By Richard Stamm
No, not a person, but the late Victorian building located at 703 6th Street NW. With stylized Neo-Classical details, the buff-colored brick and limestone condo building was designed to look like a typical Washington row house by its builder/designer John H. McIntyre. However, the building's original function was always that of an apartment building.
Born in the District of Columbia in 1859, McIntyre was the son of Irish immigrants and although he designed the building, he was not an architect. Listed as a contractor in the 1900 census, he lived with his wife Catherine and six children on O Street in Georgetown.
By 1930, McIntyre was twice widowed and living with four additional children by his second wife Lola in Berwyn, Maryland. He named this new building on 6th Street the "Myrene." This is something of a mystery given that none of his four daughters or two wives bore that name nor does it seem to have been a family surname.
The Myrene was unique at the time of its construction in 1897. Up to that time, apartment buildings were defined as being large and capable of housing many families-five or more stories with upwards of 20 units per building. The Myrene was a mere four stories tall (not including the basement) and had but one apartment, or "flat," per floor.
The unpretentious building was about the same width and depth as a row house and was designed with members of the middle class in mind. Meant to simplify modern domestic life through a reduction of time and cost devoted to housekeeping, the units were smaller and the rooms less numerous than earlier, more opulent apartments.
Another innovation was the added convenience of having a kitchen in the apartment. Almost all of the large apartment buildings of the previous generation were built without kitchens in the units. Instead, those buildings had public dining rooms where the building's affluent residents would take most of their meals.
This new form of apartment building caught on immediately with architects and developers who could easily translate their single-family row house designs into multi-family dwellings. Thousands were constructed in Washington during the decade following the introduction of the Myrene, part of a building boom that only abated with the outbreak of World War I.
The modest two, three, or four story structures had filled a void in the housing market among Washington's working classes and this type of apartment building soon became a ubiquitous form of architecture throughout the city.
Today, the Myrene is a private condominium building.
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Stamm.
Rick Stamm is the curator of the Castle Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, as well as an author.