Bloomingdale Historic Landmarks

Old Engine House #12

1626 North Capitol Street, NW

Old Engine Company 12 Old Engine Company 12, located at North Capitol Street and Randolph Place, and now home to a restaurant, is a three-story, red brick firehouse designed by Municipal Architect Snowden Ashford. Built in 1896-97 in a Dutch Revival style, the former firehouse affords a commanding presence on North Capitol Street. It is a large, three-part structure with its principal wing fronting North Capitol Street, and a two-story hyphen connecting this front block to a rear wing. The front wing of the building is the most highly articulated part, covered by a steeply pitched roof with projecting Dutch gables on the east, front façade, and on its north and south end walls. At the first floor level, two large apparatus doors are located to either side of a central entry, while a decorative shield above the second-story windows containing the number “12,” clearly mark the building as a municipal firehouse building.

Excerpt from the Bloomingdale Historic District nomination

Old Engine 12 as photographed in 2004

• Nathaniel Parker Gage School

2035 Second Street, NW

Nathaniel Parker Gage School, which opened in 1904 at 2035 Second Street to serve white students.187 Named for a beloved and influential educator in the District’s public schools, the two-story, Georgian Revival-style building was designed by municipal architect Lemuel W. Norris. It was expanded in 1908, though was overcrowded by 1912 and remained so into the 1920s.188 In 1929, the Bloomingdale Civic Association, the African-American counterpart to the whites-only citizens association, requested the school be transferred to the DC Public Schools’ colored division due to the neighborhood’s changing racial demographics, but it remained an exclusively white school until 1954.189 Bloomingdale’s African-American children continued to attend Mott Elementary School at Fourth and W streets. (Gage closed in 1976, when the GageEckington School (since razed) was built nearby, and Mott closed in 1977.) The Gage School was designated a historic landmark in 2004, both for its architectural significance and for its commemoration of an important early education leader and reformer. The school is also important for being an institutional building in the midst of an otherwise almost entirely residential neighborhood, and is said to exemplify “the creative neighborhood-friendly approach that architects in private practice brought to the . . . Office of the Building Inspector.” It was converted to condominiums in 2004-2008, at which time a new four-story building was constructed north of the historic schoolhouse in the former playground area, as part of the condominium complex.190

Excerpt from the Bloomingdale Historic District nomination

Gage School as photographed in 2004

Samuel Gompers house

2122 First Street, NW

This house, built in 1902, served as the home of Samuel Gompers until 1917. Gompers was the pioneering labor leader and long-time president of the American Federation of Labor during a period of great achievement. He was born in a London tenement in 1850 and apprenticed in his father’s cigar-making trade. He then emigrated to America in 1863, and at age 14. While working in New York’s East Side, he joined the Cigarmakers’ Union. As a union organizer, he was instrumental in making the Cigarmakers a national labor model, with a hierarchical leadership exercising centralized control of benefit funds drawn from increased membership dues. In 1877, Gompers was a founder of the union federation which became the AFL in 1886. As union president until 1924, Gompers struggled for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, and succeeded in making the AFL the strongest spokesman for organized labor in America. His residence, a modest 3-story bay-fronted brick rowhouse typical of the Edwardian era, was also an informal meeting place for labor leaders.

National Historic Landmark designation: May 30, 1974
National Register listing: September 23, 1974
DC Inventory: March 3, 1979

“Samuel Gompers House,” DC Historic Sites, accessed November 10, 2017, http://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/254.