Well, this is strange. I was walking down 13th Street and at Otis saw something odd under construction: a modern-ish residential building where there used to be a townhouse with a big porch. What’s extra strange though is that it’s attached to what looks like other half of the townhouse.
This corner building has been a weird one for some time. Way back in 2009, I wrote about the crazy enormous rear staircase on the outside of the building, presumably a fire escape (commenters said the building was a home for special needs people, and thus the fire escape was required.)
The building seems to always have been a kind of Frankenstein duplex, with two not quite mirror image houses attached to each other. It seems the developer decided to demolish one half and replace it with an incongruous modern addition, which is still under construction. But even when it’s finished, I bet it will still look very odd attached to its neighbor: it’s much larger and blockier than the fairly nice, classic looking house it’s attached to. (The twin houses were a little funky before, mainly due to the paint jobs not matching up, but this is another level of weirdness.)
The address is 3585 13th Street NW and there will be four 3 bedroom condos from the $600s to the $900s. The project’s website doesn’t actually show the adjoining house, it’s just kind of a white square.
And I guess technically it’s a Frankenstein’s monster condo, but that doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
Here it was before from Google Streetview, and a few other shots from the other day.
