Last week I wrote about the beer garden located at 4th and E Streets NE. I later received a message from John DeFerrarri indicating that my final sentence was incorrect: The sale of the brewery to Albert Carry did not, in fact, mark the end of a beer garden at this location on the Hill. And so, this week, the real story about the end of this Capitol Hill watering hole.
When George Juenemann’s family sold his brewery to Albert Carry, they also sold the beer garden located on the premises. What, exactly, he did with it directly can not be discerned from the papers of the day. The Pleasure Garden is no longer mentioned, nor does the name appear in the city directories of the day.
In 1889, Carry sold out to a British consortium, who continued to run the brewery. It was not until almost ten years thereafter that the papers took notice of the beer garden. On November 30, 1897, the Washington Evening Times published an article with the name “The New Alhambra.” In it, they write of a restaurant and beer garden on the premises of the Washington Brewery Company that is to open on December 2nd. It is extolled as “certainly the most excellently furnished place of public entertainment in the northeast section of the city.”
The article goes on to describe both the saloon, which is “supplied with all the best of drinkables,” and the summer garden, both of which are “brilliantly illuminated with both electric light and gas.” The architect of all of this was John W. Swainson, who is apparently known to the readers of the Evening Times as the designed of the Washington Brewery’s giant smokestack.
For the next 20 years, the Alhambra was an important mecca for revelers in D.C. They came of course for the beer, the “finest brew of the Washington Brewery Company,” and the food, which featured crabs and oysters, but also music, which could be heard there every night. During the day, the premises catered more to those who were enjoying the latest fad – the bicycle: The gardens were lauded as the perfect destination for those out on two wheels.
Ad for The Alhambra that ran just before the 5th of July, 1911. It is part of a larger ad pushing a large number of D.C. establishments. (LOC)
The premises are also sometimes given over to parties thrown by organizations in Washington, and it generally had a most salubrious reputation: Ladies were particularly invited to come by. Whether they came in large numbers on the nights in 1901 when the “Largest Man-Eating Shark” was there on display is not recorded.
Sadly, this otherwise impeccable business was shut down on November 1, 1917, along with all other places selling alcohol in the city. As the Post put it eloquently a few years later: “the eighteenth amendment … changed a highly profitable brewery property into nothing more than 70,000-odd square feet of ground cluttered with a group of massive buildings.”
For seven years, it sat unused, other than a brief outcry when it appeared that it would be converted into a dance hall. In 1924, it was bought by the developer Charles E. Myers, who saw opportunity in this “group of massive buildings.” His plans were to convert it into manufacturing of some sort, with a central steam and power plant. Nothing came of this, and instead, he sold it the following year to the District, who then built Stuart Junior High School on the lot, which opened in June, 1927.