Kalorama takes its name from a nineteenth-century private estate, not a planned neighborhood. The poet Joel Barlow owned that estate and called it Kalorama for its beautiful view, and the name stuck once embassies and freestanding mansions replaced his gardens. What never got built alongside those grand houses was a real neighborhood park. What residents have instead is three small, separately run fragments of green space, plus a grocery counter and a dining room that run the same way: one person, one lease, no chain behind them. This fall, one of those green fragments is scheduled for construction, while restoration of the other follows a separate funding timeline; the two are being handled through different arrangements.
The Three Pieces That Add Up to a Park
The closest thing Kalorama has to a central park sits at the intersection of Columbia Road, Kalorama Road, and 19th Street NW, a three-acre triangle that the DC Department of General Services and Department of Parks and Recreation jointly manage. A few blocks away, at the base of Connecticut Avenue where it meets Kalorama Road, a small traffic circle owned by the National Park Service functions as a second, much smaller green space, one the Park Service can't fully maintain on its own budget. And running between S Street and Decatur Place at 22nd Street is the third piece: the Spanish Steps, a public staircase that is technically its own park, since it is the only park in Washington that occupies a street.
None of the three answers to the same authority, and none of them was built at the same time or for the same reason. That matters this fall, because only the park project has construction scheduled.
The Park Is Being Fixed for the Second Time
Kalorama Park's current capital project addresses drainage and erosion on the sloped triangle, with a $2 million budget, a design phase that started in fall 2025, and construction slated to begin this fall, with Atmos listed as the contractor. That timeline lands right now, which is why any fencing or equipment staging near the Columbia and Kalorama corner this season isn't a random closure. It's a scheduled mobilization on a project that has moved from design into permitting, with construction next in line.
It's also not the first time DC has paid to fix this exact slope. A separate capital project completed by the summer of 2016 covered anti-erosion and soil remediation work for roughly $450,000, plus another $500,000 for plaza and landscaping improvements, close to $950,000 combined. A decade later, the city is returning to the same slope with a $2 million budget, more than double the earlier combined figure. The park sits where three streets converge, and this next phase builds on the earlier work to address run-off and erosion.
If you've noticed the playground and picnic lawn getting quieter or fenced this season, that's the mechanism behind it.
The Circle Nobody Assigned to One Office
A few blocks south, the small oasis where Connecticut Avenue meets Kalorama Road runs on a completely different clock. Because it sits on federal Park Service land with constrained federal budgets, the Rock Creek Conservancy has stepped in as a philanthropic partner rather than a contractor, restoring the planting bed according to a circa-1965 plan inspired by Lady Bird Johnson's beautification era. The Conservancy has put in roughly 500 daffodils and 125 hardy perennials, a mix of coneflower and aster, and replaced the shrubs behind the northwest-facing benches in the spring of 2022, following that same 1965 layout. The other sides of the circle are next, whenever funding allows.
There's no fixed construction start date here, no named contractor, no permitting milestone. It's donation-funded and moves at the pace of a small nonprofit's fundraising, which is a very different rhythm from the DGS project happening a short walk away.
The Steps Already Had Their One Rebuild
The Spanish Steps are the one fragment that isn't currently under repair, but they've already been through their version of it. Built in 1911 during the City Beautiful era to solve a literal grade problem (22nd Street between S Street and Decatur Place was too steep for carriages), the staircase was designed by architect Robert E. Cook with four levels and a lion-head fountain at the top. Severe erosion and a car collision eventually destroyed the original stone balustrade and fountain, and the whole structure was restored in 1999. The steps were listed on the National Register of Historic Places a decade earlier, in 1989, as a contributing feature of the Sheridan-Kalorama Historic District, which means the version on the register isn't quite the version standing there today. What you climb now is a late-twentieth-century reconstruction of a 1911 design.
That history is worth knowing if you assumed the fountain and railings were original. They're not, and the fact that Kalorama's most photographed piece of infrastructure already needed a full rebuild once says something about how fragile these small green spaces can be, whether a park, circle, or staircase.
The Same Pattern Shows Up at the Counter
Kalorama never got a retail strip either, and the two food destinations residents actually rely on follow the identical one-person-one-lease pattern as the green space.
At 2160 California St NW, in the former Opendoor Market space, chef Daniel Petitta, formerly the sous chef at two-Michelin-starred JÔNT, opened Kalorama Market as a grocer and deli, open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. He financed it himself and hand-tiled the counters with help from his wife's father. There's no rotating regional chain behind the register, just Petitta posting the day's hot meal to Instagram, whether that's a chicken scaloppine burger, wood-fired pizza, or lasagna, and locals lining up at the counter once the post goes live. Eater DC covered the opening as one of the season's notable debuts.
A few blocks over at 2132 Florida Ave NW sits Annabelle, restaurateur Ashok Bajaj's fine-dining room on the site that once held Restaurant Nora, the country's first certified organic restaurant. Chef Frank Ruta, who served three presidents as a White House chef before running Palena, leads the kitchen, and the ten-seat Bar Barlow is named for Joel Barlow, the same poet whose estate gave the neighborhood its name. Washingtonian named it one of the region's best restaurants for its consistency rather than novelty, which tracks with a neighborhood that doesn't turn over its anchors often.
Kalorama's food scene, like its green space, isn't a system. It's two people who bought or rented a specific address and built something around it.
What Changes By Winter
None of Kalorama's public life runs through a single office, and that's worth carrying into how you read the neighborhood this fall:
- Expect fencing and equipment mobilization near the Columbia Road and Kalorama Road corner of the park as the DGS drainage project moves from permitting into construction.
- Expect the daffodil beds at the Connecticut Avenue circle to keep filling in gradually, side by side over seasons, rather than all at once, since that project runs on conservancy donations rather than a capital budget.
- Expect the Spanish Steps to stay exactly as they are, since the version standing today already survived one full rebuild after a car took out the original balustrade and fountain in the twentieth century.
- Expect Kalorama Market's board to reset daily, with the day's meal decided by one chef and posted before the lunch rush.
A DGS contractor, a conservancy's donation fund, a 1999 restoration crew's stonework, and one chef posting to Instagram before noon. That's what actually holds Kalorama's daily life together, not a single park department or a single strip of shops.
If you're curious how these small, separately run pieces of the neighborhood fit into the bigger picture of life in Kalorama, the team at Kerry Fortune knows this corner of Northwest DC block by block and is glad to talk through what's changing this season.
