The Park View Historic District is located in the northeastern area of the City of Portsmouth.

Annexed in 1894, the Park View Historic District was Portsmouth, Virginia’s first residential suburb north of the downtown commercial area. Electric streetcars, mass-produced building materials, and building and loan associations all contributed to the availability of affordable housing within the neighborhood, which was located on the outskirts of the city. The area developed in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century as the city of Portsmouth experienced tremendous commercial and industrial growth.

Portsmouth’s population grew from 12,000 in 1886 to 33,000 in 1910 as the city became one of Virginia’s major shipping, industrial, and population centers exporting products such as tobacco, coal and lumber. Many of the blue- and white-collar residents of Park View Historic District in Portsmouth, Virginia would have been employed by one of the seven steamship or nine railroad trunk lines whose base of operations were in Portsmouth or Norfolk or by the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Park View’s name is derived from the U.S. Naval Hospital park that is located east of the district and was the only publicly accessible park in the city at the time.

The Park View Historic District in Portsmouth, Virginia is built upon former farmland, including Alabama, the former Hatton family farm. It is bounded by Scott’s Creek to the west, the Elizabeth River to the north, London Boulevard to the south, and the U.S. Naval Hospital grounds to the east. The Park View National Register Historic District was established in 1984 and local review began the same year. (Courtesy of Portsmouth Department of Planning)