Post Mortem: F Street
IN ITS EARLIEST DAYS the mile-long stretch of F Street from 15th to Fifth was called the Ridge. Until Pennsylvania Avenue was paved, it was about the only way to reach the Capitol from downtown Washington. But the name didn’t stick, and with the turn of the 20th century F Street finally came into its own. For decades it was the closest thing the city had to New York’s Fifth Avenue.
“The F Street promenade, through successive generations of flappers, has become an institution,” the society editor of the Washington Times observed midway through the Roaring Twenties.
The man most responsible for F Street’s aura was Julius Garfinckel, who reigned as its merchant prince until his death in 1936. He imported the latest fashions from New York, Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin and lavished personal attention on customers, whom he considered to be his guests. Garfinckel’s first store, at 1226 F Street, N.W., is visible in the background of this postcard; its elegant successor, which still occupies the northwest corner of 14th and F, opened in 1930.
This article originally appeared in the August 1987 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan