H Street NE

News, events and what's changing in H Street NE

Data as of
Updated nightly

Then

How H Street NE was built, from DC's historic building permits, and what the newspaper said about it a hundred years ago this week.

When it was built

Buildings by decade of permit
3,282historic building permit records, 1872 to 1957
Counts by decade
DecadeBuildings
1870s33
1880s430
1890s1,095
1900s668
1910s512
1920s149
1930s47
1940s23
1950s12

At a glance

3,282
building records
1872–1957
years covered
1890s
busiest decade, 1,095 buildings

Each record is one building listed on a historic DC building permit; a single permit can cover many buildings. The busiest decade is highlighted in the chart.

Top architects

Buildings designed
  • A. H. Sonnemann114
  • George S. Cooper101
  • H. R. Howenstein82
  • George T. Santmyers77
  • N. T. Haller72

Top builders

Buildings built
  • H. R. Howenstein155
  • Kennedy Bros. Inc.113
  • George P. Newton102
  • T. A. Jameson87
  • Jos. S. Boss56

100 years ago this week

October 31 – November 6, 1926

Mentions of H Street NE in the Evening Star, October 31 – November 6, 1926. Searched for "H street".

No clips matched this week.

No usable mentions in the Evening Star for October 31 – November 6, 1926 (8 matching pages searched). Some weeks a neighborhood just isn't in the paper. Clips are machine-read text (OCR) from scanned Evening Star pages on the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, lightly cleaned (line-break hyphens rejoined, stray symbols removed); misspellings are the scanner's. Newspapers this old are public domain. Each clip links to its page at loc.gov. Clips that mention race, covenants, deed restrictions or slurs are skipped automatically (keyword list: race, races, racial, colored, coloured, negro, negroes, white only, whites only, for whites, white people, white persons, white residents, caucasian, segregation, segregated, covenant, covenants, restricted, restriction, restrictions, plus a list of slurs), because they need an editor's context; legal notices and lists of private individuals are skipped too.

Neighborhood voices

Oral histories, held by the archives

We haven't found a recorded oral history about H Street NE in a public archive yet.

Search the archives yourself: The People's Archive, DC Public Library · Historic Chevy Chase DC Oral History Archive · Humanities Truck Community Archive, American University · Tenleytown Historical Society · Boundary Stones (WETA). Summaries are ours; the recordings and their rights stay with each archive.

History data refreshed Oct 31.