North Capitol Crossroads Site Context

By 1851, momentum had grown to fund a Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, who carried out "Indian Removal" policies for multiple US presidents, fought in the Mexican-American War where he was paid a fee in lieu of ransacking Mexico City. So, Scott promptly paid off his troops and gave the rest to Congress - petitioning it to open a home for retired and disabled U.S. Army Veterans. The funds purchased “Corn Rigs,” the 250-acre country estate of George W. Riggs.

In 1852, William Wilson Corcoran purchased Harewood country estate and farm. The 191-acre property was longer east to west than north to south, stretching from the Harewood and Rock Creek Church Roads almost as far as the Seventh Street Road. When Harewood Lodge was constructed around 1857, it served as the property's gatehouse. It is one of the first examples of the Second Empire style constructed in the United States, as well as an early work of the nationally prominent architect, James Renwick Jr.

During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Washington, D.C. served as a base of operations for the Union Army throughout the war, rapidly turning it from a small city into a major capital with full civic infrastructure and strong defenses.

The Harewood estate’s outbuildings were largely complete before the Civil War. Therefore, Corcoran was able to secure a letter of “safeguard” for Harewood from Lieutenant General Scott, commander of the U.S. Army. However, Scott retired in November 1861, and Harewood was confiscated in 1862 to serve as a hospital.

Featuring excerpts from  Here's the peculiar story of DC’s Irving Street Expressway 

Unfortunately, revitalization efforts in North Capitol during the 1920s and 1950s prioritized automotive transportation at the expense of walkability and the environment. This resulted in blocks without street trees, a four-lane expressway, and a large highway cloverleaf.

Both the Irving Street expressway and the cloverleaf intersection at the Washington Hospital Center date to the 1950s and were intended to solve two problems: the first was to establish a better crosstown route, and the second was to connect that route to the freeway system in Maryland. Neither project achieved those goals.

Two important routes were identified in 1927 that later played a role in creating the North Capitol and Irving cloverleaf. The relevant radial route consisted of North Capitol Street, Michigan Avenue, Harewood Road, and Blair Road to the District boundary. The relevant crosstown route was Garfield Street, by way of Cleveland Avenue, Calvert Street, and Columbia Road to Sixteenth Street. In 1931, NCPPC used the 1927 thoroughfare plan to prioritize street improvements and paving. 

While the basic corridors were identified in 1927 and expanded in 1931, it wasn’t until the beginning of the 1950s that genuine efforts were made to realize these corridors. The plan consisted of constructing two new highways through the Soldiers’ Home. The north-south freeway was proposed as a six-lane highway that would end the detour around the Soldiers’ Home and connect North Capitol Street directly with Maryland.

After two years of negotiations, the southern 42 acres of the Soldiers’ Home was transferred to the District in late 1954, paving the way for the highway project to move forward. As construction was geared to begin in late 1956, the original plan to use Irving and Columbia Road was altered to include Lamont and Kenyon streets as well. 

The narrowness of the streets between the Soldiers’ Home and Sixteenth Street, identified in the 1927 plan, was not entirely solved with the one-way street scheme. To receive federal aid for the crosstown street project, the streets included in the network had to be a least 30 feet wide. This meant that several of the streets had to be widened, some as little as six inches on each side. This requirement doomed more than 100 street trees, which were cut down to make way for the widened streets and new curbs. The final stage of the crosstown route project was completed on August 19, 1959, when the final one-way streets were implemented. 

Serving the nation’s children for more than 150 years, Children’s National Hospital has been an innovator in pediatric healthcare around the nation and around the world. It was one of the nation's first children’s hospitals, opening in 1870. Formerly referred to as D.C. Children’s Hospital, Children’s National is the only exclusive provider of pediatric care in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

In 1959, a three-story facility for research was built and is now the ninth most funded National Institutes of Health pediatric department and sixth among children’s hospitals. In 1989, Children’s National leadership conceived and developed a strategic plan that resulted in the formation of Children’s National Research Institute (CNRI). The opening of the Sheikh Zayed Institute in 2009 brings the total amount of Children's National Research Institute lab space to 123,000 square feet.

In 2016, Children’s National signed an agreement with the U.S. Army to accept the transfer of nearly 12 acres of land from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center property in Northwest Washington, D.C.  – an acquisition that nearly doubles the health system’s footprint in the city.

