Charlet’s guidebook
Neighborhoods
Walk through the Blagden Alley/Naylor Court Historic District in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood these days, and you’ll step into a preservation fantasy land.
Inside the system of interior alleyways is a booming commercial core of craft cocktails and coffee, street art, and one of the city’s most popular new restaurants—not to mention a crowd of projects clamoring to get in next—and almost all of it is hosted inside beautiful historic buildings.
But the story behind these two city blocks is far from a fairy tale.
Beginning in the 1870s, the stylish rowhouses that surround the interior corridors of Blagden Alley and its quieter neighbor one block north, Naylor Court, helped create a secret world of poverty and struggle. It was a world that barely changed until after the area’s National Register nomination in the 1990s, when more than a century of hard living and heartbreak started to turn on its head.But in the 1860s, with the advent of the Civil War and those fleeing the South in its aftermath, Washington’s population jumped by roughly 75 percent. As the demand for housing grew, properties in squares 368 and 367 were subdivided into street-facing and alley-facing lots. The result was a neighborhood with an increasingly split personality.n the decades following the Civil War, Washington enjoyed another boom. Public sewers and a streetcar line drew more people to squares 368 and 367, and many of the attractive residences that still make up most of the neighborhood’s perimeter were built for local doctors, lawyers, and tradesmen.
But as the number of middle-class houses on the perimeter of the blocks increased, the number of brick dwellings, lean-tos, and shanties solely fronting the alley exploded. There were often no floors to protect tenants against the cold winters, and residents were known to spend summertime nights stretched out in the alley on ironing boards and rocking chairs to combat the oppressive Mid-Atlantic heat.
Blagden Alley Northwest
Blagden Alley NorthwestWalk through the Blagden Alley/Naylor Court Historic District in Washington, D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood these days, and you’ll step into a preservation fantasy land.
Inside the system of interior alleyways is a booming commercial core of craft cocktails and coffee, street art, and one of the city’s most popular new restaurants—not to mention a crowd of projects clamoring to get in next—and almost all of it is hosted inside beautiful historic buildings.
But the story behind these two city blocks is far from a fairy tale.
Beginning in the 1870s, the stylish rowhouses that surround the interior corridors of Blagden Alley and its quieter neighbor one block north, Naylor Court, helped create a secret world of poverty and struggle. It was a world that barely changed until after the area’s National Register nomination in the 1990s, when more than a century of hard living and heartbreak started to turn on its head.But in the 1860s, with the advent of the Civil War and those fleeing the South in its aftermath, Washington’s population jumped by roughly 75 percent. As the demand for housing grew, properties in squares 368 and 367 were subdivided into street-facing and alley-facing lots. The result was a neighborhood with an increasingly split personality.n the decades following the Civil War, Washington enjoyed another boom. Public sewers and a streetcar line drew more people to squares 368 and 367, and many of the attractive residences that still make up most of the neighborhood’s perimeter were built for local doctors, lawyers, and tradesmen.
But as the number of middle-class houses on the perimeter of the blocks increased, the number of brick dwellings, lean-tos, and shanties solely fronting the alley exploded. There were often no floors to protect tenants against the cold winters, and residents were known to spend summertime nights stretched out in the alley on ironing boards and rocking chairs to combat the oppressive Mid-Atlantic heat.