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| Parts of old Klingle road runs through Klingle Valley
park from Porter Street NW to Cortland Place NW, bordering the National
Park land on either side. There are other sections
that continue on the historic path of the road. The National Park Service
includes old Klingle road and Klingle Valley Park on its map of Rock Creek
National Park (327k)
rockcreeknp.pdf The section of Klingle Road closed to cars is a steep, narrow, winding, unlighted ½-mile road running between Woodley Road and Porter Street. There are no driveways intersecting the closed section. Even before it washed out, Klingle Road carried less than 2 percent of the traffic across Rock Creek Park. It had a traffic volume roughly equal that of the Zoo road that parallels it. It was never a vital east-west artery. |
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The pro-road group has made claims regarding the width of the road right of way, but the right-of-way dimensions have been well established by both DC and Federal agencies. See a map of the Right-of-way here.
Klingle road began life as Joshua Pierce's Road and was first laid out in 1831 as a connection between the owner's estate, Linnaean Hill (now Klingle Mansion), and Pierce's Mill Road (now Tilden St.) on the east. His prosperous arboretum on "Linnaean Hill" (named in honor of the famous Swedish botanist Carl von Linne, inventor of the system of binomial nomenclature for biological species) provided plants, trees and shrubs that were planted at the White House and the U .S. Capitol.
Klingle was an important road prior to the construction of the Connecticut Ave bridge in 1886. Keep in mind that there was virtually no uptown development prior to bridging Rock Creek gorge at Klingle, and at Calvert Street in 1891.
The reason was that Klingle Ford (see a pic) was one of the few places to cross Rock Creek north of what was then the city of Washington (which pretty much ended at Florida Ave), although the primary route was to the north up Pierce Mill road (Tilden).
Klingle became even less important as the Tilden and Porter Street bridges made travel across town safe and easy. Klingle road was a narrow winding road that served as a shortcut from Rock Creek Park under Connecticut Ave to the west side until 1990. It was closed because the roadbed had been ripped up by repeated stormwater flows over the road.
