Near Northeast

Near Northeast is a neighborhood in Northeast Washington, D.C.. It is bounded by North Capitol Street to the west, Florida Avenue to the north, F Street to the south, and 15th Street to the east.

Once a patchwork of several different landowners' claims, most of the land had been ceded to one landowner, Notley Young, under the name of Youngsborough by the 1790s. Youngsborough was included shortly thereafter in the original survey of land for the new national capital, and Young and a few other landowners gave the land to the Federal government in exchange for a promise that Congress would divide the land into lots and return half of those lots to the original landowners.

Once the capital was created, streets were laid out in the grid system that Pierre L'Enfant had designed, with Florida Avenue (then known as Boundary Street) forming the northern border of the city. However, nearly all of the land remained undeveloped, used as farmland to cultivate fruits and vegetables for the fresh market in the more developed sections of the city. The land lots that were used for non-agricultural purposes in the early 19th century were mostly cemeteries.

In the 1830s, the B&O Railroad constructed its Washington Branch, which entered the city of Washington at roughly 9th and Boundary Streets and proceeded through the neighborhood to the downtown area. Its presence gradually led Old City to evolve into a working-class neighborhood: wood and coal yards appeared to serve the railroad and its terminals, with houses subsequently built for the employees of the railroad industries.

The neighborhood remained undeveloped and sparsely populated through the end of the 19th century, although by the 1890s, H Street NE was the eastern terminus of the Washington streetcar system (at 15th Street). Some minor commercial development therefore began to develop along H Street.

The area was also the site of Swampoodle Grounds, a baseball stadium which was the home of the Washington Nationals baseball club from 1886 to 1889, when the team folded.

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