The family man | German-American Community | Career | City History | Cluss-Buildings | Cluss in the context of the city

General Noah L. Jeffries Residence (103)

1505 K Street, NW
Constructed in 1871, demolished ca. 1922

Cluss designed a large, brick house for Noah L. Jeffries that was built on two lots surrounded by a large terraced lawn. The District of Columbia government in 1874 estimated its value at $25,000, one of the largest and most expensive houses that Cluss designed. The house had a full basement, two full stories and a Mansard roof. The Evening Star said the Jeffries house had the "largest-sized bay windows in the Renaissance style," one on the Fifteenth Street front and one on the K Street front. Its doors and windows had "ornamental trimmings" in Ohio sandstone. The newspaper left the interior to the imagination saying that it had all "that cultivated taste would suggest."

General Jeffries, a lawyer, had been Assistant Provost Marshall for the Union Army during the Civil War. In the same year that he built the K Street house, Jeffries became editor of Washington’s Patriot newspaper. He also invested in street railways in Washington in his later years.

By 1880, Jeffries sold the K Street house and new owners divided the house into apartments. By the early 1920s, the house was demolished along with other neighboring buildings. In 1924, developers built the Investment Building, a large office structure that occupied half of an entire block.

Cluss's architecture influenced the nearby neighborhood. On K Street, from Thirteenth to Fifteenth streets, he designed two schools, (55) and (66), a five unit row house, (37), single family residences, (39), (43), and one duplex (78). Within a block of K Street, he also designed a church (5) on Thirteenth Street, a duplex (102) on Fourteenth Street and a house (80) and a hotel (18) on Fifteenth Street.

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