Photo by PGCist

In 1928, the Washington Post declared “Foggy Bottom” an extinct nomenclature. Over eighty years later, one of D.C.’s oldest neighborhoods is firmly branded with the curious nickname, which was spawned from smoke and fog that hovered over the industries once housed on the area’s low, swampy land.

The name “Foggy Bottom” was used before 1877, which is when the Washington Post was founded and its archives begin. In some of the earliest mentions of the neighborhood, journalists used quotation marks around the moniker, suggesting it wasn’t universally accepted — that they assumed it was ephemeral. Foggy Bottom was occasionally grouped with other neighborhoods with vivid names, known as “hiding places of lawbreakers,” including Bloodfield, Murder Bay and The Slashes.

But Foggy Bottom didn’t start out with a sordid reputation, and it wasn’t always called Foggy Bottom.

In “Foggy Bottom 1800 to 1975: A Study in the Uses of an Urban Neighborhood,” Suzanne Berry Sherwood writes that in the late eighteenth century, Foggy Bottom was part of the town of Hamburgh — a 130 acre area of land which she places between present-day 24th and 19th Streets NW, extending from the Potomac to H Street. In 1765, German immigrant Jacob Funk bought the land, subdivided it and then sold it to “up country” residents. The village became colloquially referred to as Funkstown. Two other men owned land in the area that would become Foggy Bottom.

At the start of the 19th century, there were a couple of prominent residents that lived in the neighborhood, and many skilled laborers. In 1850, the makeup of the city, and subsequently the neighborhood, changed dramatically. The District’s population doubled between 1850 and 1860, and the growth was significant in Foggy Bottom. Sherwood writes:

As the city grew and developed, Foggy Bottom’s character was slowly altered. The population increased, and the character of the population changed. The number of industrial establishments increased, particularly along the western and southern edges. The change in population character may have been related to the increased industrial activity.

Industries in Foggy Bottom included Godey’s lime kilns, the Washington Gas and Light Company, the glass works, and the Abner/Drury and Christian Heurich breweries. Its population evolved to house many poor immigrants who, presumably, wanted to live close to where they worked. It’s unclear when the name “Foggy Bottom” was adopted, though it’s said the fog from the riverbank combined with the smog from the gas works engendered the name.

In the next century, the makeup of Foggy Bottom would change again, despite residents’ protests against the creep of modernity. Sherwood writes, “Between 1950 and 1970, Foggy Bottom was transformed from a run-down industrial slum to a high-rent luxury apartment district, considered one of the best downtown residential sections in the city.”

Two factors played into this. One is that the U.S. Department of State moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The other, Sherwood articulates:

Also in 1947, the Washington Gas Light Company announced its plans to remove the gas facility and began dismantling the manufacturing plant at 26th and G Streets, NW. It also removed two large gas holders and buildings housing the manufacturing equipment, some parts of which had been built before the Civil War. All that remained were two large tanks at Virginia and New Hampshire Avenues and one small brick building at New Hampshire and 25th which were used to store natural gas in case of emergencies. In 1954, when the remaining tanks were taken down, one official noted that the “tanks would be missed on the skyline.” For Foggy Bottom, the gas tanks were landmarks that defined the neighborhood just as surely as a courthouse defines a midwestern town.

But even as the population changed and Foggy Bottom was, according to the Washington Post, “freed from the ugly profile and gassy odors of the giant tanks,” the name stuck.

The fog has, interesting enough, a legacy of charms. From The Post in 1959: “‘One of the reasons I like living in Foggy Bottom,’ said a young wife relaxing in her chic remodeled home on 23d st., ‘is the funny name.'”