Park View, Washington, D.C.

Park View is a neighborhood in central Washington, D.C., immediately north of Howard University.

The name of the neighborhood comes from its views east over the campus of the Old Soldiers' Home. At the time Park View was developed, and well into the 1960s, the Home's grounds were open to the public as a park. Those grounds were a designed urban landscape, including pedestrian paths and ponds, modeled along the principles of New York's Central Park. Indeed, when the Home's campus was developed into a public park in the later 1880s, it often was compared to Central Park.

A solidly residential community, Park View is a quiet corner of the city, one in which the trend toward gentrification has only recently found a foothold. Its one commercial corridor, Georgia Avenue, has a generous share of liquor stores, but increasing interest in the corridor began to attract other goods and services to the area starting with the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School (3600 Georgia), founded in 2004, and Temperance Hall (3634 Georgia, now the Looking Glass Lounge) in 2006.

The neighborhood itself is well maintained and pleasantly suburban, populated mostly by middle-class African American families.

Geography

Park View is situated in the Northwest quadrant of the city. The territory that defines the Park View neighborhood extends from Gresham Street north to Rock Creek Church Road, and from Georgia Avenue to the Soldiers' Home grounds. The additional area bounded by Park Road, New Hampshire Avenue,...
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