The  Children’s National Research & Innovation Campus  opened on a nearly 12-acre portion of the former, historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Northwest Washington, D.C., combining its strengths with those of public and private partners including Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC and Virginia Tech, along with industry, universities, federal agencies, start-up companies and academic medical centers. This makes the Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metro area one of the nation’s fastest-growing life science and biotechnology hubs.

Just north of Capitol Hill, Catholic University has the largest campus in Washington, D.C. with 176 acres. At more than 135 years, Catholic University remains the one and only national university of the Catholic Church in the United States. Established in 1887 as a papally chartered graduate and research center, the Catholic University of America officially opened as an institution of higher education on Nov. 13, 1889.

The land’s history dates to the 17th century, when this area was part of the Maryland colony and was populated largely by Native Americans. By the 18th century, the area was settled by Europeans and Africans; the area largely became tobacco farmland and as such was populated by slaveholders and enslaved persons. The land transitioned from Native to Colonial land, changed ownership a number of times, hosted some of D.C.’s early stakeholders, and even played a small role in the Civil War. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that a structure was built that would later serve as CUA's first building.

Additionally, and fortuitously for the U.S. Catholic bishops in favor of creating a national Catholic university, the Pope at this time, Pope Leo XIII, was very receptive to a proposal submitted to him by the American bishops in 1884 that a Catholic university be founded in the U.S. The property was purchased by the bishops for the purpose of building the University in 1886. The tract of land cost $29,500, and was adjacent to the grounds of the Soldiers' Home, which had been built for Civil War veterans. CUA was only the second university in America dedicated to graduate education and the production of new research. In 1887, the University was incorporated in the District of Columbia on 66 acres of land. The University continues to be the flagship Catholic educational institution in the United States and to maintain its unique status as the bishops' university.

The first building to be erected as part of the CUA campus was Caldwell Hall, known as called Divinity Hall at the time. The Romanesque architecture stood as one of the only examples of its kind in the D.C. at the time. 

In 1852, following a push to establish a soldiers' home in D.C., Congress purchased a rustic country cottage owned by the prominent Riggs family as the site for the new home for retired and disabled U.S. Army Veterans. This cottage sat high atop a breezy hill overlooking several hundred acres of farmland in rural Washington. The Old Soldiers’ Home began with just one “inmate.” Before long, more soldiers moved in, and they outgrew that cottage. So a larger “Scott” dormitory was built. After the Soldiers' Home grew, President Lincoln asked to use the cottage for a summer home to escape the humidity and political pressures of D.C. All told, Lincoln spent one quarter of his presidency in the cottage.

The Soldiers’ Home had a 300-acre dairy farm, so inmates could cultivate food and remain self-sufficient. In the 20th century, the Home evolved with the times as the focus shifted away from work toward leisure, and the cow pastures became a nine-hole golf course and resident gardens.

The asylum continued to develop with the construction of surrounding buildings in the years that followed. In addition to the buildings, the historic grounds -- and the statuary and war relics that decorate them -- comprise part of the historic district. Today, that original cottage is splendidly restored as President Lincoln’s Cottage, a National Landmark. The 272-acre Armed Forces Retirement Home Historic District represents an early American military asylum.

Founded in 1897 as Trinity College in Washington, D.C. by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Trinity was the nation’s first Catholic liberal arts college for women. Trinity’s first building, Main Hall, was built in stages, with the cornerstone set in 1899, the south wing open to students in 1900 and the building completed with the addition of the north wing in 1909 – when electricity was installed. On October 25, 1900, Sisters of Notre Dame took up residence in the unfinished South Hall of Main Hall at Trinity, and opened its doors to its first students. Trinity became Trinity Washington University in 2004. In the 1980s, Trinity launched the innovative Weekend College program, aimed at working women to earn their college degrees, with classes on Friday evenings and Saturdays--a racially diverse population the school had previously not served. The first such program in Washington, it became very popular; within three years, it had more students than the undergraduate program.

Trinity enrolls more D.C. residents and more graduates of D.C. Public Schools than any other private university in the city.  Trinity is one of only three private institutions of higher education to have U.S. Department of Education classification as both a Predominantly Black and Hispanic Serving Institution. 

