Over the twenty years
that I’ve been researching historic houses in Washington, DC, I find that in
only about 15% of the cases do we discover the original blueprints have been
retained with the building permit: some are the coveted façade drawings, and
some are the even more rare floor plans.
We recently
discovered and even more rare occurrence: both façade and floor plans for a client
in the 1500 block of E Street, SE. They were
thrilled to discover how their first floor had originally appeared. It solved many mysteries for them.
The owners of the
vacant lots where 1502 to 1518 E Street, SE were to be constructed, Wilhelm Schmidt and Frederick D. Brandt, received their building permit on May 17,
1906.
They listed architect
B.Frank Meyers on the application as responsible for their design, and their
own construction company, Schmidt & Brandt, as responsible for their
erection. They estimated the cost of
building all nine houses as $18,000, or approximately $2,000 each.
You might recall that
we composed a blog entry for grocer Wilhelm Schmidt here, who ran a grocery at the corner of 18th and T Street, NW, today home to Rosemary’s Thyme
restaurant.
The floor plans revealed
that a Latrobe Stove was inserted into both the front parlor and the dining
room fireplaces, and that the kitchen featured a coal range, sink with cabinet
overhead, and a built in wall cabinet with upper glass doors and lower wood
doors and drawers on the party wall.
 |
| BF Meyers, Washington Post |
Architect
Benjamin Franklin Meyers (1865-1940), known as B. Frank or BF Meyers,
contributed many row houses and theaters to the Washington, D.C., area. Meyers was born in 1865 in Nazareth,
Pennsylvania. He moved with his family
to Washington, D.C., as a child and attended school here. He also received his architectural training in
Washington, D.C., not through an educational institution, but likely through
his father, John Granville Meyers, a local builder and architect.
Copyright Paul K. Williams
