The Kingman Park Historic District, located at the northeastern end of today’s Capitol Hill, was principally developed during the late 1920s through 1940s as a residential neighborhood for African Americans. The district was part of a larger area that until that time, was underdeveloped due to a lack of basic infrastructure and to unhealthy and insanitary conditions caused by the tidal flats along the Anacostia River. As the city expanded its infrastructure services easterly beyond 13th Street NE, and as the reclamation of the Anacostia River undertaken by the Corps of Engineers reached the section of the river bordering today’s Kingman Park in the late 1920s, the area became ripe for speculative real estate development.
Real estate developers such as Charles Sager who was the first and most prolific builder and developer of Kingman Park housing, seized the opportunity to build rows of residences for middle-class homebuyers on previously undeveloped or underdeveloped land. Sager named the area Kingman Park after Kingman Lake which was being carved out of the Anacostia River for recreational purposes, and which was itself named for the chief engineer at the US Army Corps of Engineers in charge of the Anacostia reclamation efforts. Sager did not necessarily conceive of building houses for African Americans at the outset, but he very quickly realized a ready market and began targeting his new houses to African Americans, a practice emulated by other developers.
The new rows of brick dwellings reflecting a variety of revival styles popular in the interwar period provided affordable and quality housing to Blacks during the height of segregation, when legally enforced practices in real estate limited the supply of housing for the city’s growing African American population. As a result, Kingman Park took off, attracting an exclusively African American population, and engendering the further growth of segregated facilities in the area, including city and federally funded residential, educational, and recreational institutions.
Some of these sites include residential areas like the cohesive collection of twenty blocks of two-story rowhouses and flats, built between 1928 and 1951 that line the streets between 21st Street and Oklahoma Avenue south of Benning Road or the several blocks of rowhouses located in the nineteenth-century residential subdivisions of Rosedale and Isherwood that became an integral part of the social, cultural and physical fabric of Kingman Park after its development beginning in 1928. The Langston Terrace Dwellings (1935-1938) consists of a federally-sponsored public housing complex of garden apartments for low-income African Americans, designed in the International style by Bauhaus-trained architect, Hilyard Robinson (1899-1986). This historic district also includes educational and recreational facilities, like the Young, Browne, Phelps and Spingarn Education Campus (1931-1952) consisting of four public schools, and the Langston Golf Course (1939-1955), open to African Americans, and laid out along the western banks of the Anacostia River and on Kingman Island.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of these institutions in Kingman Park would become the scene of Civil Rights demonstrations and activities that ultimately led to the end of legally sanctioned segregation practices in education, recreation and housing in the city.
DC Inventory: May 3, 2018
DC Inventory (Boundary Expansion): September 24, 2020
National Register: December 17, 2018
National Register (Boundary Expansion): April 22, 2021
]]>Built between 1951 and 1952, Spingarn High School was constructed for the education of African American students, meant to relieve the overcrowding of the other segregated high schools and had been planned for that purpose since the late 1930s. Desegregation lawsuits of the late 1940s and early 1950s finally prodded the District to construct the building. Its postwar construction represented an attempt to satisfy African American parents while keeping alive the “separate but equal” regime in the public schools. Spingarn was thus Washington's last “Black” high school, and the first built in 36 years. Its opening was a major event, drawing not only the family of its namesake but also such luminaries as W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and John Hope Franklin. Only two years later, the process of desegregation began.
The school’s name honored Joel Elias Spingarn, a renowned literary critic, professor of comparative literature at Columbia, and one of the early founders of the NAACP, who served as both the chairman of the board and president during his 26-year tenure with the organization. Spingarn High School provided a complete curriculum to prepare its students for life after high school. It included a housekeeping suite for home economics students, clothes-making classrooms, modern workshops such as carpentry and print shops, and laboratories.
Spingarn is also the last of the District’s era of Classical and Colonial Revival style schools. In its time, it was considered one of the most modern schools in the District. The school’s long-deferred construction, coupled with its siting on a campus of earlier African American schools, is probably responsible for this architectural anomaly.
The school is currently being rehabilitated and, once open, will serve as the DC Infrastructure Academy Training Center.
DC Inventory: November 29, 2012
National Register: May 12, 2014
Within Young, Browne, Phelps and Spingarn Educational Campus Historic District; and Kingman Park Historic District
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