development of standardized components and types, Goodman created a modernist idiom tailored to freestanding houses that were moderately priced and well suited to middle-class needs. He also considered topographically varied, wooded tracts advantageous to the landscape he wished to nurture. His Hammond Wood, developed and constructed by Paul Hammond and Paul Burman in 1951, is an excellent, fully developed example of Goodman’s important work in residential development.
• Rock Creek Woods, North Kensington, MD - Using the same underlying house designs and siting principles as at Hammond Wood, Goodman's nearby and slightly later Rock Creek Woods (1958-61), designed for merchant builders Herschel and Marvin Blumberg (Bancroft Construction Company), is a clear illustration of how quickly expectations for new houses were rising in postwar America.
• New Mark Commons, Rockville, MD - One of Montgomery County, Maryland's pioneering planned unit developments (PUD), New Mark Commons helped to set a precedent for residential development that balanced concentrated land use for dwellings with generous allocations of open space. Distinct from concurrent "new town" ventures, this neighborhood and others like it were devised as entities within but linked to otherwise conventional suburbs. New Mark Commons (1967-74) was designed by the well-known Washington firm of Keyes, Lethbridge & Condon and developed by Edmund J. Bennett. Their efforts resulted in a comparatively adventurous residential design of roughly four hundred housing units that set the community apart as much as did its innovative site plan.
• Dinner at Glen Echo, MD – see below.

Bus Tour 2 Itinerary

• Hollin Hills, Fairfax County, VA - Architect Charles M. Goodman helped alter the concept of suburban living in the Washington area by designing individual houses and subdivisions that differed markedly from those around them. Through the development of standardized components and types, Goodman created a modernist idiom tailored to freestanding houses that were moderately priced and well suited to middle-class needs. He also considered topographically varied, wooded tracts advantageous to the landscape he wished to nurture. Developed by Robert Davenport, Hollin Hills (1946-71) is the largest and best-known of Goodman's work, and is an invaluable example of the way modernism could be packaged for middle-class consumption in postwar America.
• Fairlington, Arlington, VA - Fairlington, a Colonial Revival garden apartment and row house complex, was developed between 1941 and 1945 to house defense workers and their families. With 3,439 apartments and row houses, it was by far the largest project financed by Defense Homes Corporation (DHC) and the largest apartment complex in the nation at the time of construction. To qualify as a renter, applicants had to prove that they had relocated to the region after July 1, 1941 and were directly involved in the war effort. Many residents worked at new defense-related office complexes recently constructed nearby, such as the Pentagon and the Navy Annex.
• Box lunch at Fairlington Community Center – Farlington’s current community center occupies the complex’s historic elementary school.
• North Brentwood, MD - Established in 1891 for African Americans by Captain Wallace A. Bartlett, a veteran officer of the U.S. Colored Troops (Civil War), North Brentwood is Prince George's County's oldest incorporated black community. It contains a variety of housing types common to working-class suburban locations, dating from the end of the nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth centuries. These include I-houses, dwellings designed for deep and narrow lots, bungalows, foursquares, and "minimum" brick cottages typical of the 1930s and 1940s.
• Clara Barton National Historic Site, Glen Echo, MD – In exchange for the use of her name and that of the Red Cross in promotional material, Edwin and Edward Baltzley offered Clara Barton a half-acre lot adjacent to their Chautauqua grounds in Glen Echo, promising to construct on it a building of her choosing. Dr. Julian B. Hubbell designed a building that initially served as a warehouse for supplies received by the Red Cross. After Clara Barton moved to Glen Echo permanently in 1897, the structure became her dwelling and de facto headquarters for the Red Cross. Clara Barton lived here until her death in 1912. For a preview of this late nineteenth-century vernacular gem and National Historic Landmark, see the Clara Barton House HABS Survey on the Library of Congress' American Memory Web site.
• Dinner at Glen Echo, MD – see below.

