Description
A century ago, the popularity of early Washington landmarks like Stoneleigh Court and the controversial Cairo (which, at a soaring twelve stories, shocked District officials into enacting the city’s height limit) made it clear that apartment living used to be here to stick. By the 1920s, Beaux Art and Art Deco palaces offered residents all of the luxuries of a firstclass hotel: barbershops, ballrooms, rooftop terraces, and indoor pools. Soon other innovations in apartment living—the garden complex, the cooperative, and the mixed-use building—put Washington at the leading edge of urban planning. Nowadays the resurgence of the historic heart of the nation’s capital has created an apartment boom rivaled only by that of the 1920s.
Through residents’ personal recollections, original floor plans, and more than 690 photographs, Best Addresses offers an intimate tour in the back of the facades of 162 remarkable buildings. Some have already been destroyed or disfigured beyond repair, making their preservation here especially valuable, at the same time as others continue to set the usual for elegant living within the nation’s capital.