Adams Morgan Neighborhood

Washington Heights Historic District

The Washington Heights Historic District is located in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. It includes 347 contributing properties that date from 1891 to 1950. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006, Washington Heights was a mostly white, middle-class neighborhood of single family rowhouses until the early 1920s when immigrants from Europe and Asia moved in. They started small businesses along 18th Street and worked in neighborhood embassies and homes as staff. The black population began moving into their rooming houses converted from larger homes in the 1930s, especially along Vernon Street. When white families migrated to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s, Latinos began moving in, taking advantage of affordable housing and work in Latin American embassies. Their population grew with political unrest in Latin American countries during the 1960s and in the 1970s they were joined by people from the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Africa, creating today’s vibrant, multicultural neighborhood.

Kalorama Triangle

The Kalorama Triangle Historic District is located in DC’s Kalorama Heights neighborhood. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, included on the District of Columbia Inventory of Historic Sites since 1986, it is comprised of approximately 350 contributing properties.

The Kalorama Triangle is a neighborhood within Adams Morgan, bounded by Connecticut Avenue, Calvert Street, NW and Columbia Road.

Lanier Heights

Lanier Heights is one of the early subdivisions created within the District, sited outside of the original, officially-planned City of Washington and two miles north of the White House. Lanier Heights is located within the larger, newer neighborhood of Adams Morgan. Its boundaries are considered to be 16th Street (east), Adams Mill Road and the National Zoo (west), Columbia Road (south), and Harvard Street (north). Like Mount Pleasant and Crestwood, Lanier Heights was developed from a large parcel of land granted to John Bradford in 1714. He named this tract Plain Dealing. In 1763 the parcel was acquired by Robert Peter of Georgetown, who also built the first home in Meridian Hill. The land that would become Lanier Heights was only used periodically for common farming until shortly after the end of the Civil War, when Washington started to develop rapidly. In 1883 the “Lanier Heights Subdivision” was created, planned and financed by Elizabeth Lanier Dunn and her husband General William M. Dunn. A few years later, banker Archibald M. McLachlen and biologist George Brown Goode of the Smithsonian Institution helped shape the neighborhood’s identity as a community for Smithsonian employees and other professionals in Washington. Introduction of an electric streetcar line on Columbia Road in 1897 and construction of The Ontario apartment building (c. 1902-06; converted to a co-operative in 1953) heightened the neighborhood’s profile and increased its population. As time went on, the Lanier Heights subdivision became a well-to-do neighborhood comprised of families, professionals, intellectuals, and city workers, developing in to a diverse compilation of people and cultures.