Photo by NCinDC.

It is strange to think back to a downtown Washington that housed a candy factory, but in the 1930s it did at 1309 F Street NW. Brownley Confectionery Building was built in 1932 in grand art deco style to serve as a factory for the Brownley family’s candy business with a candy store with a soda fountain on the ground floor.

The building, with its gray aluminum sunbursts, floral patterns, and zigzags, is a quite rare example of the more over the top ornamentation of the art deco style in the D.C. area. Porter & Lockie architecture firm, one of the most popular in the D.C. area in the 1920s and 1930s, designed the building. The firm was one of the pioneers of art deco in Washington and designed other great buildings such as the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on East Capitol Street NE and the Scottish Rite Temple in Columbia Heights.

The confectionery closed in 1940. Following, the building housed a number of tenants, including a Mayflower Donuts bakery – which has the distinction as being the first bakery to spell doughnut as donut. The national chain, now defunct, started in the 1930s and went out of business in the 1970s. Dash’s, a men’s clothing store, set up shop in the building in the 1970s. It lay vacant for decades, but now houses the restaurant Funxion on the ground floor with offices taking up the other floors.

It’s pretty neat to look back at a time when a functioning confectionery sat in downtown Washington, in a fabulous art deco building no less. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places, preserving its historic facade.