Streets of Washington (Legacy Posts)

Jean Moran’s DC Restaurants of the 1940s – 1960s

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 21:32:00 +0000

Jean Moran (1898-1971) was a successful restaurateur who ran several eateries in Washington from the World War II years until she retired in 1965. Born Lillian Jean Conery in New Orleans, Louisiana, she favored atmospheric eateries with multiple, separately themed rooms. Eating at one of Moran’s restaurants was an immersive experience designed to uplift the spirit as much as satisfy the palate.

Postcard of the Stables Restaurant (author's collection).

One of Moran’s first ventures was a converted former horse stables at 2620 E Street NW in Foggy Bottom, known simply as The Stables. Before the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was built, several stables and horse-riding academies had buildings in that area. Moran—known as Jean Richards at the time—opened The Stables sometime in the early 1940s. During World War II, when gas rationing limited automobile use, she faced a disadvantage in that her quaint and charming inn was out of the way for most downtown visitors. She responded by outfitting an elegant Victorian-era coach drawn by a pair of bay horses to serve as an evening-hours shuttle between downtown hotels and her restaurant. The coach rides generated great publicity and added to the restaurant’s charm.

Stables Restaurant matchbook cover (author's collection).

Overcoming one wartime restriction did not address others, however. Moran was beleaguered by rationing restrictions. In 1943, the same year she married Barney Moran, her restaurant was barred by the Office of Price Administration from purchasing meats, fats or cheese until its overdrawn rationing account was balanced. Moran sought a “loan” of ration points to keep her in business until her account was balanced but was refused. She wrote a letter to the agency accusing it of “Gestapo methods.” “Thanks to your dictatorial attitude,” she wrote, “from a thriving, healthy, successful enterprise my business has deteriorated into sickliness.” If this didn’t satisfy the OPA, she suggested, “the Potomac is only a few feet away and it should be a simple matter…for you to shove me into the river and drown me.” The hardball tactic worked; the OPA reversed course and granted her the loan of ration points.

Nevertheless, her troubles were not over. In 1945, the OPA raided the restaurant, arrested Moran, and seized meat and cheese. Moran said it was “just like a kidnapping.” The OPA agents “just swooped into my kitchen without showing any badges or credentials whatever.” Finally, in 1949 the government shut the place down for failure to pay taxes. Moran protested the seizure in a telegram to President Truman, but to no avail. Furnishings were auctioned off, and the building was leased to Howard Johnson’s, which used it as a supply depot.

Old New Orleans matchbook cover (author's collection).

Despite the loss of The Stables, Moran had another venture underway. In September 1940, she opened the Old New Orleans restaurant at 1404 18th Street NW. Within a year, the eatery moved to 1214 Connecticut Ave NW, south of Dupont Circle, where it would remain for more than a decade. The Old New Orleans was Moran’s homage to her hometown, featuring separate Hunt, Latin Quarter, and Continental rooms. Psychic Roberta Robbins was on hand to tell your fortune during evening entertainment, and on the third floor the orchestra played dance music at the Chateau Internationale. While Moran soon moved on to other ventures, the Old New Orleans remained for many years a well-known nightspot, featuring top drawer entertainment, including French singer Hélène François.

Old New Orleans postcard (author's collection).

Singer Hélène François pictured on an Old New Orleans postcard (author's collection).

In 1955, Moran took over the former Wise Funeral Home at 2900 M Street NW in Georgetown and turned into the ultra-chic L’Espionage restaurant, a full year before the Rive Gauche opened. Restaurants like L’Espionage and Rive Gauche marked the arrival of a new era of fine French dining in Washington and established Georgetown as a dining destination for the first time in the modern era. L’Espionage featured four separate rooms seating about 40 each. The Diplomacy Room, decorated in rich red velvet, and the Intrigue Room, in black and white, were on the ground floor. Above was the Attic, said to have a Charles Addams look, and in the basement was the Underground, where one could dine by candlelight in an old brick cellar and pretend to be a James Bond character. Moran told the Washington Post she came up with the room names “because local papers feature so much cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

L'Espionage matchbook cover (author's collection).

