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This exquisite building is
quintessentially Queen Anne in style
with its prominent chimney, varied roof
line, and wonderful use of textures
(note the basketweave brick). There is
a stained glass transom on the first
floor and the character-defining square
colored panels around the sash on the
top turret window.
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A friend of mine recently moved into a gorgeous Queen Anne house and was interested to find out whether the fireplaces were original. They had grilles that looked old, but also had fans that made an awful racket and seemed like they came from a more recent era.
It’s not always easy to tell if fireplaces in our old Victorians were part of the original design. However, visible from the curb, the house has a large and highly expressive chimney suggesting that if the fireplaces themselves were not functional, the idea certainly was important to the builder/building.
By the last two decades of the nineteenth century open fireplaces were built more for decorative, psychological, and social reasons than for heat. By then people were experimenting with early versions of central heating systems. As a result, many late-Victorian-era houses have bits of ductwork and miscellaneous grilles that allowed warm air to move around by gravity. These duct flues are sometimes located in the chimney-breast next to the chimney flues; other times you find them in interior walls. Sometimes these early vertical duct runs were from rather inefficient gravity furnaces in the basement. Sometimes electric fans were added later in existing vertical ducts.
Nineteenth-century experiments in hot air heating were abandoned in favor of radiator systems, either water or steam. Interestingly, the radiators in many of our old houses were not installed in our houses when they were build but were added early in the life of the house. Sometimes the radiator pipes themselves hint at whether they were original. Exposed pipes are generally retrofits while pipes original to the construction are tucked into the walls.
Stoves provided heat for most of the Victorian-era residents of our houses. The parlor might have a fireplace for show, supplementing a stove for warmth in the dining room and a cook stove in the kitchen. Upstairs rooms borrowed heat.
Many late-nineteenth century fireplaces burned coal, a fuel less bulky than wood for the amount of heat, longer burning, and readily available in cities. Tons and tons of coal came down the C & O Canal from Pennsylvania coal fields. Most of it was for home heating and cooking although it was also used in Washington’s foundries on Maine Avenue and shipped up and down the East Coast.
So, are her chimneys original? A definite probably. The fireplaces associated with the grand chimney are probably original, the fans probably not, the grilles and ducts possibly.
WASA, IAC, ERU, CSO-LTCP
My editor wanted me to mention that WASA gives a credit for green roofs against the recently instituted Impervious Area Charge (IAC). Recent WASA bills include a $1.24 fee, assessed on the basis of the Equivalent Residential Unit (ERU). The WASA website defines an ERU as “a statistical median of the amount of impervious surface area in a single-family residential property, measured in square feet,” and then tells us that “Initially, all residential customers will be assessed one ERU.” That’s the $1.24 monthly fee.
The fee will help fund the $2.4 billion WASA Combined Sewer Overflow Long-Term Control Plan (CSO-LTCP). (WASA’s staff English majors, possibly a little humorless, don’t seem too good at catchy terms… *Maybe working in “waste water” (snicker snicker) has made them gun shy about words describing their functions. I’d like to imagine a bunch of fun-loving engineers making poo jokes…but they obviously don’t, so they resort to these absurdly bloated names, forcing them in turn to rampant acronym-ization. How about No Overflow for NO. or…).
What is IAC, ERU, CSO LTCP
Sewers in a surprisingly large part of the District (about a third of the area in our eroded ten-mile square) are combined sewers carrying both sewage and storm water. They are adequate to the task when it isn’t raining too hard. But cloudbursts overload Blue Plains (full name: Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant) and it can’t treat all the sewage-laden storm water, some of which is then diverted, or dumped, into Rock Creek, the Potomac, and the Anacostia in combined sewer overflows (CSO). The remedy is that over the next 20 years WASA is building 12 miles of huge tunnels to impound these excess waters for treatment instead of dumping them in rivers and streams.
WASA is supposedly in the process of fine-tuning this blanket residential charge based on geographic information systems (GIS) maps of the city to calculate actual impervious areas. We shall see. I wonder how WASA will know that the brick in my back yard is on sand while my neighbor’s is on concrete. And the fact that the roof water from my house is directed to my yard instead of Blue Plains (named for a 1662 tract of land granted to two of the first colonial proprietors of land in the present-day District of Columbia).
I suppose once our current $1.24 EUR charge is calculated on the basis of actual permeable and impermeable areas you may want to check into getting a credit for your green roof although personally I would rather give them $14.88 a year than spend a day on hold listening to catchy songs EUR, CSO, WASA WASA WASA WASA...
A. I’m wondering about the use of stained glass in so many of our houses…wouldn’t that make a good question? - Patty Hearst by sneaker mail
Q. Yes! Good question, especially since I know a little about it, mostly thanks to the Capitol Hill Restoration Society Guideline, “The Stained Glass Windows of Capitol Hill,” by Lyle Schauer. (Your own copy available from the Society, 727-7360).
It’s a bit of a technicality, but this glass is not really “stained:” more correctly it is just colored glass. “Stained” refers to a particular process in which glass is painted with a silver nitrate solution then heated. Colored doesn’t sound nearly so good so we’ll stick with “stained.”
The houses on Capitol Hill with stained glass in windows and transoms are generally Queen Anne in style. As I know you remember, the Queen Anne Style was characterized by extravagant variety in forms, textures, materials, and colors. And, prominent chimneys as seen in the house in the preceding question.
John J.-G. Bluemenson, in Identifying American Architecture, one of several of my favorite style books, says “textured wall surfaces occasionally are complemented by colored glass panels in the windows.” One such window type was so commonly used it is considered a characteristic of the style.
Thus the popularity of stained glass in many Capitol Hill row houses: they were built during the period of popularity of the Queen Anne style with its typical use of colored glass and many are informed by the style. |
