Chapman Stables

The Chapman Coal Company Garage and Stable was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Originally designed by Nicholas T. Haller in 1903, the building has been comprehensively redeveloped five times in its 170-year history. Prior to being adaptively reused as a 114-unit housing community in 2018, the building saw stints as a coal sales office, horse stable, car garage, and cardboard box factory.

Located in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC, the current restoration defines the community with a celebration of the history of this pragmatic American structure. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places to preserve its ability to convey the distinctive characteristics and broad patterns of early twentieth century life in Washington, DC, the Chapman Coal Company Garage and Stable is a local landmark.

Chapman Stables is located in the neighborhood of Truxton Circle, bordered by Rhode Island Avenue, Florida Avenue, New York Avenue, and New Jersey Avenue in northwest DC. Named after military officer Thomas Truxtun (or Truxton), he was one of the first six commanders appointed to the new US Navy by President Washington.

What is not there, however, is the original traffic circle from where the Truxton Circle’s name is derived. Truxton Circle was constructed in 1900 at the intersection of Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street. The circle was demolished in 1947 when North Capitol Street was widened to facilitate commuters moving in and out of the city – but the name remained.

Truxton Circle is rich with important late nineteenth century houses and historical schools, including Armstrong Manual Training School, where Duke Ellington graduated, and other historical schools such as John Fox Slater Elementary School and the Margaret Murray Washington School buildings – all of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1940s, the overwhelming majority of households were single-parent families. Graduates of Dunbar High School began to change the community demographics as the Dunbar graduates went to college and returned to the neighborhood with higher paying jobs. Because of the neighborhood’s fine schools, including Dunbar High School, Truxton Circle found itself inundated with children returning home in the 1950s with college degrees and higher paying jobs. A new upper-middle class was established and the Truxton Circle neighborhood became the most fortunate African American neighborhood not just in the city, but in the country.

1903 – 1912

With its roots in America’s Industrial Age, the original Chapman Coal Company Garage and Stable site is attributed to local businessman and established coal dealer J. Edward Chapman. The Chapman Coal Yard was an evolving light industrial complex; beginning with a small, one-story brick building situated on three quarters of an acre of land in 1903, expanding to several sizable lots into a coal yard with stable buildings on N Street.

Chapman sold low-grade lignite coal to his neighbors that he mined in his backyard. By 1908, lignite coals were being replaced with more efficient energy sources and Chapman needed a new business venture. In 1908, he hired architect Nicholas T. Haller and placed a horse stable in the coal yard.

When a catastrophic fire damaged the horse stable in 1910, the complex underwent a transition to a commercial garage and workshop to better serve the ever-increasing number of automobiles. The new garage was designed by local architect Albert S. J. Atkinson. In what was likely a cost savings measure, remnants of both the horse stable and coal yard buildings were incorporated into this new structure.

1912 – 2018

The 1912 garage was a long, two-story structure that extended 185 feet from the alley on the east to the side wall of a two-story rowhouse on the west. With a capacity to serve 75 cars, a long-two-story garage extending 185 feet emerged. Heavy cast iron framing was covered with mesh and concrete, creating what at the time was a fire-proof building. No doubt the fireproof construction was Chapman’s response to the fire that had taken the stable structure several years earlier. Newspapers of the time bemoaned the loss of over 40 horses in the stable fire.

The main entry to the building was located off-center of the overall elevation and featured an elevator that was used to carry cars from the street to the second floor repair shop. An enclosure covering the elevator hoist and cabling projected above the roofline and helped to define the location of the entry on N Street.

Sometime before 1924, the paper box factory along the rear alley was expanded to occupy the full length of the site. By 1952, the paper box factory had been converted to bus storage depot and Chapman’s garage was serving duty as a warehouse and light industrial factory.

In 2013, the Chapman Coal Company Garage and Stable was nominated and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The construction of Chapman Stables housing’s latest adaptive reuse of the property began in 2018.

Stable Ghosts

The 1908 two-story stable was situated behind the garage structure and was identifiable along the alleyway by a hay loft door architectural ghost (a trace or remnant of structures that no longer exist) telling its story of the building’s original use. Similarly, the N Street facade of the garage had irregular brickwork architectural ghosts indicating the locations of the 1906 coal offices and other small buildings that were incorporated into the car garage when it was constructed. The stable facade is obscured by a concrete block wall in this photograph.

A Barn for Cars

In 1912, you could both park and get your Model-T serviced at the Chapman Coal Company Garage. On the interior of the ground floor, the building is divided longitudinally into three parallel sections. Along the N Street façade were front shop rooms for repairs and servicing. The central open space provided unencumbered parking for cars and the third section was occupied by the former horse stable.

