Woodley Park

Quick Answer

Woodley Park sits west of Rock Creek in Northwest DC, with Connecticut Avenue as its commercial corridor. The National Zoo and Rock Creek Park form its eastern edge. Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue lies to the southwest. DC lists about 485 row houses here, nine in ten built between 1901 and 1939. The Woodley Park station on the Red Line is at Connecticut Avenue and Woodley Road.

How We Calculate $/sqft

$/sqft is calculated on above-grade finished square footage, the standard used by DC appraisers, MLS systems, and most market participants. Properties with finished below-grade space (English basements, rental units) carry that square footage as additive value, but appraisers typically apply a discount of 50 to 75 cents on the dollar relative to above-grade space. Blending the two into a single $/sqft figure would make a home with a finished basement look cheaper than it is and obscure the real comparison. When a property has significant finished below-grade square footage, both metrics are presented in context so you understand the full picture before the appraiser does.

Apartment and condominium buildings line Connecticut Avenue and 29th Street. The row houses stand on the side streets. The two trade as separate markets, so a median that mixes them says little about either.

The median row house sale here is $1.7M, against $1.3M in Cleveland Park. With so few sales, one large house can move either figure.

Half the row houses in Woodley Park have more than 3,000 square feet. Fewer than fifteen of them sell in a year.

DC lists about 485 row houses in Woodley Park. About 425 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 60 are recorded as converted to two units. Nine in ten single-family houses went up between 1901 and 1939, about six in ten of them in the 1920s. The typical house has about 3,000 square feet on a lot of about 2,400. More than one in four rises three stories or more. Nearly all have a basement, and three in four are finished. About two in three have four bedrooms or more.

Half the houses stand on Woodley Place, Cathedral Avenue and 28th Street. Different builders put up different rows in different years. Two houses a block apart can differ by a floor and a finished basement.

Here is what I do with that. I start with sales in the same row, then widen to ten years and adjust for time. I match on finished square feet, the basement and the number of stories, not on the street name. I ask the seller in writing what was finished below grade and when.

When few houses sell, the right comp was built in the same row.

From the Record

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  Woodley Park was first platted in 1875, when A.E. Kervand divided her land into 18 lots named for Woodley, the estate Philip Barton Key built around 1801. The lots did not sell. Building began in the early 1900s.

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  Senator Francis Newlands's Chevy Chase Land Company laid streetcar tracks up Connecticut Avenue, with service from 1892. The bridge now named for Taft carried Connecticut Avenue over Rock Creek from 1907. Most row houses went up between about 1905 and 1930, in Colonial Revival, Tudor and Queen Anne designs.

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  The Woodley Park station opened on the Red Line on December 5, 1981.

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  Harry Wardman opened the Wardman Park Hotel in 1918 and added the eight-story Wardman Tower in 1928. A 1980 wing made it the largest hotel and convention complex on the East Coast. The hotel closed in 2020. The 1980 wing came down in 2022 and 2023, and the Tower remains as condominiums.

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  The Woodley Park Historic District was listed on the DC Inventory and the National Register in 1990. It counts about 395 buildings from about 1905 to 1938.