See this post from David Ramos` Imaginary Terrain blog. (This post is from the Greater Greater Washington blog.)
I have included his map below titled "1857 Watercourses Against a Modern Map of Washington, DC."
You can see some waterways flowing through Bloomingdale.
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With all of the flooding in Bloomingdale, you would think that there would be *some* interest in this old map of streams in the District.
The stream branches in the Bloomingdale and Stronghold neighborhoods are branches of Tiber Creek which were all covered up in about the 1890s. Adolf Cluss, who designed the Eastern Market among many other structures in Washington, built the tunnel which put Tiber Creek underground below Florida Avenue. I have not been able to find out who put the branches north of Florida Avenue underground, but it may have been Cluss's team. There is one entrance to one of the tunnels on the grounds of the Park Place gated community, the branch that runs right under my house on Franklin Street and goes under the extreme SE corner of the McMillan Site, and continues under several houses in NE Bloomingdale. When we discussed Bloomingdale flooding with George Hawkins and originated the notion of storing stormwater in a couple McMillan cells, we discussed the fact that the Combined Sewer System in our area in fact includes these branches of Tiber Creek, and that moving them out of the sewer system would both daylight an interesting, historic creek and alleviate a good part of the flooding. George Hawkins was well aware of that but said that doing so was not within his budget or responsibility, though he loved the idea. There's a thesis written by a graduate architecture student some years back with a plan to daylight all of Tiber Creek, which is fascinating, but would involve some pretty considerable purchases of land, especially around the Florida Avenue and Constitution Avenue areas. Magnolia Plumbing has the contract with DC Water to periodically check and maintain those tunnels, but they said they could not give out maps or detailed information on the tunnels for security reasons -- the tunnels run right under the Capitol area and many mall-area federal buildings. According to a friend who spoke to one of the Magnolia Plumbing guys who went into a tunnel not too long ago to check on them, there are fish down there in the tunnels. All these branches of Tiber Creek come from headwaters at and near the duck ponds on the west side of the Soldiers' Home grounds, so I must presume the fish that are in those ponds are swimming right under my house! At some point nearby, likely near the corner of Evarts Street and North Capitol Street the Park Place tunnel must converge with the stormwater system, and further down it converges with the sewer system. But there are fish swimming in there at least as far as Evarts Street NE or so.
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