Washington DC
Bloomingdale/LeDroit Park

LeDroit Park was developed in the 1870s by Amzi L. Barber, an asphalt entrepreneur responsible for the surfacing of Pennsylvania Avenue and one of the founders of Howard University. Barber married the daughter of real estate broker LeDroit Langdon, from whom the area gets its name. He envisioned LeDroit Park as a whites-only neighborhood, and actually built a fence around it to keep out Black Washingtonians. In 1888, protesters dismantled the fence, and eventually, the area became home to prominent Black leaders such as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Judge Robert H. Terrell and his wife, Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights activist, educator and suffragist. Composer and jazz musician Duke Ellington grew up in the area as well. Many of LeDroit Park’s original Gothic and Italianate cottages — designed by architect James McGill and built between 1873 and 1877 — still remain. To the east, the neighborhood of Bloomingdale, which was named for one of the original family estates that once existed in the area, was built between 1890 and 1912. Many of its original Victorian and early 20th-century brick row houses are still intact. It also was originally segregated by restrictive covenants, leading to a landmark 1948 Supreme Court decision that struck down such contracts. Though the neighborhood fell into decline in the 1980s, since then it has enjoyed a resurgence, and today, Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park form a quiet enclave in the midst of the city, with historic homes surrounded by gardens and parks.