Bus Tour 3 Itinerary

• Colonial Village, Arlington, VA - At the time of its construction, Architectural Forum called Colonial Village "the most talked-about project in the country." Constructed between 1935 and 1940, it was the first apartment complex developed by the Rental Housing Division of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). As such, Colonial Village became a national model for affordable, good-quality rental housing for middle-class families. Designed by Harvey Warwick and Frances Koening, the low-rise, low-density garden complex helped redefine the nature of apartment housing in the metropolitan DC area, as well as in the rest of pre-World War II America.
• Deanwood, Washington, DC - Located in Northeast Washington east of the Anacostia River, Deanwood is one of the city's oldest African American neighborhoods. While its settlement and development histories begin in the nineteenth century, Deanwood's primary character is that of an early twentieth-century residential neighborhood with a defined commercial and civic center surrounded by blocks of single-family houses. Deanwood's success encouraged the later twentieth-century development of nearby Suburban Gardens, a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) project. Here the bus will also make a loop around nearby Mayfair Mansions. Intended for black Washingtonians, this development is also representative of the Washington area's many garden apartment complexes developed under FHA direction and programming.
• Belair at Bowie, MD - Described from the outset as Levitt and Sons' "most de luxe venture," Belair at Bowie, Maryland (1960-68) grew out of more than a decade's experience in mass housing design, construction, and marketing by a firm whose name and identity was synonymous with postwar residential construction. Yet, while building on experience and precedent set with the three earlier Levittowns, the company remained adamant that Belair would "not become another Levittown," which by the late 1950s had come to be predominantly—and not always positively—associated with the middle-income working class. At Belair, Levitt and Sons completed a process started at Levittown, New Jersey: the creation of a community that was entirely directed to and unquestionably designed for middle-class consumers.
• Box lunch at Belair Mansion, MD - The inspiration for Belair at Bowie’s name, this imposing Georgian house was built by Maryland governor Samuel Ogle in 1745. In 1898, Belair was purchased by the Woodward family, who proceeded to restore the house and expand it to its present five-part state between 1910 and 1914 on a design by the firm of Delano & Aldrich.
• Greenbelt, MD - A model of community and social planning, Greenbelt (1935-37) was one of three realized "green towns" developed by the U.S. Resettlement Administration during the New Deal. Part public housing, part "make work" construction program, and part model for metropolitan growth, Greenbelt is considered one of the most significant experiments in modern community planning of the twentieth century. Greenbelt's design fuses American traditions and European modernism, featuring apartments, row houses, commercial, and institutional buildings arranged in a "superblock" layout that creates communal green space with separate automobile and pedestrian circulation routes.
• Dinner at Glen Echo, MD – see below.

Dinner at Glen Echo

At the end of the day, all buses will meet at Glen Echo Park on the Potomac palisades near Bethesda, Maryland. Originally a Chautauqua retreat, Glen Echo Amusement Park was developed at the end of a trolley line during the early 20th century. Now this National Park is host to a variety of arts, environmental and history programs.

A buffet dinner will be served in the 1923 Bumper Car Pavilion featuring pork BBQ, herb roasted chicken, pasta primavera, coleslaw, brownies, watermelon, chips, and beverages (beer, wine, and non-alcoholic). VAFers can tour the grounds, ride the 1921 Dentzel Carousel, and enjoy other historic buildings including the 1933 Spanish Ballroom, the Chautauqua Tower, and the Arcade complex—all restored by the National Park Service.

Friday, May 21st

SELF-GUIDED WALKING TOURS:
Washington, DC Neighborhoods

Transportation on your own via Metro rail or bus, 8:30 am - 7:30 pm
Morning tours 8:30 am - 12:30 pm; afternoon tours 1:00 - 5:00 pm. Registration includes evening reception, 5:30 - 7:30 pm, at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Meals on your own.

MORNING TOURS – 8:30 am - 12:30 pm

Choose One: Tour 1 | Tour 2

Morning Walking Tour 1 - Capitol Hill

The Capitol Hill neighborhood stretches eastward from the U.S. Capitol to the Anacostia River and southward to the Navy Yard. Most of the neighborhood’s earliest development occurred immediately around the Capitol and the Navy Yard, early in the nineteenth century. While notable remnants of this early fabric survive, the neighborhood's overall character is primarily an outgrowth of a construction boom lasting from the late 1870s through the economic downturn of 1893. This development was the work of small-scale real estate speculators, local developers and builders, and dedicated residents and businessmen who built rows or small groups of bay-front houses with eclectic articulation for the burgeoning middle class. By the turn of the twentieth century, Capitol Hill was a well-established residential district composed predominantly of Victorian-era brick rowhouses, supported by Eastern Market (1873), corner stores, schools, and religious institutions. An early focus of Washington preservation efforts, Capitol Hill remains a delightfully intact example of a vernacular nineteenth-century urban landscape.

