Glen Echo Park, 7300 MacArthur Boulevard, Glen Echo, Montgomery County, MD

See also HABS MD-1080 and HAER MD-43 for additional documentation.

Entry and First Place Recipient 2010 HALS Challenge: Revisiting Cultural Landscapes of Childhood
Significance: Glen Echo Park provides a living record of multiple intersecting currents in American history. The Park's many incarnations – and the landscape and architectural features they have left behind – offer a unique encapsulation of urban Americans' shifting attitudes towards recreation. Containing iconic structures and landscape elements that are representative of both an early-era Chautauqua cultural retreat and an urban trolley park, Glen Echo Park is one of the few remaining examples in the nation (and alone in Greater Washington, DC) of either of these once-numerous landscapes of amusement and recreation. The Park also played host to contentious moments, as the site of significant protests against segregated public facilities during the Civil Rights Movement. Today, Glen Echo Park is a living classroom, offering various arts, educational, and amusement opportunities for local residents in an historic setting – a unique combination among National Park Service facilities.

Throughout its history, various owners and managers of Glen Echo Park shaped and re-worked the landscape in myriad ways – to serve different groups of people and different notions of "amusement." Perched atop forested bluffs overhanging a gentle bend in the Potomac River, Glen Echo offered a cool, tree-shaded enclave convenient to Washington. Originally conceived as a bucolic but accessible retreat for the well-heeled, centered on dining, music, conversation, and the Potomac River, Glen Echo was later envisioned as a centerpiece for the Chautauqua movement – a cultural and educational experiment born of the late nineteenth century. But when facilities built for art, lectures, and other educational pursuits of "polite society" proved economically unviable, Glen Echo found new life (and business), by catering to the larger audience of the newly-minted middle class. Located at the end of a DC streetcar line, the trolley company purchased and gradually redeveloped the Park. For six decades, Glen Echo's pool, dances, rides and diversions lured large numbers of white, middle-class Washingtonians and their families on evenings and weekends. While many other trolley parks in the region did not survive the Great Depression, Glen Echo aggressively rebuilt, augmented and marketed its attractions to stay in business. In 1960, Glen Echo Park became a focus for protests against segregation. The picket lines and sit-in on Glen Echo's historic carousel organized by Washington students are an intricate part of the local and national social history.

Like most trolley parks, Glen Echo closed after losing too much business to television, air-conditioned movie theaters, and other auto-oriented amusements. In the late 1960s, the National Park Service purchased the property in order to protect the character of the Potomac River valley and surrounding historic sites. Since then, Glen Echo has returned to a more democratic version of its original mission, offering classes in art, crafts, dance, and other subjects to the local community, while the restored Dentzel Carousel harkens back to its days as an amusement park. Today, Glen Echo Park is a living part of Washington's history. It is a place where one can experience the broad historical changes in how urban American communities "have fun."
Survey number: HALS MD-17
Building/structure dates: ca. 1888 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: ca. 1891 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1911 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1934 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1955 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1966 Subsequent Work
Building/structure dates: ca. 1971 Subsequent Work
National Register of Historic Places NRIS Number: 84001850