Park View, D.C.

(The new car barns of the Capital Traction Company on “Fourteenth Street Extended” in December 1907 (left) and today (right))

We haven’t really heard anything of substance about streetcars on Georgia Avenue since the middle of last year. With the way the District budget is shaping up it’s likely to be years before it happens, if it happens at all. Yet, one thing I’ve been curious about since DDOT first proposed a city-wide streetcar system is where the trains will actually be housed when not in use.

The old car barns on Georgia Avenue, which were transformed into Curtis Chevrolet, are currently going to be raised to make way for Walmart and the car barns on East Capitol Street are now condos. The Decatur Street car barn (above) at 4615 14th Street, NW, would make an excellent facility in the area — except it isn’t located on any of the proposed lines.

The Decatur Street car barn dates to 1907 and was considered an architectural gain for the District. Architects Wood, Donn & Deming designed the structure for the Capital Traction Company which wanted their new facility to be in keeping with the residential architecture in the surrounding neighborhood. The finished barns accommodated over 250 streetcars. Today it is WMATA’s Metrobus Northern Division garage.

View from the interior of the car barn toward 14th Street, 1961

This entry was posted on April 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm and is filed under History, streetcars. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: historic comparison, Sixteenth Street Heights