By 1964, the Evening Star’s dining critic John Rosson was able to say, “L’Espionage has always been looked upon as one of THE places to go. Both the food and the décor—to say nothing of the Parisian air—place it high on many lists.” The occasion of Rosson’s column was the sale of the restaurant to another veteran D.C. restaurateur, Gusti Buttinelli, who promptly lowered some of the eatery’s steep prices. The gambit apparently didn’t work; he closed the restaurant about a year later.

Pages from a L'Espionage menu (author's collection).

Meanwhile, Jean Moran had started another dining spot across the street at 2915 M Street. Opened in 1961, the Rue Royale once again harkened back to Moran’s beloved New Orleans. Said critic Rosson, “The Rue Royale, as tasteful a display of regal New Orleans as we’ve ever seen, can be described in two words: ultra elegant. You know you’re dining out. It’s an occasion. You’re dining in splendor.” Smaller than L’Espionage, Rue Royale sat 90 in three rooms. First was the Shell, a barroom decked out in black leather, dark walnut paneling, and hung with gold-framed portraits of old Louisiana families. Second was the main dining room, called the Chartreuse Room, and finally the Larder, a clubroom intended primarily for men. The menu had just four choices, each a complete meal, including ice cream for dessert.

Rue Royale matchbook cover (author's collection).

Jean Moran retired from the restaurant business in 1965, when the Rue Royale closed. She died from a heart attack six years later, at age 73.

The Tally-Ho, nee White Peacock, a Classic Washington Tearoom

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 12:41:00 +0000

In the 19th century, restaurants were a male bastion, places established by and for men where they could socialize among themselves—eat, drink, and smoke—without having to worry about behaving properly in mixed company. Women were largely shut out, except for designated rooms separate from the main dining areas where they could eat only if accompanied by a husband or other male chaperon. By the beginning of the 20th century, a radical transformation occurred, leading to a much more casual and welcoming environment. Much of this transformation can be attributed to the aesthetic and social choices of pioneering women who opened tearooms in the 1910s and 1920s, eateries that influenced both the cuisine and the décor of restaurants for decades to come. Tearooms were informal, bohemian places, often designed and operated independently by women and set in old farmhouses, mills, or stables. The tearoom concept emphasized light, alcohol-free, casual eating and socializing in a cozy, home-like setting.

The Tally-Ho Restaurant as seen on a 1950s postcard (author's collection).

One of the more successful tea houses of the era was at 812 17th Street NW, a block south of Farragut Square and near the White House. It was founded as the White Peacock by Betty Sample Williams (1883-1957), a native Washingtonian who had opened the Purple Iris Inn teahouse around 1917 in her farmhouse at 32nd and Rittenhouse Streets NW in Chevy Chase DC. In 1922, Williams hooked up with two artist friends, Blanche Greer and Dorothy Swinburne McNamee, to acquire the old stables behind an historic house at 812 17th Street NW.

The Shellabarger mansion is at the center of this 1919 real estate map excerpt showing the west side of 17th Street between H and I Streets NW. The mansion has a "(31)" on it, and the stables are the building at the rear of the very long lot. Notice the empty garden space alongside the lot (Library of Congress).

The house was the former home of Judge Samuel Shellabarger (1817-1896), an Ohio congressman during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, who was best known for authoring the Enforcement Act of 1871, designed to combat Ku Klux Klan attacks on African Americans in the south. The Shellabarger mansion was on the earlier homesite of Judge Buckner Thruston (1763-1845), an early Kentucky senator and federal circuit court judge, who had planted a famous locust tree in the yard that lived well into the 20th century. While the house fronted on 17th Street, a long side lot featured an extensive garden stretching back to the substantial stables building on the rear alley. The stables included horse stalls on the ground floor as well as a second-floor hay loft and an attic above it, all accessible by ladders. As originally configured, the two artists used the loft and attic for their studios, while Williams ran the White Peacock on the ground floor. The teahouse opened on Valentine’s Day 1922.

1950s postcard view of the path from 17th Street that led to the stables (author's collection).

