The Height of Buildings Acts (1910 and 1899) - Limiting the Heights of Washington, DC Buildings

[DonRocks]

Everyone knows that the height of Washington, DC buildings is restricted, and many people mistakenly think the law says that buildings can be no higher than the Capitol Dome, which is a myth.

In 1910, the Federal Government passed the Height of Buildings Act of 1910 which amended the Height of Buildings Act of 1899. See? You just learned something - there were two of them!

After you read this post, you'll get the greatest benefit if you read the Wikipedia article about 1899 first (which includes a section about the Capitol Dome myth), and then the one about 1910 next.

The 1899 law limited height to between 60 and 130 feet, and if you read the fascinating article (and the Act itself), it seems to make reasonable sense.

Architecture aside, I can see a legitimate fear about fires breaking out many stories above the ground (don't forget - we had no motor-powered firetrucks, and certainly no high-tech hook-and-ladder vehicles, in 1899). Interestingly, an impetus for the 1899 Act was The Cairo apartment building in North Dupont. Built in 1894, it was the tallest building in the entire city at 14 stories (164 feet), and to this very day, it remains DC's tallest residential building.

Most of the material was covered by the 1899 Act (which is why you should read it first), and the 1910 Act served largely to "make minor modifications and tighten it up," and that 1910 Act is still the law today. Here is the current law, as of Mar 11, 2016, in my everyday, "roadside prose," as Vladimir Nabokov would say:

* No building can be taller than the width of the street in front of it plus twenty feet. For example, if the street directly in front of a building is 40 feet from-curb-to-curb, the building can only be 60-feet tall.

* No building can be taller than 130 feet, with one exception: on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue between 1st and 15th Streets NW (the parade route), a building can be 160-feet tall.

* On a residential street, no building can be taller than 90 feet.

* On a corner lot, the wider of the two streets is used as the basis for calculation.

* On blocks adjacent to public buildings (e.g., schools), the maximum height is to be determined by a schedule written by the DC Council.

* Next to the front of Union Station (the plaza), all buildings must be fireproof and cannot be taller than 80 feet.

* Section 5, Paragraph h, is extremely long, but basically says that things like spires, towers, steeples, chimneys, smokestacks, etc. are exempt (this is an extreme simplification).

If you're familiar with these seven bullet-points, you know the law better than 99.9% of the DC population. If anyone cares to discuss this further so that we can hit 99.999%, that's okay by me.

The Tallest Buildings in Washington, DC

1. The Hughes Memorial Tower (1989, 761 feet) in Brightwood is the tallest structure in the Baltimore-DC metropolitan area (note the last bullet point above - it's exempt).

2. The Washington Monument (1848-1888, 555 feet) was grandfathered in, as were several other buildings and structures.

3. * The Basilica of the Natural Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (1920-1959, 329 feet) is one of the ten largest churches in the world, and the tallest habitable building in DC - it was granted an exemption).

4. * The Old Post Office Building (1892-1899, 315 feet) is being leased to The Trump Organization - there is a great deal of complexity to this lease, so bone up before chiming in, please.

5. The National Cathedral (1907-1990, 301 feet) is the second-largest church in the U.S. after The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

6. * The United States Capitol (1793-1863, 289 feet) is under a major, three-year, external restoration project, and will have scaffolding around the dome until early 2017.

7. One Franklin Square (1989, 210 feet) is the tallest commercial building in DC, and is now home to The Washington Post - I'm curious why (and how) this building got an exemption.

* These three buildings have the distinction of being the only buildings to claim that they are (were) "the tallest buildings in Washington, DC."

I don't understand how the Basilica is "one of the ten largest churches in the world," but the Cathedral is the "second-largest church in the U.S." Here's a list of the Largest Church Buildings in the World - it looks like the claim about the Basilica could be referring to the exterior, which would make everything consistent. Note also the incredible discrepancy between exterior and interior of The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Ivory Coast.

It's extremely thought-provoking that a "times-have-changed" mentality can easily be envisioned (and justified) while reading about these two Acts; yet, they were both passed over 100 years *after* the 2nd Amendment became law. No, this post was not some grand, manipulative build-up to ram a private political agenda down your throats; this one, largely unrelated item is merely an interesting point to ponder in its own right.

I am also going on-record, right here, right now, and predicting that the Height of Buildings Act of 1910 will be overturned within the next fifty years, and that height restrictions will be greatly lifted, if not essentially removed altogether. Washington, DC, circa 2300 - if it's not a pile of rubble - is going to look a lot like Manhattan. And I think it's *so cool* that someone is going to look back and examine this statement in 284 years. "What the hell does 'so cool' mean?" they'll ask.

[The Hersch]

7. One Franklin Square (1989, 210 feet) is the tallest commercial building in DC, and is now home to The Washington Post - I'm curious why (and how) this building got an exemption.

I believe that the height of One Franklin Square falls under the exception in the Height of Buildings Act for ornamental "spires, towers, domes, pinnacles, or minarets", like the Shrine and the Islamic Center.

[DaveO]

7. One Franklin Square (1989, 210 feet) is the tallest commercial building in DC, and is now home to The Washington Post - I'm curious why (and how) this building got an exemption.

