National Register of Historic Places Registration Form

NFS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 10244018
(M6)
United States Department of the Interior
National Park Service
National Register of Historic Places
Continuation Sheet
CLEVELAND PARK HISTORIC DISTRICT
WASHINGTON D.C.
Section number 7 Page 10
A similar type of development of apartment buildings and retail shops was
occurring on Wisconsin Avenue interspersed among the single family homes and
even 19th century estates. Wisconsin Avenue predates Connecticut Avenue and
was the main route into the city from this area until the Newlands syndicate
laid out Connecticut. Several fine apartment houses on Wisconsin are extant:
University Apartments, 3213 Wisconsin - 1925 - 3-story - George T. Santmyers
The Abbey, Wisconsin & Newark - 1926 - 4-story - George T. Santmyers
One apartment complex was built during this period which did not conform
to this general description. This was the Cleveland Park (3018 - 3028 Porter
St., 3/22/1924) which has the distinction of being the first garden apartment
designed and built in Washington D.C. These six separate, three-story red
brick buildings, with twelve coop apartments in each building, are an eclectic
combination of Tudor revival architectural forms having very steep gables plus
Georgian-inspired stone arches and door surrounds. The buildings are
surrounded by land on all sides with spacious lawns in front of and between
the buildings; garages and gardens are located behind the buildings. The
domestic scale and appearance blends in with the single-family homes prevalent
in Cleveland Park. These buildings and their grounds have been maintained
very much in their original condition.
The first store in Cleveland Park, the Monterey Pharmacy, opened in the
Monterey Apartments, 3532 Porter, in 1923. 3301-5 Connecticut Avenue, a five-
story apartment building which was completed in August of 1927, was
constructed specifically to combine the apartment house entered from Macomb
Street with shops on the first floor along Connecticut Avenue. These shops
began opening in 1927. Generally in Cleveland Park the two functions,
commercial and residential, were not combined. Later we find the rowhouses at
3500-3518 Connecticut Avenue converted their first floors to shops in 1933-34
and eventually their second floors as well. 3309 Connecticut Avenue is the
only store which was constructed to have a single apartment above, presumably
for the owner of the store. This store has Tudor half-timber detail in the
gable which is unique in the Cleveland Park commercial strip.
All of these apartment buildings remain very much intact as they were
originally conceived and they help to maintain the domestic scale along
Connecticut Avenue and on the side streets where they are found.
Following 1927 larger apartment complexes were built immediately to the
north of the commercial section of Cleveland Park which was just beginning to
develop.
Tilden Gardens, which was built on a 5-acre plot of land between Sedgwick
and Tilden Streets from 1927 to 1930, introduced the newly fashionable
suburban style type of apartment house to Cleveland Park. It also employed a
more literal Tudor Revival Style in its decorative details. "Tilden Gardens
cost $3 million and ranked as one of the five (Cathedral Mansions, Broadmoor,
Westchester, Kennedy Warren) most significant very large luxury apartment
houses, of 200 units or more, in Washington until the 1950's," *(James Goode,
first draft: Best Addresses, a Century of Washington* s Distinguished
Apartment Houses, 1880-1980; to be published in 1987 by the Smithsonian
Institutions Press.) Some of the innovative features were the cross-shaped