MAY CONTAIN NUTS
HOME
 
JUMP TO PAGE   100  >  200  >  300  >  400  >  500  >  600
VINTAGRAPH • WPA • WWII • YOU MEAN A WOMAN CAN OPEN IT?

Here Comes the Neighborhood

Washington, D.C., circa 1921. "Dunigan auto." The residential developer D.J. Dunigan with some of his creations. In back is the house we saw earlier today. The car is a circa 1921 Velie Six. National Photo Co. glass negative. View full size.

Washington, D.C., circa 1921. "Dunigan auto." The residential developer D.J. Dunigan with some of his creations. In back is the house we saw earlier today. The car is a circa 1921 Velie Six. National Photo Co. glass negative. View full size.

 

On Shorpy:
Today’s Top 5

Neighbors

I live two blocks from these houses. They're bigger than they appear, around 2,500 square feet and still in great shape.

Scary windows

The cottage for sale has those scary quarter-round windows that will forever haunt me from the Amityville movies.

How gauche

If there's anything I can't stand, it's dirty whitewalls.

Where the streets have no name

These look like good, solid houses that should still be around, so I went hunting on google/bing maps but came up empty.

Of course, numbered streets in DC are totally bizarre (18th, for example has a NE, NW and SE, and they start and stop and random locations), so it's not exactly simple. I don't envy the Washington postal carriers.

[The ever-resourceful Stanton Square found these houses on 16th Street NW in the previous post. - Dave]

Edit: Ah, thanks, missed that. They sure look smaller now than the old pix, but in nice condition.


View Larger Map

Nomenclature

How neat that the two door Velie sedan was known as the "Sociable Coupe"! I wonder if it had a bar in the back?

Why two?

Ok, so it is a Velie, but why are there 2 license plates on the front and back?

[Back before the reciprocity laws, motor vehicles had to licensed in every state they were driven in. - Dave]

Love to find the car today.....

Being able to see the house 82 years later via something that was never even dreamed is just beyond NEAT!

Love this website!

Velie Motors

Velie built 250,000-300,000 cars from 1909 until 1928, of which a couple hundred still exist.

The company also built aircraft and aircraft engines for several years. Its airplane business was sold and moved to St. Louis after Velie Motors closed, building Monocoupes until 1950 or so.

Velie Motors ended production of automobiles in 1928, a year before the death of company founder Willard Velie, a grandson of John Deere.

The front wall of the old Velie Carriage Works is all that remains, incorporated into the perimeter around the John Deere Planter Works on River Drive in Moline.

The new closed Velie

Velie seems to be the correct answer. This car had hundreds of ads in the Washington Post from 1910 to 1928. Maybe D.J. saw it on display at the Wardman Park Hotel "Closed Car Salon" -- click below to enlarge.

Car ID

I win! That's old man Dunigan's car.

It might be a Gardner

The car looks like a 1920 or 1921 Gardner sedan, but I'm not positive.

Velie sedan

I think the car is an early 1920s Velie, a car made in Moline, Ill., by a cousin of John Deere, who invented the steel plow. Closed sedans were a luxury in the early days when most cars were open tourings or roadsters.

Syndicate content  Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago. Contact us | Privacy policy | Accessibility Statement | Site © 2024 Shorpy Inc.