Patrons followed the old brick path through the garden back to the former stables, which were painted in the pea-green shades that were very fashionable for tearooms. The tearoom sported accoutrements from the old White House stables, including a saddle said to have been owned by Dolley Madison. Like the nearby Iron Gate Inn, the White Peacock converted its horse stalls into dining booths. Betty Williams drew praise for creating “perhaps the most artistic teahouse in Washington,” according to the Washington Times-Herald, but after a few months she and her artist friends moved on. Williams became a student of interior decorating in Paris, turning the White Peacock over to Miss Kathleen Evans, a friend with past connections to the Wilson administration.

An American Restaurant magazine reviewer wrote in July 1926 of her delight in dining at the White Peacock: “Shortly a maid comes in with a tray of the most delicious things to eat. She hands you a fringed bit of ecru that matches the fringed linen runner on the table. How you revel in the tall glass of Russian tea, iced and spiced with mint and such things, frozen fruit salad, hot biscuits and a parfait! Your check is presented on a seashell!” Patrons liked the feeling of being transported into the rural past even though they were on a downtown block near the White House. By that time, the loft spaces formerly occupied by the artists had been converted for use by the teahouse, and Georgia-born Ruth Portillo was its latest manager.

Matchbook covers from the Tally-Ho (author's collection).

The following year a notice in the Washington Times observed that Mrs. James M. Haley and Mrs. Ralph D. Pendexter had redecorated and were reopening the tearoom as the Tally-Ho Tavern. Within two years, they turned it over to Marie Mount (1888-1957) and her University of Maryland colleague Adele Stamp. Mount was dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Home Economics, and the Tally-Ho Tavern was just one of several teahouses she ran, another being the nearby Iron Gate Inn, which also had been converted from an old stables. In 1929, a fire in the second-floor kitchen of the Tally-Ho damaged that room as well as the second-floor Saddle Room, but prized possessions including as the Dolley Madison saddle, were spared, according to newspaper accounts.

More postcard photos of the Tally-Ho in the 1950s (author's collection).

By 1930, the Tally-Ho was a well-known establishment with many loyal customers. It remained in business for three more decades, acquiring the old Shellabarger mansion itself for additional dining space. Government officials and local celebrities were said to be among the many who frequented the Tally-Ho in its heyday. Then in 1959, the entire property was sold to a developer. The restaurant quietly closed and was razed and replaced by a nondescript office building, which in turn was replaced by another office building in 2008. Weschler’s held an auction in July 1959 to sell “everything that could be moved from the restaurant,” according to an article in the Post. No mention was made of Dolley Madison’s saddle or the other antique White House stable gear that had once graced the tearoom’s walls.

At the time the restaurant closed, its operator was Indiana-born Hubert H. Keller (1881-1963), dubbed the “dean” of Washington restaurateurs. Keller had presided over the Tally-Ho since arriving in Washington in 1930—almost 30 years, far longer than any of his predecessors. On his death in 1963, the Post and the Star both gave Keller full credit for “opening” the Tally-Ho in 1930. The Star even claimed Keller was the one who converted Buckner Thruston’s old stables to create the restaurant. No mention was made of the risk-taking women who had been the real pioneers, creating this and most of Washignton's other historic tearooms.

Front cover of a Tally-Ho menu from 1957. Click to enlarge. (Author's collection).

Tally-Ho menu from 1957. Click to enlarge. (Author's collection).

The back of the 1957 menu. Click to enlarge. (Author's collection).

Luther Place Memorial Church, 150 years on Thomas Circle

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 17:41:00 +0000

Beautifully situated on a triangular lot at the north end of Thomas Circle, the Luther Place Memorial Church, known formally as the Memorial Evangelical Lutheran Church, has stood as an emblem of social harmony for almost a century and a half. Conceived at the close of the Civil War as a memorial to reconciliation between North and South, the church went beyond that in later decades to broadly embrace reconciliation between whites and Blacks, rich and poor, haves and have-nots. And while virtually every other building around Thomas Circle has been replaced in the past 150 years, the Luther Place Memorial Church remains little changed.

Luther Place Memorial Church (photo by the author).

