Cox's Row

Morning light slides down a wall of soft red brick. Gas lamps stand along the brick sidewalk. Shutters, iron railings, and heavy paneled doors line the street, and ivy climbs some walls while window boxes spill flowers in season. On N Street, the loudest sound is often a bird. You are looking at one of the finest rows of early American houses in Washington.

These five brick townhouses are called Cox's Row. They stand at numbers 3327 to 3339 N Street, each three stories tall beneath attic dormers. A wealthy merchant named John Cox built them around 1817, when Georgetown was a busy port town and the young capital next door was still half built. Their walls have watched this street for more than two hundred years.

John Cox was more than a builder. He became mayor of Georgetown in 1823 and held the office for more than two decades. He was the first mayor the town's citizens elected directly, and few American towns kept one mayor so long. His houses were an investment, and also an advertisement. This, they said, is how Georgetown should look.

The style is called Federal, the fashion of the young republic. It prized balance over show. Builders copied pattern books from England and adapted them in American brick. Look at the flat fronts, laid in neat rows, the doors under fanlights and simple arches, the dormer windows in the roofs. On some houses, delicate plaster garlands and swags decorate the space between floors, quiet trim instead of loud ornament. Notice how the five houses share one height and one rhythm, yet no two doorways match exactly.

In 1824, the row hosted a legend. The Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, returned to tour the country he had helped to free. His journey of 1824 and 1825 was a national event, with cannons, parades, and dinners in every city. Georgetown claimed its share, and John Cox entertained Lafayette in one of these houses. Neighbors told the story for generations.

Walk slowly and read the houses like pages. Each door is different. Brass knockers, painted shutters, railings polished by two centuries of hands. The window glass ripples in places, because some panes are very old. Iron boot scrapers wait beside several doorsteps, survivors from the age of mud streets and horses.

This block also brushed against modern history. In 1957, a young senator named John F. Kennedy bought the house at 3307 N Street, a short walk east along this block. He lived there with Jacqueline and their daughter Caroline until his inauguration in 1961. Tour groups still pause at his door.

During the winter after the 1960 election, this quiet street became a stage. Reporters and cameras camped on the brick sidewalk in the cold. Kennedy introduced his cabinet choices from his front doorstep, one announcement at a time. When the family finally left for the White House, the street exhaled and returned to its birdsong.

The Kennedys were part of a wave. Through the twentieth century, politicians, journalists, and diplomats made Georgetown their village, and its dinner tables fed the national news. Yet the streetscape never modernized, and that is not an accident. In 1950, Congress passed the Old Georgetown Act, which protects the look of these blocks. A board of architects still reviews every change to a facade. That is why no glass towers interrupt the rooflines, and why the gas lamps survive.

The people of Cox's Row have changed with the centuries: merchants, officers, diplomats, senators, writers. The houses remain private homes, so admire them from the sidewalk. Their owners are used to walkers who stop, point, and photograph. Please keep the morning quiet they wake to.

Stretch the walk a little. One block south runs M Street with its shops and noise. Uphill to the north stand the university gates. The C and O Canal and the river lie a few minutes downhill. All around, the side streets repeat the same materials: brick, iron, slate, and old trees. Few neighborhoods in America keep such a complete early streetscape.

Before you go, stand across the street and take in the whole row at once. Five houses, two centuries, one steady rhythm of windows and doors. A street can be a museum without a single label, and this one is. The bricks hold the morning light now just as they did when the paint of the new republic was still wet.