Best Addresses: A Century of Washington's Distinguished Apartment Houses

A century ago, the popularity of early Washington landmarks like Stoneleigh Court and the controversial Cairo (which, at a soaring twelve stories, shocked District officials into enacting the city's height limit) made it clear that apartment living was here to stay. By the 1920s, Beaux Art and Art Deco palaces offered residents all the luxuries of a first-class hotel: barbershops, ballrooms, rooftop terraces, and indoor pools. Soon other innovations in apartment living—the garden complex, the…