The church was an offshoot of St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church, the first English-speaking Lutheran church in Washington, founded in 1843 at 11th and H Streets NW. (Since 1958, St. Paul’s has been at 4900 Connecticut Ave NW.) St. Paul’s pastor was the Rev. John George Butler (1826-1909), a charismatic leader who was one of the city’s most influential clergymen. Born in Cumberland, Maryland, and taught at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Butler was a staunch abolitionist and pacifist. On graduating from the seminary in 1849, he was immediately assigned to St. Paul’s. During the Civil War, he served as a hospital chaplain, witnessing firsthand how devastating the war was to wounded soldiers recuperating in the District. He later was also chaplain to the Senate and to the House of Representatives.

Photo of Rev. Butler from Samuel Domer, History of St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church 1843-1893.

After the war, Butler came up with the idea of creating a new memorial church to commemorate the end of slavery and the country’s reconciliation. In March 1866, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church purchased a lot for the memorial just north of the 14th Street Circle for $8,000. It would take some years to raise the money for the new building, but in 1868 a small chapel was dedicated on the north end of the lot as a starting point. From 1868 to 1873, Rev. Butler had charge of the new chapel in addition to his main congregation.

An architect by the name of Judson York prepared a soaring design for the new memorial church. Although the details are unknown, the design as actually constructed was modified by two other architects to save money. The cornerstone was laid October 31, 1870, at which time Rev. Butler reported that he had almost $30,000 on hand for construction of the new building, most of it from St. Paul’s congregation but with additional contributions from “all parts of the country.”

In January 1873, Butler announced that he would form a separate congregation for the new church, quitting his post at St. Paul’s. About a quarter of St. Paul’s congregants followed him to the new congregation. Meanwhile, the building itself was nearing completion. Faced in Seneca sandstone from nearby Maryland, it was an imposing sight in the still sparsely developed neighborhood north of Massachusetts Avenue. In June 1874, the new church was dedicated, the National Republican newspaper taking the opportunity to provide an admiring description:

The memorial is located upon the triangular lot formed by the intersection of Fourteenth and N streets with Vermont avenue. It is the most commanding church site in the city, lying immediately adjacent to the Memorial circle [now Thomas Circle], so tastefully improved under Gen. Babcock. While in the Memorial, built of brown stone, quarry face and dressed lines, the Gothic architecture largely predominates, the capacious structure is so mixed and broken as to be probably the most unique church building in the United States….
The audience chamber is in the shape of an open fan, adapted to the triangular shape of the lot. It has five wide entrances in the chief towers, which yet need their fine spires to complete them…. All the inside work—galleries, pews, altar and pulpit—is of the best Indiana walnut, displaying fine taste and skill in the design and workmanship…. The whole is carpeted and cushioned in green of best qualities, each pew being furnished with book-racks and books of worship….

Detail from a late 1870s stereoview image of the 14th Street Circle, before the statue of Maj. Gen. George Thomas was installed. The Luther Place Memorial Church is finished except for the spires on the towers. (Author's collection.)

By 1876, the congregation had grown from 50 to almost 200. The building was complete except for the spires atop the three towers, which were finally added in 1883 when George Ryneal, a local dealer in artists’ supplies and church vestryman, paid for their construction.

The church gained its informal title, Luther Place Memorial Church, after a statue of Luther was erected in front of the church in 1884 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the reformer’s birth. The statue is a copy of one in Worms, Germany.

Statue of Martin Luther (photo by the author).

In January 1904, while a reception was being held in the old chapel at the rear of the building for Rev. Butler’s 78th birthday, a fire broke out in the main auditorium. The blaze began high up in the rafters above a chandelier. After it was discovered, congregants could do little but watch and wait for the fire department, which was hampered by snow and ice. The roof, main steeple, organ, and stained-glass windows were all destroyed. The steeple, in particular, made for a dramatic spectacle: “The tower reared high its stately head, and all its expanse was sheeted with flame. Flames leaped out into the air, and flames wreathed themselves about the slender structure in strange, bizarre figures. The light was reflected from the snow-covered roofs of the surrounding buildings, glaring white against the darkness of the night,” the Washington Post reported. The spire and roof both collapsed, but Rev. Butler assured everyone the church was insured and would be repaired. It was. President Theodore Roosevelt attended its rededication in January 1905.

Postcard view of the church from around 1910. (Author's collection).