 In 1948, preparation for an archdiocesan boys’ high school inside the city of Washington was underway. Through Bishop McNamara’s leadership, the Archdiocese of Washington acquired land from the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement in 1945 on which to build a school. The 11-acre parcel was located just north of The Catholic University of America off Harewood Road. Fred Murphy, the head of the School of Architecture at Catholic University, and his former student, Bernard Locraft, were chosen as the architects for the new building.

Archbishop Carroll High School’s original building in two wings had 22 classrooms, three science labs, a general science room, a suite for commerce classes (bookkeeping and short-hand), a 400-seat cafeteria, a 1,000-seat auditorium, a smaller lecture room, gymnasium, offices, library, and a student chapel. In the third wing there were quarters for the Augustinian brothers and priests who staffed the school, and that wing had a dining room, library and chapel.

Archbishop Carroll High School opened as an integrated school three years before the Supreme Court’s seminal 1954 Brown vs Board of Education case that barred racial segregation in public schools. In 1989, Archbishop Carroll merged with several other Catholic high schools in the city to become a co-educational institution. 

The United States has the most comprehensive system of assistance for Veterans of any nation in the world, with roots that can be traced back to 1636. After six years of planning and construction, the Washington D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center opened its doors at 50 Irving Street, NW during 1965. Touted as the VA’s first state-of-the-art hospital that would go on to become the designated forerunner for contemplated VA hospitals across the United States, the medical center became one of the most automated hospitals in the country and possibly the world. The hospital began a historical journey that would continue to keep it at the forefront of innovation and medical firsts in the VA. In 1972, a two-floor research building was completed. A ground-breaking ceremony was held in September 1982 to begin construction on a 120-bed nursing facility at the Washington D.C. VA Medical Center. In 2014, the medical center opened its Women’s Health Pavilion, which specializes in providing comprehensive health care with gender-specific services.

The VA Washington D.C. Healthcare System serves the health care needs of more than 125,000 Veterans throughout the Washington, D.C. area, including parts of Maryland and Virginia. 

In 1949, Bishop Constantine Bohachevsky appointed the first priest to organize Holy Family Parish in Washington D.C. in a desire to meet the spiritual needs of the Ukrainians moving into the Washington Metropolitan area. The parish grew over the next 30 years and relocated its premises four times until it finally built a monumental church on three acres of land overlooking the Roman Catholic (now Basilica) National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1975. The dome of the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine is visible from the observation points of the Washington Monument.

The Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family in Washington D.C. has become the visible presence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in our nation’s capital. 

Saint John Paul II Seminary is a house of priestly formation founded by the Archdiocese of Washington. Its aim is to prepare college-age men and young adults for entrance into major seminary and eventual ordination to the Catholic priesthood. On May 1, 2011, Cardinal Wuerl founded the first seminary in the world with Saint John Paul II as its patron. The building was originally built in 1951 by the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, and was renovated to accommodate the new users. Saint John Paul II Seminary officially opened in the fall of 2013.

The Saint John Paul II National Shrine is a major pastoral initiative of the Knights of Columbus, a lay Catholic fraternal organization with nearly two million members around the world. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops designated the Shrine a national shrine on March 14, 2014. After five years of construction and the canonization of its patron, the Saint John Paul II National Shrine attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims annually.

The building which now is the Saint John Paul II National Shrine historically housed the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. On August 2, 2011, the Knights of Columbus purchased the Cultural Center with the intention of transforming it into a religious shrine dedicated to the memory of then-Blessed John Paul II. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Archbishop of Washington, immediately declared the facility a diocesan shrine. 

The 130,000-square-foot building is built on 12 acres adjacent to The Catholic University of America and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the Brookland neighborhood of Northeast Washington.

Four Atonement Sisters journeyed to Washington, D.C. on February 8, 1923 to take over the administration of the Carmelite Retreat House, owned and operated by the Discalced Carmelite Fathers. The Sisters staffed the Retreat House until March 1, 1926. Originally the property was part of the Vineyard property that Father Paul purchased in 1923 for the establishment of the Friars’ seminary.  He gave five acres to Mother Lurana on December 15, 1925. The land remained undeveloped until 1928 when Mother Lurana received permission from Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore to build the Retreat House. The Washington Retreat House officially opened on October 28, 1930.