Towards a Taxonomy of the Nomenclature of Luxury Apartment and Condominium Dwellings in Washington, DC
Now leasing.
Nota bene: This work was completed during a period of temporary insanity, a four-hour interval when the author’s sweltering Megabus pulled over to a gas station in southern Virginia after its air conditioning failed.
We asked readers if they would tell us the names of apartment and condominium buildings in DC. We promised to power-rank them.
Instead, your author embarked on a project of classification. Sorting through the names, it became clear that the nomenclature of dwellings in D.C. is both simple and complex. Families of names appeared — families detailed below — and exceptions abounded. (This exercise is limited to names crowdsourced from a 730dc survey. Most of the responses were either luxury dwellings or put on airs to be. This exercise clearly does not extend to the whole universe of apartment buildings.)
Names cannot be plotted on a simple two-dimensional x/y plot, but many have an element of temporal or geographical displacement.
The first question to ask of a name is, what is its relation to spacetime? Some call to the past, others reach for the future, and most somehow suggest to a prospective resident, when you are here, you will not be here.
There are some names that tell us where we are. But the vast majority of these names attempt to displace us from where we really are. Strange way to think of a home.
Let’s dive in.
POSITIVELY RETROGRADE
Classical: The Agora, The Jason, The Tellus, The Apollo
Castlenyms: Excelsior, Avalon, Elberon
Crypto-colonial: Sulgrave Manor, Chatham Court, Circle Arms
Our first three clades of names — the classical, the castlenyms, and the crypto-colonial — are positively retrograde. They think wistfully of ancestral oppressions, embrace apocryphal Freudian drives for strong fathers and certain morals. In Marxist terms of historical evolution these are callbacks to feudal and even Asiatic ways of life. They are frankly infantilizing on a civilizational scale.
[wearing beret]: Avec, Chalfonte, Belle Pre
A fourth, the [wearing beret] clade, is a hybrid, as it looks simultaneously back and to the left (yes, just like JFK’s exploding crown). These play upon the delusion, common to Americans, that they would be more sophisticated — able to tell a pinot from a cab at one whiff, more forgiving of extramarital affairs, able to fucking relax — if only the French had won the Seven Years War, Napoleon not sold Louisiana, Leclerc not been so roundly defeated in San Domain. (Despite not being any kind of a French word, The Shay belongs here thanks to its Marie Antoinette-aping ads.)
One thinks of the many Chinese cities bearing Californian names: “Thousands of Beijingers wake up every day in Yosemite. Hordes more have moved to Palm Springs, not to mention Orange County and Silver Lake. They shop at UCLA and go to Hollywood for a bite to eat.” One wonders what they see in us.
THE MODERN MIDCENTURY MUDDLE
The 20s: The Fedora, The Knickerbocker, The Ambassador
Post-industrial: Foundry, The Mill, Dock 79, Atlantic Plumbing, The Kenmore, The Helicopter Factory
Here our spectrum gives way to the Modern Midcentury Muddle (M.M.M.), which at least exudes authenticity, whatever that is, more than any other subgroup. Probably this is because at least some of these buildings really have maintained their names since being built earlier in the 20th century.
The Siodmak Corollary: In general, a building can pass into this group if, at the height of a chase sequence in a Robert Siodmak noir film, one can imagine the police sergeant dialing into his rotary and exclaiming, “We’ve got him cornered — he’s in _______!”
The post-industrial group fits here, but disingenuously. As young, educated people with computer-desk jobs flock to cities that were once hubs of industry, a fetishization of the industrial past has emerged. “America used to build things,” the pundits say on the television all day, and even if we don’t vote with the pundits, their words leave marks. Hence a certain affinity (one cannot call it nostalgia, for so few of these people — either the rentiers, their marketers, or the renters — ever put on, e.g., a hard hat) for the warehouse, the old factory, the yards, the docks. Sweat is very marketable, it turns out. Especially if the renovations have added central air and Nest units.
THE MODERN ASPIRATIONAL MUDDLE
Beaux arts: Aria, Lyric, Mondrian, The Libretto
…ad astra: Zenith, Elevation, Paramount, Sky DC
Premium Signature Luxury Elite: Insignia, The Policy
Do not be fooled: Here we have made a sea change. A revolution must have occurred, because we have transitioned from the feudal to the capitalist! These names tend to displace identity not by changing what we relate externally to — England at the height of empire instead of Northeast DC on a muggy July day — but by resituating our identity within narratives of self-betterment, by names associated with art, culture, industry, and prosperity, markers of modernity that are not merely allusive but extensive modifiers of our self-identity. These apartments do not displace but augment you, like an Instagram filter or a hashtag carefully applied.
Young people move here to be upwardly mobile. Their choices in apartment take this aspiration literally: Start from the top, Elevation’s branding says. “The time has come to indulge ambitions and fulfill possibilities — to explore elegance and rise to the pinnacle of DC apartment living.” One wonders if life is possible at all, down below. (An analysis of the branding engaged in by these apartments is beyond the scope of this exercise and would surely fry the author’s already-cooked brain.)
These names are modern not only in the sense of being contemporary, but also in the sense that they take as given a metanarrative of progress. They would not make sense but in a time when the economy insists that you are either on your way up or on your way out, that you are what you eat but also what you buy and where you live, that you are a brand and the brand is you. Their particular violence is in an implicit condemnation of the status quo: Whoever you are, you aren’t good enough — but we have something we can sell you that will help.
POSTMODERN MISHMASH
The Name of This Building Is a Name: The Lex, The Corey, Alexander House
An Extremely Goofy Building: The Celsius, The Fahrenheit, The Stealth, Gab
L33T Speak: Twelve12, F1rst, Westend25
Synecdoche, DC: Colonnade, Portico, Gables, eaves
Not even trying: District
As silly as these names generally are, they don’t bother me. They embrace the essential arbitrariness of the exercise of address. I think they know they are stupid. If so it is to their credit. I take their cue and exit left.
