Drainage & Hardscape in Brookland, DC

Drainage in "Little Rome" on the combined sewer

Brookland has long been known as Little Rome. As clerics and religious men and women of different orders walked around in their religious robes, Brookland began to be called Little Rome, and between 1900 and 1940 more than 50 international Catholic institutions rented or owned property in the neighborhood, clustered around the Catholic University of America. The Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land — its large, well-appointed monastery completed in 1905 and known for its gardens and its reconstructions of sites sacred to Roman Catholics — anchors that identity along with the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, built between 1920 and 1959. That institutional cluster and the surrounding streetcar-suburb streets give Brookland a look all its own: detached Victorian and Queen Anne houses on their own lots, rather than the continuous rowhouse fronts of the inner Northeast neighborhoods nearer the tracks.

That older, detached housing sits over infrastructure of a particular kind. Brookland is inside DC's combined sewer system, where stormwater and sewage move through one pipe, and it falls within the Northeast Boundary (NEB) drainage area that DC Water is relieving with the Northeast Boundary Tunnel — a five-mile, 23-foot-diameter tunnel designed to collect, convey, and store combined-sewer overflows and to provide flood relief. DC Water names Brookland directly on the list of NEB neighborhoods, an area it describes as served by a combined sewer system with a long history of chronic flooding problems during storm events. When a combined line surcharges in a hard rain, the water has nowhere to go but up — which is how a September 10, 2020 storm sent sewage backups into basements across Northeast DC, with Brookland named among the neighborhoods that reported damage after severe flooding. Actaeon meets that with drainage built for a detached lot — intercepting runoff with French drains, re-cutting settled grades, extending downspouts past the foundation, and setting dry wells where the yard has to absorb what it can't shed.

Retaining walls, patios, and hardscape for a streetcar suburb

The detached, individually-built houses of an 1887-onward streetcar suburb come with the drainage quirks of their age: grades that have settled over more than a century, downspouts pointed at the foundation, and older retaining walls reaching the end of their service life. Actaeon rebuilds and installs retaining walls, patios, walkways, stone features, and driveways, and regrades around them so water sheds away from the house instead of pooling against it. On a Brookland lot, a retaining wall is not only a soil-holding structure — it also sets where surface water travels once it leaves the higher ground, which is why we plan the grade and the wall together rather than one after the other. A paver patio or a stone terrace on an older lot has to be pitched to shed water cleanly rather than trap it, and on the combined sewer that discipline matters twice over, because water kept moving on the surface is water that never has to test an overloaded pipe.

South Brookland lies within the Hickey Run watershed, a stream that drains to the Anacostia River; the neighborhood as a whole sits in the Anacostia River watershed, which covers most of the eastern half of Washington, DC. Landscaping, planting, and sod work round out the scope, knitting a rebuilt grade back into a lawn that holds through a hard rain instead of washing toward the street.

DC permits and the RiverSmart rebates in Brookland

Building and land-disturbance permits in the District are issued by the DC Department of Buildings (DOB) — there is no county permit office — with the Department of Energy & Environment (DOEE) reviewing the stormwater side. Reach DOB at (202) 671-3500. Confirm the specific requirements for a retaining wall or grading project with DOB before work begins.

Brookland is not a designated DC historic district, so there is no neighborhood-wide historic-review overlay on a typical hardscape or drainage project — though a handful of individually landmarked sites carry their own review. On the rebate side, sewershed decides eligibility. DOEE's RiverSmart Homes program offers rain barrels for a $100 copayment and free shade-tree planting to essentially any DC home, and RiverSmart Rewards can discount the stormwater fee for properties with qualifying green infrastructure — none of which depends on your sewershed. The larger permeable-pavers and re-vegetation rebate — up to $6,000 — is a different story: DOEE restricts it to homes within the MS4 sewershed, in Ward 7, or in Ward 8. Brookland is a combined-sewer neighborhood in Ward 5, so that $6,000 rebate is not available here — the rain-barrel, rain-garden, and RiverSmart Rewards paths are.

Brookland is one of many Northeast DC neighborhoods Actaeon serves; see the Washington, DC hub for full District coverage.

On a detached Victorian lot in Little Rome, sitting over a combined line that a hard rain can push past its limit, the real work starts before the first stone is set — reading how a century-old grade sheds its water, and rebuilding it so the storm leaves by the surface, not the basement.