When Marc Koblentz and his wife bought their Craftsman style home in Arlington’s Maywood neighborhood in early 2020, they were just the second family to own it — even though it was built in 1915. The previous owner had spent 98 of his nearly 101 years in the house, watching horses and wagons deliver blocks of ice for the icebox and slide coal down a chute to the cellar as a child. In the days before modern plumbing, water was stored in a tank in the attic.
Today, the house retains its original woodwork and other historical elements, but its granite kitchen counters and marble-tile bathrooms are fully 21st century. Maywood, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has about 200 homes built between 1909 and 1925, although there are also more than 100 that are more modern, including some condominium buildings. Its narrow, leafy streets belie the rush of traffic on Interstate 66, which borders Maywood to the east and busy Langston Boulevard (formerly Lee Highway) to the south.
“We wanted to be close to the city,” said Koblentz, an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. “Buying a historic home was not in our minds. I’m not a handyman by any stretch of the imagination. But it was a very unique house, not one of the cookie-cutter McMansions that you find further out west in Falls Church or Vienna. It was right off the bike trail, and it was perfect for us.”
Koblentz is now the president of the Maywood Community Association, which sponsors events throughout the year, including an Easter egg hunt in the spring, a Fourth of July parade and a Halloween costume party. Maywood might be named after the wife of one of the original developers, Hugh Thrift, whose nickname was May, Koblentz said.
“It’s almost a Norman Rockwell type of community. We almost rolled our eyes thinking that can’t really be true, but it turned out to be 100 percent true. The sense of community and the neighborliness of everyone is very strong and very rare these days,” he said.
Maywood’s neighborliness was put to the test 35 years ago as the community grappled with seeking designation as a Local Historic District, which preserves the Queen Anne, Colonial revival, Craftsman and Tudor revival architecture by putting restrictions on exterior changes to homes. Maywood received the designation in 1990 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. While some fought the designations, many embraced them.
“Eventually those opposed moved out, so now it’s a self-selected group of people who value the historicalness,” said Peter Harnik, who moved to Maywood in 1997. “For the most part, you can’t have teardowns like you see in a lot of Arlington.”
Before moving to Maywood, Harnik and his wife, Carol Parker, lived just a few blocks away in a small house in neighboring Cherrydale. When Parker rode her bike past a gray three-story house in Maywood, she would often see an older woman sitting on a wide wraparound front porch. One day Parker asked her to let her know if she was planning on selling the large 1916 home.
A year later, the woman told her she was putting house up for sale. But there was a catch. First, the woman had to see Parker’s garden at her small Cherrydale home to make sure she’d tend the one in the larger yard. Parker and Harnik passed muster. Since then, they purchased half of the yard next door to extend their gardens, one planted with vegetables and another with native plants like milkweed to attract butterflies.
In addition to the house, the avid bicyclists were attracted to the neighborhood because the Custis Trail borders it. The trail runs for four miles from the Key Bridge in Rosslyn to the Washington & Old Dominion Trail. Harnik founded both the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and the Washington-Area Coalition for the Capital Crescent Trail.
“The bike paths are really why we moved here,” he said.
Despite its historical feel, living in Maywood sounds a lot different from a century ago.
“Noise is on a lot of people’s minds. We’re next to 66 and in the flight path [of Reagan National Airport],” Harnik said. “Planes come over every 90 seconds. It used to wind down for the night, but there’s no longer a curfew, and we’re now hearing them 24/7 more and more often.”
There’s also been a shift in his neighbors. “Years ago, it was home to plumbers, assistant fire chiefs, all working class. You could get all your services done by your neighbors. But that pretty much doesn’t exist anymore,” Harnik said.
As they have throughout the Washington area, prices have escalated, pricing out some of the earlier residents, said Jim Connolly, a Long & Foster agent who lives in Maywood. In addition, repairing homes to the historic preservation standards can be expensive, he said.
Connolly noted how one of Maywood’s oldest houses, built in 1910, has a tin roof, but the owners wanted to put asphalt shingles on an addition. The county disagreed.
“In the end, it would cost something like $60,000 because they’re all handmade. No one does that anymore. But the flip side of that is it’s really beautiful,” he said.
Connolly moved to a 1937 brick bungalow in Maywood 19 years ago from an Arlington condo when he was looking for a single-family house for his growing family.
“One of the things I like about it is that it has a front porch culture. Prior to World War II, people everywhere had a lot of front porches and everyone would say hello,” he noted. “But after air conditioning and tract housing, so many homes were built without that front porch design. But I feel that porch culture is still alive because of the protections of the historic district.”
One example of neighborliness, he said, was that when his daughter was young she loved to jump on a neighbor’s trampoline, which they still had even though their kids were grown. One day, the neighbor offered to give them the trampoline, rolling it down the street. Now Connolly’s kids are grown, and a few years ago a new neighbor with small kids came over almost every day to jump. Then, Connolly rolled the trampoline down the street to give it to them.
“I love those kinds of traditions, seeing those things like trampolines and basketball hoops passed along. It’s fun,” he said. “That’s a very good metaphor for the very congenial feeling here in Maywood.”
Living there: Maywood has two parks: Maywood Mini Park, which is about the size of a house lot, with a playground that hosts a Halloween costume party and Thrifton Hill Park, built along an old streetcar line, with access to the Custis Trail.
In the last year, 13 homes have sold, ranging from a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo for $325,000 to a five-bedroom single-family house for $2.35 million, according to Connolly. Four homes are for sale, ranging from a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo for $699,900 to a four-bedroom, four-bath newly constructed home for $2.27 million.
Public schools: Taylor Elementary, Dorothy Hamm Middle and Washington Liberty High School.
Transit: The Clarendon, Virginia Square-GMU and Ballston-MU Metro stations on the Orange and Silver lines are all about 1.7 miles away. Arlington Transit (ART) bus route 55 travels along Langston Boulevard between the Rosslyn and East Falls Church Metro stations.
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