Buying & selling in Bloomingdale

Bloomingdale at a glance

Bloomingdale's edges are Florida Avenue on the south, Channing and Bryant Streets on the north, North Capitol Street on the east and 2nd Street NW on the west, per the historic district nomination form (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018). The land was farmland held by the Beale, Moore and Emmert estates until an electric streetcar line arrived in 1887 and the heirs began subdividing; the name comes from one of the original estates, and building ran from 1890 to 1912 (same source). The commercial center is small and specific: the corner of First Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW, with a coffee shop, a pub in a former theater block and a Sunday farmers market at First and R Streets.

The housing is attached brick rowhouses, with a few rowhouse flats, duplexes and a handful of mid-rise apartment buildings concentrated on North Capitol Street and Rhode Island Avenue. Forms run from three-story turreted Late Victorian and Edwardian houses on First and Second Streets to more compact two-story front-porch rows from the 1910s and 1920s; many houses have an English basement that is or could be a separate unit, and a rear alley with a garage or former stable (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018).

Bloomingdale, block by block

The rowhouses were built by a rotating cast of developer-architect teams, and the block tells you which one; every date below is from the district's nomination form (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018):

• 1700 block of First Street NW — Bloomingdale's first speculative rowhouses: seven two-story brick houses at 1700–1712 First Street, built in 1891 by developer George N. Beale with builder Peter Fersinger.
• 2200 block of First Street NW — three-story, terra-cotta-colored Roman-brick rows with alternating projecting bays, built in 1898 for developer Ray Middaugh to designs by B. Stanley Simmons; when Harry Wardman and architect Nicholas R. Grimm finished the east side in 1904, The Washington Times called First Street the Fifth Avenue of Bloomingdale.
• 1900 block of Second Street NW — 1893 Romanesque Revival rows by architect N.T. Haller, ending in a cylindrical corner tower at 1921 Second Street.
• Unit block of W Street NW — one block with four styles on it: Colonial Revival and Craftsman rows by George T. Santmyers from 1922 on opposite sides of the street, plus Academic Eclectic and Renaissance Revival rows by William Allard from 1912.
• First Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW — the neighborhood's commercial corner, including a 1913 row of five one-story storefronts by MacNeil and MacNeil and the 1914 Sylvan Theater building (originally the American Theater) at 116 Rhode Island Avenue.
• North Capitol Street corridor — the district's larger apartment buildings, The Francis and The Victor at 1812 and 1814 North Capitol Street, plus the 1896–97 Old Engine Company 12 firehouse at Randolph Place; the McMillan Reservoir grounds and the Reservoir District redevelopment sit just north.

Five things locals know

Five things about Bloomingdale that a listing will not tell you:

• First Street was once called the Fifth Avenue of Bloomingdale — The nickname came from The Washington Times after developer Harry Wardman and architect Nicholas R. Grimm completed the east side of the 2200 block of First Street NW in 1904, matching the three-story Roman-brick rows B. Stanley Simmons had designed across the street in 1898. Wardman went on to become one of the most prolific rowhouse builders in the city, and Bloomingdale was one of his early proving grounds (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018).
• Crispus Attucks Park was a telephone-company yard — The block interior bounded by First, U, V and North Capitol Streets NW was a warehouse and cable yard for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company from 1910 until the company abandoned it in the mid-1970s. A block club got the company to donate the land, a community arts center opened there in 1978, and a 2004 DC Council act returned full control of the site to the neighborhood group and forgave its back taxes. It remains community-owned, open-to-the-public green space rather than a city park (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning, district designated July 2018; Crispus Attucks Park).
• The Northeast Boundary Tunnel changed the flood math — Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park flooded repeatedly for decades because the combined sewer under them was undersized for heavy storms. DC Water's Northeast Boundary Tunnel, 27,000 feet long and 23 feet in diameter, was placed in service on September 15, 2023, more than 18 months ahead of its federal deadline; DC Water puts the annual chance of flooding in the chronic-flood areas at about 7 percent afterward, down from about 50 percent. Buyers of older rowhouses here should still ask for the basement's flood history and check flood-insurance requirements for the specific address (Source: DC Water, September 2023).
• The restaurant at North Capitol and Randolph Place is a firehouse — Old Engine Company 12, built 1896–97 in a Dutch Revival style to designs by DC Municipal Architect Snowden Ashford, is listed on its own in the DC Inventory of Historic Sites and on the National Register. The apparatus is long gone and the building now holds a restaurant (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018).
• The historic period ends in 1948 for a legal reason — Two 1940s lawsuits over houses on Bryant Street NW, Hurd v. Hodge and Urciolo v. Hodge, reached the U.S. Supreme Court as companion cases to Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 decision that made racially restrictive covenants unenforceable, and that year is the end date of the district's period of significance (Source: NRHP nomination form, DC Office of Planning; district designated July 2018).

Getting around

There is no Metro station inside Bloomingdale. The nearest is Shaw–Howard University on the Green Line, with entrances at 7th and S Streets NW and 8th and R Streets NW, west of the neighborhood (Source: WMATA). Metrobus routes on North Capitol Street and on Rhode Island Avenue carry most transit trips from the eastern and central blocks; WMATA has renamed its DC bus network under its Better Bus redesign and made further schedule and route changes on June 21, 2026, so check the current route name before relying on an older map (Source: WMATA, June 2026). Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street are the two arterials for drivers.

Within the neighborhood, errands mean the First Street and Rhode Island Avenue corner and a walk west toward Shaw or south across Florida Avenue for larger grocery and retail options. Parking follows the usual DC rowhouse pattern: residential permit parking on the block, with the zone tied to the ward and confirmed for the exact address on the DDOT permit site rather than assumed, and off-street parking only where a house still has a rear garage or a paved alley pad. Alley access, garage condition and whether a curb cut exists are worth checking in person before an offer.

The market & what to expect

What separates one Bloomingdale price from another is mostly the house itself: the three-story turreted rows on First and Second Streets carry more square footage and more original detail than the two-story front-porch houses to the north, and a finished English basement with its own entrance changes both the use and the appraisal. Condition matters more than usual in a historic district, because exterior changes visible from the street go through DC Historic Preservation Office review, so a house with permitted, documented work sells on a different footing from one with an open question about its front. Flood history on the lower-lying blocks is a due-diligence item in its own right, and the few condo and apartment conversions on Rhode Island Avenue and North Capitol Street are priced on their fees and reserves as much as their square footage.

District-wide, DC homes carried a 30-day median time on market and about five months of supply in July 2026 (Source: Bright MLS via UrbanTurf). That is a District figure, not a Bloomingdale one. No current neighborhood-level statistic for Bloomingdale is published by the local associations, so a read on a specific block has to come from recent comparable sales of the same house type.

For buyers, the order is address, then review, then basement: confirm the house is in the historic district and what exterior work would need review, then get the flood history and any sump or backflow equipment documented before you write. For sellers, permits, historic review approvals and post-2023 dry-basement records are the paperwork buyers here ask for first. Start with the buyer's guide or the seller's guide to see how Kelly runs the process, compare with her Shaw guide across 2nd Street to the west, or get in touch for a read on a specific house.

Why work with Kelly in Bloomingdale

Kelly Balmer is Vice President & Partner, Mollaan Babbington Group at Compass, with $130M+ sold, a 5.0 Best-of-Zillow record across 130+ client reviews, and more than 13 years in the DC, Maryland and Virginia markets. Her office is at 1313 14th Street NW, a direct run west on Rhode Island Avenue from Bloomingdale's commercial corner, and the Logan–Shaw–Bloomingdale rowhouse belt is where she has done most of her DC work.

In Bloomingdale that means knowing the questions before they come up: which developer built the block and what that implies about the framing and the original layout, whether a basement was dry before or only after September 2023, what historic review will and will not allow on a front elevation, and how the English-basement unit changes financing and appraisal. Kelly prices, negotiates and manages every transaction personally.

Kelly Balmer
Vice President & Partner, Mollaan Babbington Group at Compass · Licensed in DC · MD · VA