Over the last two weeks, I have looked at Adolf Cluss (that’s him there on the left) the architect of Eastern Market and his political past. In researching him, I was also looking for other projects he had been involved with. I was hoping that some had not fallen victim of the destruction that sought out so many of his works.
I have previously written about another of his designs, but as I kept looking, it turned out that there was actually even more. In 1864, the police station on Marion Park (5th Street and South Carolina Avenue SE) was in rough shape. An article in the April 21 Daily National Republican made that clear. Two soldiers who had attempted to break into a liquor store were arrested.
“[T]he men were taken to the Eighth precinct station-house, where they were confined to a cell. During the night, however, they escaped from the cell, which is a wooden shanty and in a very dilapidated condition. Being built against a brick wall, the prisoners only had to remove several bricks in order to make an aperture large enough for the egress of their bodies. This they did, and being soldiers, are to-day rambling about their camps, instead of being immured within prison walls.
This deficiency was well-known, as it is not eight days later that the Washington Evening Star describes the new digs for the police. After a lengthy paragraph describing the interior, including the entrance, “a convenient office, with a large platform, furred to fit the Sergeant in charge, with space for a telegraphic officer,” the article then turns to the rear, which is where the prison is located. It contains “two rooms for male and female lodgers.”
The outside is described as follows
The exterior of the station house is plain, but executed in tasteful solid work; wood having been done away with, except I the crown-moulding of main cornice, which is protected by tin. It has a bold central projection, built higher than the sides of the building, which very appropriately we think, gives the station a castellated appearance to this stronghold of public safety, which thus forms an ornament to the neighborhood.
The architects of this building are listed as being Adolf Cluss and Joseph von Kammerhueber. Only one picture seems to have survived of the station, in an 1894 history of the Metropolitan Police Department, at which time it housed the fifth police precinct. It shows a small, two story building with three windows across the top. The central portion, which is where the entrance is, is a slight projection from the front, an extends up a few feet above the roofline, giving the impression of a snug fort.
Sadly, while the outside looks fine, the inside was in worse shape, and the whole building was – in spite of various additions – too small. Eight years later, the precinct was moved out into a temporary location, the whole building was torn down and replaced with the structure that still graces Marion Park today. More on that building here.