St. Mary’s parking lot on the north side of the rectory has been a relief to many parishioners attending evening Mass when the Capitals are playing a home game, but that lot, like the rest of the old neighborhood, was once densely built up with residential rowhouses and small businesses that looked more like the Capitol Hill section of Washington than today’s busy commercial downtown.

The attached picture of the corner of Fifth and H Streets, NW, was taken looking south along Fifth Street from the intersection at a vantage point roughly across from the entrance of the present-day Fairfield/Marriott Hotel. It most likely dates from about 1898, just a few years after the church was built.

Starting up the street from right to left in the photo you can see the dense tree line on the grounds of the Federal Bureau of Pensions (1882 -- now the National Building Museum); then, a row of about a dozen nineteenth century rowhouses (demolished – now the Fifth Street side of the Government Accountability Office); then, the old wooden frame, gable-roofed St. Mary’s School (demolished – now the present-day 1905 St. Mary’s School building); then, the church (1890), and the rectory (built in 1887 by architect Richard Esdorf), and finally, the three rowhouses (now demolished) that once stood on the corner where the parking lot is now.

Incidentally, if you take a close look at the rectory in the photo, you can see that the picture must have been taken on a hot summer afternoon, as seasonal striped canvas awnings are pulled down low over the front windows. This was a ubiquitous sight on houses all over Washington prior to air–conditioning.

The drug store and soda fountain depicted here on the corner was 733 Fifth Street, NW, owned by James K. Sudler, who came to Washington as a young man in the 1870s from his family’s farm in rural Queen Anne’s County Maryland. He came to the city to become what was then called a "druggist.”

Sudler and his son, Oden, bought the property in 1897 from William E. Halleck, born in Washington of German descent, who died that same year. Halleck and his family owned another drugstore and lived in rowhouses on the north side of H Street, where several buildings are being renovated today, before purchasing the property for a new drugstore on land that is now the church parking lot. Note the apothecary pestle and mortar sheet metal ornament on the pediment high above the building in the photo.

After a decade of commuting the sixteen or so blocks to the drugstore from his home in LeDroit Park, Sudler died in 1908 and his son ran the business for some years afterwards. The property passed hands several times in the twentieth century before becoming derelict as the commercial center of downtown shifted farther to the north and west. The Archdiocese purchased the buildings, too far gone for redevelopment, and created the parking lot the parish uses today.