Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Some of the Advantages of Beautiful Columbia Heights

Sam over at Red Sky at Night sent us a really cool find: a booklet published by the Columbia Heights Citizens' Association in 1904. The title alone—A Statement of Some of the Advantages of Beautiful Columbia Heights, a Neighborhood of Homes—is enough to make me want to flashback 100 years (but I am not a character on Lost).

The publication includes a rundown of the advantages of living in Columbia Heights, some of which haven’t changed for over a century: "street railway facilities" and "attractive residences will all the modern improvements." It also has photos of houses and row homes in the neighborhood. Some of the East-West streets have different names, for instance Roanoke is now Euclid. Does anyone know of other examples?

UPDATE: Flickr comes through with a map of Mt. Pleasant, Columbia Heights, and Pleasant Plains from 1887

Mount Pleasant, 1887

The full booklet is available to view online here: http://www.archive.org/details/statementofsomeo00colum

And, of course, a post about Columbia Heights history is nothing without one of my favorite photos from 1926 of 14th and Irving.

2 comments:

Jezebel said...

I love the section called A Wise Man's Summary, which lists five reasons to buy a house in Columbia Heights: "Second, it is free from malaria." Hopefully that is still true!

ArtBart said...

I hope so, too! I have gotten some nasty mosquito bites on summer evenings in the neighborhood.