Lost Washington: 1603 K Street, NW

History

Lost Washington: 1603 K Street, NW

by Kent Boese • November 20, 2009 3:00 pm

The red brick home that was once located at 1603 K Street, was likely built in the late 1880s. It was most notable for being the home of William Howard Taft from 1904-08, while he was Secretary of War.

In March, 1955, the AFL Bakers Union purchased the home, along with 1601 K Street (former home of Admiral Dewey), 1609 K Street, and 1006 16th Street with plans to build an eight-story building as their Washington location.

Images from the Library of Congress. Interior images below.

William Howard Taft Home 1603 K Street Interior 1

3 comments

Tags: DC, downtown DC, history

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Kent Boese posts items of historic interest primarily within the District. He's worked in libraries since 1994, both federal and law, and currently works on K Street. He lives in the Park View neighborhood, and is the force behind the blog Washington Kaleidoscope.

Comments

Absolutely amazing! How could we lose such a glorious building? Much of the current architecture on K Street is far less appealing.

by Matthias on Nov 20, 2009 3:29 pm • link • report

Matthias

The area from Pennsylvania Avenue around the White House all the way uptown to DuPont Circle , over to Foggy Bottom, and as far east almost to Swampoodle was a large partrician neighborhood- many of the wealthiest people in the USA wintered in DC because of our favorable winter climate- DC was known after the Civil War as the Winter time Newport.

Sadly- just about all of this heritage has been lost to the depredations of maximum density office construction for the city's post world war 2 new downtown area.

The upside of this is that the old downtown was actually spared some of this wanton destruction- but still sufferred many losses.

This is an excellent picture and Kent does a remarkable job in fishing out these little gems of the city's past glories.

My hat is off to Kent !!!!

by w on Nov 20, 2009 4:41 pm • link • report

Thanks w for that bit of history, which is new to me, and thanks Kent for digging up these excellent photos.

by Matthias on Nov 23, 2009 8:48 am • link • report