Victorian row houses with bay windows and front stoops ring Logan Circle, one of Pierre L'Enfant's seven original traffic circles.
The circle was originally named Iowa Circle. In 1930 it was renamed for General John Alexander Logan, the Civil War general and senator from Illinois who stands on horseback at the center — one of the finest equestrian statues in Washington. Logan is notable for being the primary force behind the establishment of Memorial Day, which he initiated in 1868 as Decoration Day: a day to honor Union soldiers' graves.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Logan Circle was one of the most fashionable addresses in Washington. The row houses surrounding the circle were built for prosperous middle-class families: doctors, lawyers, government officials. The architecture is uniformly Victorian — bay windows, Italianate details, front stoops.
By the mid-twentieth century, as Washington's wealthier residents moved to the suburbs, Logan Circle's demographics shifted dramatically. The neighborhood became predominantly African American, part of a larger transformation in Shaw that made it the cultural and economic center of Black Washington.
The riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968 burned significant sections of the surrounding neighborhoods, and Logan Circle entered a long period of decline. The Victorian row houses were subdivided, abandoned, or fell apart.
Beginning in the 1990s, the neighborhood gentrified rapidly. Today those same row houses sell for well over a million dollars, and Logan Circle is one of the most sought-after addresses in Washington.