Morning Walking Tour 2 - Dupont Circle / Logan Circle

The adjacent Dupont Circle and Logan Circle neighborhoods enjoyed the distinction of being Washington's premier residential districts at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Radiating outward from the traffic circles featured in DC’s monumental plan, both neighborhoods maintain impressive collections of large houses, in addition to all scales of housing and other building types, suggesting a more layered and dynamic history. Extending north from the White House and Lafayette Square, Sixteenth Street NW runs between the two neighborhoods. It is one of the city's grand thoroughfares, and the many apartment buildings, churches, and institutional buildings lining its blocks give the street a dignified character that is in many ways distinct from the adjacent neighborhoods.

AFTERNOON TOURS – 1:00 - 5:00 pm

Choose One: Tour 1 | Tour 2

Afternoon Walking Tour 1 - Southwest, DC

The urban renewal projects of the post-World War II period can be interpreted as both idealistic and forward thinking, and, at the same time, as desperate and highly misguided programs promoted by urban leaders whose cities were, in many ways, collapsing around them. Initially planned in 1952-55 and realized with many revisions to the original scheme between 1957 and 1970, Southwest Washington, DC, was one of the earliest urban renewal efforts in the United States. The individual components of the project reflected a high level of architecture and landscape design. Numerous prominent local and national architects of the Modernist movement were involved in the creation of the new Southwest, including I. M. Pei, Chloethiel Woodward Smith, Charles M. Goodman, and Keyes, Lethbridge & Condon. Much of the landscape design was devised by Dan Kiley and Hideo Sasaki. Many of the area’s high-rise apartment and condominium buildings and townhouse clusters may seem unremarkable today, but this attests to the widespread dissemination of similar urban architectural enclaves across the country, and with it the creation of a twentieth-century vernacular.

Afternoon Walking Tour 2 - U Street Corridor / LeDroit Park / Strivers' Section

The U Street commercial corridor, LeDroit Park, and the Strivers' Section are among DC’s most important neighborhoods for black history. The area became a draw for African Americans immediately following the Civil War, with the establishment of a Freedman's Hospital and Howard University north of Florida Avenue, NW, in the vicinity of Seventh Street. The simultaneous construction of streetcar lines along Seventh and Fourteenth Streets primed the corridors and adjacent blocks for rapid development. Starting in the late-nineteenth century, Washington became more intensely segregated, hastening the rise of U Street as the city's black main street. LeDroit Park at the corridor's eastern end and the Strivers' Section at its west became the most desirable residential neighborhoods for black Washingtonians. In the 1910s and 20s, U Street boomed as the center of African American social and economic life. Black-owned businesses, banks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, dance halls, and nightclubs lined the corridor and supported a brilliant cultural atmosphere. Desegregation and the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's assassination ravaged the neighborhood, and more than a generation passed before the area entered an ongoing process of rebirth paired with gentrification.

OUTDOOR EVENING RECEPTION:
National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden

Seventh St, NW and Constitution Ave, NW, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

The National Gallery of Art opens the gates of its lush sculpture garden to VAFers, for an exclusive opportunity to recap the day’s tours, socialize and enjoy the sunset on the Mall. The reception features heavy hors d'oeuvres, wine, beer, and non-alcoholic beverages.

Sunday, May 23rd

POST-CONFERENCE BICYCLE TOUR:
Arlington to Old Town, Alexandria

Round trip from Key Bridge Marriott, 9:30 am - 2:30 pm, limited to 20 participants

VAFers will have the opportunity to ride rented bicycles from Arlington to Alexandria, VA along the George Washington Parkway trail. This gentle paved hiker/biker path offers scenic views of the Potomac River and Washington, DC, before delivering riders right into the heart of historic Alexandria. After a tour and lunch on your own, the group will return to the hotel, again along the trail. The round trip is approximately 20 miles.

Schedule:
9:30 - 11:00 am – ride to Alexandria
11:00 am - 12:00 pm – tour Alexandria
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm – lunch on your own at suggested restaurants
1:00 - 2:30 pm – ride back to hotel