BERKLEY

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REAL ESTATE

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     As of September 30, 2008, 14 single-family homes were for sale in Berkley with two homes under contract, both listed for over $2.5 million. In the third quarter of 2008, five homes sold with two selling for $3 million and over.

    In the first half of 2008, nine single-family homes sold in Berkley. In both 2007 and 2006, there were 25 sales. The average sale price in the first half of 2008 was $1,568,444. This compares to $1,820,700 and $1,600,566 in 2007 and 2006, respectively. The average list price was $1,584,556 in the first half of 2008, $1,935,196 in 2007, and $1,680,570 in 2006. Listed below are the sales by price range.

     While Colonials still dominate the landscape of Berkley, the last two or three decades have seen the addition of contemporaries, Victorians, and ranches. Over the past 10-15 years several developers have added two or three houses to a few acres of land or about 10 houses to a block of empty acreage. Colony Hill homes near Mount Vernon College are large brick colonials or Georgian-style homes.

     Foxhall Crescents introduced spacious Beaux Arts styled homes to the neighborhood onto winding streets. Foxhall Crescents are accessed from either Foxhall Road or 49th Street.

HIGHLIGHTS

     Nonresidents of Berkley often don't recognize its name. Berkley is thought of by many as the southern part of the Wesley Heights neighborhood or the northern section of Foxhall. But Berkley is a unique community with a pervading bucolic feel complemented on three sides by parkland --  Battery Kemble, Glover-Archbold, and Wesley Heights Parks.

     A number of shops and restaurant are nearby, some of which have been neighborhood favorites while more recent upscale additions are drawing attention from locals as well as visitors throughout NW Washington. A Safeway and CVS drugstore, formerly a movie theater which residents tried to save, are located on MacArthur Boulevard. The Palisades branch library is in Berkley. The neighborhood is also fortunate to be the home of the German Embassy and the Kreeger Museum.

     Berkley has many schools within its borders ranging for higher education to pre-k. Mount Vernon College, which is now part of George Washington University, sits on 23 acres of Berkley. Field School, a private co-ed middle and high school, relocated to Foxhall Road. Other schools in the neighborhood are The Lab School, St. Patrick's Episcopal Day School, and Our Lady of Victory parochial school.

HISTORY

     Berkley was part of a 760-acre land grant given by Lord Baltimore in 1689 called Whitehaven. Like the adjoining neighborhoods, Berkley was farmland until the 20th Century. Several slaughterhouses were located on Foxhall Road and drover yards stood at Reservoir Road and MacArthur Boulevard. The Drovers Rest Tavern stood where our Lady of Victory Church and School now reside. The building of the aqueduct, which leveled the land, allowed for the construction of Conduit Road (MacArthur Boulevard) in 1863. In the 1880s one of the first subdivisions, Senate Heights, was built on 47th Street Hill.  In the 1890s, Canadian developers opened the first of their subdivisions called "Palisades of the Potomac" around V and 49th Streets. The Clark family, one of the founding developers, lived on Reservoir Road and in 1923 their home became the Florence Crittenton Home which is now The Lab School. The Palisades of the Potomac Land Improvement Company built other subdivisions including one at Hutchins Place. In the 1930s, Colony Hill, near Mount Vernon College, was built by the original architects of Foxhall Village. Post World War II builders, including Frank Phillips with his subdivisions of Briarcliff and Berkley, helped populate the area.

      Foxhall Crescent, which many mistakenly believe is located in Foxhall, was built on the grounds of the former estate of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The original mansion was built in 1885. Rockefeller lived in the house from 1941 until 1956 and also when he served as Vice President in 1974. A year later, when the Admiral's House at the Naval Observatory was transformed into the Vice President's House, Rockefeller moved into it. The Foxhall Crescent subdivisions were built in the late 1980s. Another estate in the neighborhood was the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Art Deco home, which at one point was being considered as the official residence for the city's mayor, is now home to the Field School.

ADJACENT NEIGHBORHOODS

NEIGHBORHOOD BOUNDARIES

Map of Berkley

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