The stable, a long and open space, may have continued to serve as a stable after construction of the garage or it may have been reused for storage or repair facilities. The rear space section of the garage – which likely served as the automobile storage area – was entirely open with a concrete ceiling supported by concrete columns and beams on concrete floors.

The front shops were divided from the garage parking area by metal sash windows, allowing natural light into the workspace. A line of structural concrete columns divides the end of the 1912 building from the 1908 stable forming the back wall. The upstairs is similarly arranged with work rooms in the front having the large arched windows and work rooms at the rear lit by large monitor roof skylights.

The original building was a mix of different structural systems of load-bearing multi-wythe brick walls in the coal yard houses and stable and concrete-covered steel carrying terracotta floors and roofs. This continued with new work where wood was once again used to construct the light monitors and load-bearing steel framing to carry the concrete slabs of the addition.

The N Street Façade

The N Street façade is divided roughly into nine bays, marked by brackets in the cornice, and each bay featuring three arched window openings on the second story. The third bay – the only bay that does not feature arched openings – was and remains the primary entrance to the building.

The left, westernmost bay consists of three arched windows on the second story above a large segmental-arched door and segmental-arched window in the first story. The segmental arches on both the door and window are formed by two rows of header bricks. The second bay from the west consists of a grouping of three arched windows at the second story and a large double door and a smaller window on the first story. The window features a segmental-arched header, while the double door has a flat wooden beam across the opening.

Altered brickwork and the length of the beam indicate that the original entry was larger than the current one.

Similarly, the irregular brickwork reveals that the first floor walls of these two western bays remain from an earlier building on the site.

The first floor of this third bay consisted of two entrance doors – the larger, western one had a metal replacement door and a wrought iron canopy over it. This door originally led directly into the elevator and enabled cars to move up to the second floor for service. The single pedestrian opening was converted into a window. The second floor of the eighth bay has a single, round-arched window and a second, wider window with pairs of wood sash. The first floor contained a single, segmental-arched window and a wide, roll-up door opening with a three-part, multi-light transom above. The segmental-arched window featured a double row of header bricks and a stone sill. The second story single pedestrian entrance was served by an wrought iron stair with landing.

The first floor windows had historic flagstone lintels and sills. The westernmost window is partially blocked by the fire stair leading to the second floor door. The eighth and ninth bays incorporate the walls of the original coal sales buildings.

Activating Hanover Place Alley and Revitalizing the Urban Block

The demolition of the paper box factory at the rear of the site left a derelict and vacant lot fronting the Hanover Place alley at the rear of the site. On a larger urban scale, the ability to repopulate this alley space with residents allowed us to redefine the identify and sense of place of the Truxton Circle community.

On the scale of the city, it allows the reestablishment of the grid; extending Hanover Place another block and activating the neighborhood with a new building that defines place, interweaving value and modern redevelopment.

Historic Preservation Review

The District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) is the government body that advises design standards and guidelines to review construction affecting historic properties. HPRB covers such issues as rhythm, massing, proportion, scale, orientation, height, color, materials, ornamentation, setbacks, and additions.

The HPRB’s guidelines call for the retention of character-defining features and as such, additions and alterations are under scrutiny. The Chapman Stables project, both the historic renovation and new addition, were subject to review and approval of the Historic Preservation Review Board.

During the hearings, it was determined that the following architectural details possessed significant historical value and should be retained:

Wrought iron staircase: the original staircase that lead from N Street to the second floor workspaces;

Car elevator: the elevator that carried the Model-T cars to the second floor service bays;

Terrazzo: flooring that was installed at the car service work bays.

In addition to these specific historical elements, the design team identified several larger objectives that would allow the design to embrace and celebrate this unique historic resource. Those design objectives included restoring the N Street and alley facades by replacing all damaged, missing original windows, expressing the new main building entry at the location of the original, returning an open space at the center of the complex, respecting the historic buildings volume, and integrating the addition to the historic building by setting it back from the the N Street and alley facades.

Wrought Iron Staircase

Allusions to the past are an essential component of the nature of the place. They make the past tangible by attaching material references to our nostalgia. The wrought stairs here were removed from the building and carefully restored by a local craftsman. After twelve months they were returned and reinstalled.

In the main lobby, new finishes were peeled back to reveal the original structure.

At this entrance, the floor finish is detailed to suggest a bridge through the historic elevator. The bridge repeats at the glazed connection between the historic building and the new construction. The elevator space frames the first instance of major horizontal (through to the courtyard) and vertical (second floor overlook) connections through the buildings.

Seating area showing existing beams and existing brick