Georgetown Time Machine: Waterfront

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring a fascinating photo that came to my attention from this interesting thread from a vintage photo group on Facebook. The photo itself is the Library of Congress collection. It’s from roughly 1909 and shows the Georgetown waterfront viewed from the south.

There are a lot of interesting elements to this photo. Moving left to right, this is what I notice:

First off you notice the old aqueduct bridge. I discussed this bridge last week. That photo was from 1889 and showed the bridge fairly soon after it had reopened as a second version of the original bridge (which opened as a genuine aqueduct in 1843). There was no “third” version of the bridge, so the version you see in today’s photo is the same from last week. You can see fairly clearly how the bridge was constructed on the old piers, which remained from the original design. They were fairly substantial both in size and number. I suspect that once the bridge stopped carrying water, there wasn’t a need for so many huge piers. But that’s just a guess.

The bridge remained until the 1920s, when the Key Bridge was built. The old bridge was torn down in the 1930s. Most of the piers remained until the 1960s when all but one was dynamited. One pier near the southern shore remains as a relic.

Next over we see the Potomac Boat Club. While the club dates to 1869, this is actually the third club house it occupied. It was built roughly five years before the photo was taken. And it really hasn’t changed much since then. The downstream annex is bigger now and has a couple floors constructed above it, but the main part of the building looks pretty much the same (although it looks possible that the siding may have been unpainted back then).

What I find particularly cool is that there used to be a balcony connecting the club to the bridge:

You can still see where the balcony once stood:

Back to today’s photo:

Here you can see the foot of what was 60 some years away from being called the Exorcist Steps. I did a deep dive once into the history of the steps themselves. And in that article I noted that there once was a shed at the bottom of the steps, although I didn’t really know what it looked like.

There was a car service station there for many, many years (and is still there in a zombie fashion). But I don’t think that’s what this was. Perhaps it was a place trolley cars could pull into to get out of the weather without having to go into the Car Barn itself?

Moving right from there you can see a series of buildings that once stood on the south side of M St. across from the Car Barn:

These were a row of buildings that included the famed Key Mansion, which was where Francis Scott Key once lived. They were all leveled in the 1940s to accommodate an off-ramp for the Whitehurst Freeway.

On the western end of these buildings is a building with a fun billboard painted on its back. The sign appears to say “POP IN TO HOPKINS HARDWARE”. This appears to have been a hardware store that dated to the 1870s (although not at this location). It seems to have gone out of business in the 1940s, probably due to the building demolition.

Right at the center is the building that is the subject of the Facebook posting in the first place. Commenters appear to have agreed that it was some sort of a mill-related building. But what’s particularly interesting is that it’s still around, albeit a bit hidden:

The lots down there are a bit of a fee simple nightmare. For many of them it’s hard to know exactly what entity or government body owns it. The zoning map says it’s the federal government, but there could be competing claims from the city or WMATA or who knows.

The last thing that catches my eye is this rather lovely boathouse. I was not aware that there was a boathouse at this location. By this date, on top of the Potomac Boat Club there were boathouses for the Washington Canoe Club (still mostly standing) and Dempsy’s (burned down in the 1960s). But I didn’t know about this one.

Baist’s Real Estate map from 1919 doesn’t really shed light on who owned this one. They simply labeled it “Boat Ho”:

A news article from 1919 about a flood mentions two clubs I was not familiar with the Great Falls Canoe House and Capt. Moore’s Boathouse.

The boathouse in the photo looks more like a canoe boathouse that a rowing one, due to the narrow doorways (plus there’s a canoe in the water by the dock). So perhaps it’s this Great Falls Canoe house.

(After some more digging I believe that it the right answer):

Later references to the club locate it at 3800 K St., which would put it upstream of the Washington Canoe Club. Neither building remains.