When trying to write my last Looking Back post, I couldn’t find an interesting, great building to write about — so I decided to do a Looking Back post on the last 8 months or some of Looking Back posts.

Pretty much everyone in D.C. knows of the Cairo apartment building in the Dupont area, on 17th and Q. The tallest residential building in the city, it was responsible for the height laws now in place.

Club Bali, formerly at 1901 14th Street, was a popular place where jazz greats like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Cab Calloway performed. the building used to be home to Arena Stage’s Community Engagement Studio, but now is vacant.

Photo by Wikipedia user AgnosticPreachersKid.The Volta Laboratory and Bureau, founded in the 1880s by Alexander Graham Bell, has been the home of research for deaf and hard of hearing persons. The building, located on 35th and Volta Place in the Georgetown neighborhood was built in 1893 and is a National Historic Landmark. In 1879, Bell moved to D.C. with his wife Mabel Hubbard, who had been deaf from early childhood. The next year, the…

This week, the DC Preservation League celebrated their 40th anniversary at the long abandoned Wonder Bread Factory (formerly the Dorsch’s White Cross Bakery), located a half-block east of 7th Street in Shaw.

Photo by NCinDC. Alban Towers looms large over Massachusetts Avenue. Built in a Gothic revival style in the 1920s, it was one of the first modern apartment buildings built in the city. Starting a tradition of grand common areas, the lobbies and hallways were built with richly ornamented Gothic/Art Deco elements. Paved in quarry tiles of brown, orange, and ocher in a geometric pattern, the lobby is topped by plaster crown molding with rope…

Photo courtesy of Library of Congress. Ever walked from the Foggy Bottom Metro stop down to the Mall? You’ve likely walked down 23rd Street and noticed a highly fortified complex near E Street, owned by the Navy. what you’re walking by is the Potomac Annex, also known as the Old Naval Observatory. Located on Reservation 4 of the L’Enfant Plan for the Federal City, George Washington chose the site for a university, but it…

One of the many embassies that lives on Massachusetts Avenue in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, the Uzbekistan Embassy cuts out of the stretch as a Beaux Arts beauty, with limestone balustrades, windows with corbels and guttae. The mansion once belonged to a coal magnate who drowned with the Titanic, and later became the Canadian embassy, now the Uzbekistan Embassy. The mansion, designed by architects Bruce Price and Jules Henri de Sibour, who designed many prominent…

Photo by NCinDC.Built in 1912 by architect Charles Adam Platt for owner James Parmalee, the Causeway (as it was known then) is a 20 acre estate with open fields, woodlands, stone bridges, formal gardens, a pond, and meandering streams in the Cleveland Park neighborhood. Now a part of the Washington International School, the estate hearkens back to when the neighborhood was comprised of farms, summer houses, and isolated suburban estates like the Causeway. The…

Photo by Wikipedia user AgnosticPreachersKid. If you’ve ever made the walk from Nationals Stadium to Barracks Row for a drink after a game, or perhaps just live in the Navy Yard area – you’ve certainly noticed the building dubbed “Blue Castle” on the corner of 8th and M Streets SE. It’s a bit hard to miss, an old building painted various shades of blue. Now the home for two charter schools, the building used…