Licensed to Build 49TH STREET & SHERIFF ROAD NE
More than three-quarters of Deanwood’s buildings are wood-frame, single-family dwellings built between 1895 and 1946. African American draftsmen without academic training designed most of them, in styles ranging from “Folk” and Craftsman to Colonial Revival. But in 1924 the DC government decreed that designers needed professional training to operate as “architects.” This policy forced many traditional draftsmen from their work. The professionally trained Lewis Wentworth Giles, Sr. (1894–1974), however, thrived. He designed hundreds of houses, apartments, and churches here and across the city. Along the block to your right on 49th Street, Giles designed numbers 1017, 1021, 1023, 1025, 1027, 1031, 1035, and 1045. As was often the case, Deanwood builder Randolph Dodd constructed Giles’s designs. Giles graduated from Armstrong Technical High School and then studied architecture at the University of Illinois on the eve of World War I (1914–1918). He was drafted, however, before he could graduate. After serving honorably in France with the U.S. Army’s all-black 92nd Buffalo Soldier Division, Giles returned to Washington. In 1921 he opened an architectural practice on U Street, NW. In 1929 he moved his office to the home he designed and built at 4428 Hunt Place. Giles and his wife Gladys raised two sons on Hunt Place. Lewis, Jr., recalled a happy childhood here, sailing home-made boats on Watts Branch and roaming freely. He also became an architect and designed the Deanwood Professional Building, where he, his father, and brother, physician Julian Giles, all kept offices.
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