Wardman's World

All three neighborhoods grew up along the trolley car lines that were built as the federal government dramatically expanded in the decades after the Civil War. The government demolished residential buildings downtown to make way for government offices, pushing the population beyond L'Enfant's boundaries.

Columbia Heights, where Wardman built 650 rowhouses from 1902 to 1913 and where he popularized the idea of wide front porches and tiny front yards, is under the most redevelopment pressure now, said Hickman's fellow curator, Sally Berk, who did her master's thesis on Wardman and has been studying his work for about 20 years.

"There's an enormous amount of pressure in Columbia Heights," architectural historian Berk said. When one front-porch house was "drastically added onto" so that it no longer looked like the other houses in its row, "it was a warning sign, a warning flare that the value of the Wardman front-porch rowhouses . . . was not particularly recognized even by the people that live there," she said.

"If you take out one of the houses in a row in Columbia Heights . . . and you build something higher, because the zoning there allows a bit more height, it takes away the continuity . . . and it interrupts a context that really facilitates family life and community," Berk added.

The "same threat that exists in Columbia Heights exists in Bloomingdale, but to a lesser degree," she said.

Wardman built 180 rowhouses in Bloomingdale from 1903 to 1908, some of which were rowhouse flats, or two-family houses, an idea that quickly faded.

In Bloomingdale, he debuted his concept for front-porch rowhouses, set back from the street as opposed to sitting near the sidewalk as in the L'Enfant concept.

These "semi-suburban houses" were "really important," Berk said, because they offered an alternative to those looking at single-family detached houses farther out in Takoma Park or Cleveland Park. "People were looking to get out of the city environment . . . and with these houses they got little front porches and little front yards, suburban villas at an affordable price," she said.

Brightwood was where Wardman's career started, with detached houses in 1899, and where it ended, with Fort Stevens Ridge, which he started developing in 1924, the curators write. Fort Stevens Ridge was a 700-unit rowhouse development built to help house the surge of government workers during and after World War I. It was an automobile-oriented development; the neighborhood featured garages in the basement, accessed off the alleys.

The neighborhood is the least threatened -- for now, Berk said.

The houses at Fort Stevens Ridge are smaller and less ornate than Wardman's others, built for blue-collar workers, Berk said, and the neighborhood has changed very little in the past 100 years. But as the District moves toward its goal of revitalizing Georgia Avenue, "I predict that what we're seeing in Columbia Heights right now, we'll see in Brightwood."

Wardman perhaps also offers lessons to developers in these again heady and hot real estate times.