Documenting DC: Understanding a City, One Building at a Time

by Rebecca Summer · Published December 23, 2014 · Updated October 12, 2019

Last May, I packed up my car and drove two days from Madison to Washington, DC, where I spent the next three months as a historian with the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) of the National Park Service (NPS). HABS, a program that dates back to the New Deal, hires historians, architects, and photographers to document American architectural heritage. Every HABS-authored history, drawing, and large-format photograph makes its way to the Library of Congress, where it is accessible to the public. As the Sally Kress Tompkins Fellow, with support from HABS and the Society of Architectural Historians, my task was to contribute to this collection by researching and writing about a historic building in the United States.

The author standing on the roof of the Hecht Company Warehouse in Washington, DC. (Image by Gigi Price. July 31, 2014.)

A Washington, DC native, I took the opportunity to research a place in my hometown. I chose to document the Hecht Company Warehouse, a 1937 DC department store service and storage facility famous among architectural historians and nationally-recognized for its gleaming Art Deco design and innovative use of glass block. A developer currently owns the building and is converting it to high-end apartments and retail space. For HABS, the summer was the perfect time to document the warehouse’s historic industrial design before its conversion. As a geographer, I was also eager to tell the story of the building’s relationship over time with the surrounding northeast DC neighborhood of Ivy City and its residents, and its connection to the demographic, economic, cultural, political, and environmental changes that much of DC has experienced in the last decade.

No two days were the same. I split my time between the NPS office building, the DC Historical Society, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library, the DC Planning Office, and the Library of Congress. I walked around Ivy City and took hard hat tours of the Hecht Company Warehouse in the midst of construction. My research took me to Columbia University in New York City, where the records of the building’s architecture firm are housed. I drew on expertise from historians, architects, photographers, community organizers, and GIS specialists at NPS, the Smithsonian, George Washington University, the State Department, and Empower DC. I learned to dress for dusty, hot, and humid days sweating under my hard hat and to pack extra socks and sweaters for long days in the overly air-conditioned, albeit beautiful, Library of Congress main reading room. Many days I spent writing in the Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights neighborhoods, where I ran into childhood friends at coffee shops and corner stores.

The photographs below are a sample of those that I took during my site visits and those that I snapped on my own explorations of the city. Throughout the summer, the intersections between my personal re-acquaintance with DC and my historical research increasingly and inevitably informed my understanding of the Hecht Company Warehouse, Ivy City, and Washington, DC as a whole.

A view from New York Avenue of the northwest corner of the Hecht Company Warehouse, built in 1937. The alternating bands of glass block and glazed brick, the rounded “streamlined” corners, and the glass block crown have made the building a celebrated example of Art Deco architectural design. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A close-up of the Hecht Company Warehouse’s west-facing façade. The building is famous among architects and architectural historians and is listed as both a DC historic landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A close-up view of the glass block crown at the northwest corner of the Hecht Company Warehouse, taken from the building’s roof. During the warehouse’s mid-century operation, the crown was lit from within, making the building a visible icon for miles around. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is visible to the northwest. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

An interior view of the temporarily gutted Hecht Company Warehouse, mid-construction. An interior courtyard has been cut through the center of the building to provide private outdoor space for the building’s future tenants. Ivy City is visible through the walls. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

Light streams into a newly-cut interior courtyard at the Hecht Company Warehouse. The concrete columns will remain as part of the new space’s industrial aesthetic. The bright paint is left over from this area’s days as a storage space; each color indicated a different storage function. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A view of the east-facing letters, H-E-C-H-T C-O, taken from the interior of the Hecht Company Warehouse’s fifth floor. The glazed brick letters are embedded in the glass block walls. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A view of Ivy City to the southwest, taken from the fifth floor of the Hecht Company Warehouse. Residences, some of which date to the late nineteenth century, are visible in the foreground. The boarded brick building to the right is the Alexander Crummell School, a beloved neighborhood school built in 1911 for African American children. Despite the local and national recognition of its historical significance, the school has been empty and deteriorating since the 1970s due to lack of funds. The domes of the U.S. Capitol and Library of Congress are visible in the background. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A view at Union Market, sometimes called Florida Avenue Market, a sprawling wholesale international market in northeast DC, near Ivy City, that dates to the 1930s. Just two blocks away, a section of the market has been recently redeveloped into an indoor market, also called Union Market, with high-end artisanal goods. The contrast between the design, goods, and clientele of these adjacent spaces is striking. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

A view of the heart of NOMA (North of Massachusetts Avenue), a recently rebranded and redeveloped neighborhood in northeast DC, near Ivy City. The photograph is taken from the rooftop pool area of a new luxury apartment building, almost identical to the one seen in the left of this photograph and to several others on nearby blocks. The building to the right is the former Woodward & Lothrop department store warehouse. It was built within a year of the Hecht Company Warehouse by the same architects to serve the same functions. The building is now the icon and centerpiece of NOMA. (Rebecca Summer, 2014)

Rebecca Summer is a PhD student in the Geography Department interested in the relationship between historic buildings and urban cultural and environmental change. In her current research, she explores the different and often competing ways that historic preservationists, governing bodies, and community members define and articulate historic value in the urban landscape. Website. Contact.

Documenting DC: Understanding a City, One Building at a Time

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