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Side façade of the
Atlantic Plumbing building.

Shaw Builds Up
Shaw Builds Up

Modern Designs

Take an Evolving

Neighborhood to

New Heights

by Ronald O’Rourke

In an online chat about a year ago, Tom Sietsema, the
Washington Post’s lead restaurant reviewer, was asked,
“What areas of town are the most exciting now for dining,
and offer the best choices?” For Sietsema, the answer
was simple.
“The only four letters you need to share,” he replied,
are “S-H-A-W.”
He certainly had a point. In a town where restaurant
openings and closings and the careers of celebrity chefs
are now followed as closely as the ups and downs of local
sports teams and their star athletes, no neighborhood of
late has been more at the center of culinary excitement
than Shaw.
But Shaw hasn’t just been having a moment among
local foodies—it has also been experiencing a surge in
development that is changing the area’s architectural
texture and demographic profile.
Long dominated by small brick Victorian row houses
and low-rise masonry-clad commercial buildings, Shaw
now features a substantial number of new residential and
mixed-use structures that rise up several stories higher,
sporting planes of metal-panel siding and large expanses
of glass. The historic Shaw and the new, emerging Shaw
now exist side by side, switching back and forth from
block to block, and in some cases within individual
blocks, creating strong juxtapositions in building style
and scale and a saw-tooth effect in the roofline that might
be jarring to some eyes, but pleasing to others.
Some of the area’s new residential buildings, including
Bauhaus-inspired, minimalist apartment buildings
designed by Suzane Reatig, FAIA—a number of them
done for the United House of Prayer for All People, a

68 SHAW BUILDS UP Photo © Alan Karchmer