The largest commercial office building in DC is Constitution Center in SW DC, just south of the L'Enfant Plaza metro at 1.4 million sq ft of office space, roughly twice the size of One Franklin Square.  It is indeed huge....

Entirely tenanted by fed govt tenants, it is privately owned, managed by an outside commercial real estate group, and the ownership for about 40 years has been the same primarily private family limited partnership.   It lost a large govt tenant in the 2000's, was gutted, completely redone and was completely retenanted by different govt tenants, who could have relocated to other private commercial buildings at the time.

[DonRocks]

Here is Manhattan in 1846, as fictionally depicted in "Gangs of New York."

Do you think that one-hundred years from now, the height restrictions in Washington, DC will still be in place, and that we won't have any buildings taller than 80 stories high?

I understand the picture is fictional, but it's close to being real - Washington, DC will follow suit.

I don't know if that's good, bad, or just different, but I'm quite confident that the height restrictions will be circumvented - maybe not this decade or next, but during this century. I may be wrong, of course, just as I often am.

Do you think Washington, DC will let Tysons Corner become the next Manhattan while DC just sits there and watches it happen?

We live in a historical time - not a perfect time, since Tysons Corner was terribly planned by short-sighted, greedy developers who will be long-gone (with wealthy grandchildren, when all this comes to fruition) but despite this not being a perfect time, it's a historical time - make no doubt about it.

I wish urban planning could be so simple as "development is good," but it isn't. Development is good for making developers rich, and that's about all. An almost-perfect allegory is all the medical "specialists" we now have, who know everything there is to know about taking care of complex liver disorders, while at the same time not knowing anything about the rest of your interlinked systems - without everything functioning in harmony, you die. 

Developers are stupid and short-sighted.
Physicians are stupid and short-sighted.
Attorneys are stupid and short-sighted.

Yes, they're all good at making themselves many, many millions of dollars, at the expense of humanity.

There are no renaissance men or women anymore who have a broad-enough, general-enough knowledge about "LIFE" so that practicing their near-worthless specialties won't leave you penniless and DEAD.

"Holistic" knowledge? Sounds like a load of bullshit, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. It's a bullshit word, so call it "renaissance knowledge" if you wish. If you care enough about people, you'll care enough to DO NO HARM by exclusively working within your sub-field of expertise to the exclusion of all else.

 

[Tweaked]

I can understand not wanting taller buildings in the historic downtown DC core, but would some taller apartment buildings be so bad in say Van Ness or Tenleytown? Or over by the ballpark?  Or along the new waterfront developments?  There are some advantages to population denisty, which in DC can really only be achieved by building taller buildings.

[DonRocks]

16 minutes ago, Tweaked said:

I can understand not wanting taller buildings in the historic downtown DC core, but would some taller apartment buildings be so bad in say Van Ness or Tenleytown? Or over by the ballpark?  Or along the new waterfront developments?  There are some advantages to population denisty, which in DC can really only be achieved by building taller buildings.

Northern Virginia is going to be your case study. I don't take Metro (for no particular reason other than convenience), and I almost never go to the Rosslyn-Courthouse-Clarendon-rapidly-becoming-Ballston corridor anymore.

People will have their own personal preferences, of course, but I strongly prefer the Clarendon of 2005 to the Clarendon of 2017, ugly though it might have been. However, with the exception of a brief stint in Manhattan, I've never actually lived in "the city," so I guess I have privacy and trees in my bones (boy I did love living in NYC though).

[Tweaked]

According to Niche Website (never heard of them either) in 2016, Arlington was ranked the best place to live in America. 

[DonRocks]

1 hour ago, Tweaked said:

According to Niche Website (never heard of them either) in 2016, Arlington was ranked the best place to live in America. 

I'm replying before opening the link - my guess is that the people who ranked it are either under 30, or they aren't (exclusively) talking about the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, which was - if I remember correctly - a very small slice of Arlington zoned for commerce; much of the county (especially North Arlington) consists of tiny colonials, built for Pentagon workers and people around WWII - Broyhill & Sons built 8,000 of these in Northern Virginia; South Arlington also has a lot of generic, faceless, sprawling brick ... "things" (I'm not sure if they're condos, townhomes, or apartments) that house a lot of people, and also charming pre-WWII bungalows. This is a generalization, and all of these houses can be found throughout the county (which, btw, is the smallest county in America). Don't get me wrong - there's a reason I live in Arlington, but my goodness it has gotten *crazy* expensive - people are willing to pay big bucks not to commute, I guess, and a lot of houses are being bought for the land, torn down, and rebuilt. Home prices have more-than-tripled since I moved to Northern Virginia in 1994 (imagine them tripling again over the next 23 years) - one of the worst purely financial decisions I ever made was leaving the house I bought then because it was perfect (for me).

The Wilson Blvd. corridor is no country for old men; if I was in my 20s and just out of law school, I'd live there.

[The Hersch]

The part of the 1910 law that really puzzles me is the section containing all the specific exceptions, provisos, setback requirements, and authorization for approval of a building 180 feet tall, all with explicit reference to the property once known as Dean's Tract and also as Temple Heights, where the Washington Hilton and the Universal North and South buildings now stand. This is the site where Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to build a massive complex known variously as Crystal City or Crystal Heights, but I don't think there was a whiff of that in the air as early as 1910. It appears that none of the provisions of this section of the law was ever used.