Qualla: St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.)

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Lyndon Johnson needed somewhere to think, he sometimes asked his Secret Service to drive him to a Gothic Revival church on E Street SW, three blocks from where the Department of Housing and Urban Development now stands. His daughter Luci had converted to Catholicism in 1965, attending Mass at St. Dominic Church with the Dominican friars she called her Little Monks. She asked them to pray for her father through the worst years of the Vietnam War, and Johnson - a Disciples of Christ Christian who never formally joined any Catholic church - would come too, sometimes for instruction with the friars, sometimes just to sit. He never converted. When he died in January 1973, a Catholic graveside service was said in his memory, at Luci's request. The church Johnson visited had survived an 1885 fire that gutted its interior, the 1950s urban renewal that demolished nearly every building around it, and a Supreme Court case (Berman v. Parker) that displaced four thousand families from the neighborhood and reshaped American property law.

Image: Farragutful | CC BY-SA 3.0

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): The Island

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margaret 1216, CC BY-SA 4.0. St. Dominic Church was founded in 1852 on land that had been in Catholic hands since at least 1735. Notley Rozier Young - a wealthy Catholic planter whose property included much of what is now Southwest Washington - inherited the parcel from his father, Benjamin Young, who had lo...

Image: Margaret 1216 | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): Fire and Stained Glass

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0. On the morning of March 12, 1885, fire broke out in the boiler room of the church basement shortly after ten o'clock. It worked its way up through the floor and into the sanctuary, eventually engulfing the altar. The church's engineer Florence McCauliff, the housekeeper Kate Duff...

Image: ajay_suresh | CC BY 2.0

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): Berman v. Parker

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margaret 1216, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1950s the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency designated most of Southwest Washington a 'blighted area' eligible for federal urban renewal. The plan would eventually displace more than four thousand families - the largest residential displacement in District his...

Image: Margaret 1216 | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): The Sherman Window

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Farragutful, CC BY-SA 3.0. Look closely at the sanctuary windows installed in 1875 and you find a small Civil War memorial hidden in plain view. The window of Saint Joseph, just to the right of the Sacred Heart above the altar, was a gift of Ellen Ewing Sherman. She was the daughter of Senator Thomas Ewing...

Image: Farragutful | CC BY-SA 3.0

St. Dominic Catholic Church (Washington, D.C.): What Survives

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margaret 1216, CC BY-SA 4.0. St. Dominic today is a small parish in a part of the city that has changed almost beyond recognition. The Department of Housing and Urban Development sits across the street. L'Enfant Plaza, the Brutalist megablock that replaced much of pre-1960 Southwest, looms a block north. The...

Image: Margaret 1216 | CC BY-SA 4.0