The church has a long history of outreach to support those in need. In 1889, Butler opened a free eye, ear, and throat clinic in the chapel building for “the needy poor of all denominations.” His older son, Dr. William K. Butler, a physician, ran the clinic. By the 1890s, the church added recreational facilities—a gymnasium and bowling alley. Through the years since that time, the church has continued to expand its offerings. After the civil unrest following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, the church remained open continuously for three days to offer shelter, food, and clothing to more than 10,000 people who had been displaced along the 14th Street corridor. Black Muslims even stood guard to protect the building from those who wanted to add it to the many structures that had been torched.

Postcard view of the church from the 1960s, when there were apparently no street trees around it. (Author's collection).

In the 1970s, the church purchased six dilapidated townhouses on N Street for its Luther Place Ministry, a program to provide medical care, food, clothing, and shelter for unhoused women. In 1987, the church partnered with the Washington Urban League to open an additional center focused on healthcare for the unhoused aged. The church’s efforts, now known as the N Street Village, have since expanded to additional facilities and offer a continuum of services, including addiction recovery, mental health services, and vocational and employment assistance.

The main tower up close (photo by the author).

The church building itself has been renovated several times since the 1904 fire, including in 1940 when the interior of the main tower was reconfigured. In 2007, the sanctuary was rehabilitated and new front windows were installed portraying Martin Luther, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Harriet Tubman. Paintings of several other saints were installed on the church’s doors in 2009, adding touches of bright color to the building’s somber sandstone façade.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included the Luther Place Memorial Church’s website, the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the church written by T. Robins Brown in 1973; Samuel Domer, History of St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church 1843-1893 (1893); James M. Goode, Washington Sculpture (2008); Garrett Peck, The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry (2013); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); and numerous newspaper articles.

Pianos and the Golden Age of DC Music Stores

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 12:33:00 +0000

The sale of pianos is now a distinctly niche enterprise, but it used to form a major part of the retail industry in downtown Washington. First appearing on Pennsylvania Avenue, piano stores migrated with other retail businesses to the F Street area in the 1890s, eventually forming their own music district centered on G Street between 12th and 13th Streets. This is their story.

Music has always been an essential element of home entertainment. In the 18th century, young women from well-to-do families would be expected to demonstrate their social graces by performing for guests, either by singing or playing a musical instrument, and pianos became the instrument of choice. Playing the piano demonstrated multiple skills—not just raw musical talent but also training in reading music. Such skills and graces were beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest families, accentuating their elite status.

German-born Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz plays the piano for President Rutherford B. Hayes and family. (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, April 3, 1880, via Library of Congress).

All of that changed in the 19th century as the piano became a universal emblem of middle class values and prosperity. Most importantly, the family piano served as a courting ground for young women (who generally abandoned it once they were married). It was a substantial investment for most households but not a prohibitive one as household incomes began to increase. American industrialists improved the durability and quality of pianos with the introduction of cast iron frames, turning out tens of thousands of pianos every year. By 1900, a million pianos were in American homes. What as once a symbol of the elite had become a ubiquitous household appliance.

Many white Americans had their first taste of African American culture through piano music. Scott Joplin and other Black artists brought ragtime, a new kind of piano music, to the American public. While the majority of piano households were white, well-to-do African American homes had them too. As a boy, Washington's Duke Ellington famously dreaded the piano lessons his parents insisted he take, tiring of having to practice every day. It paid off.

And for those without the Duke's talents, there was an easy way to avoid learning how to play: install a piano in your home that played music on its own. The "pianola," as the player piano was often called, grew increasingly ubiquitous after American engineer Edwin Scott Votey patented an instrument under that name in 1897. Until phonograph records became widely available in the 1910s, many music lovers brought home music rolls from local stores to play on their home pianolas.

Metzerott, Droop, and the Pennsylvania Avenue pioneers

In the 1830s and 1840s, several bookstores on Pennsylvania Avenue began offering sheet music and musical instruments, including pianos. By the early 1850s, the first two stores devoted exclusively to music appeared on the avenue: the Hilbus & Hitz Music Depot at 11th Street and the Richard I. Davis Music Store between 9th and 10th Streets.

Advertisement for W.G. Metzerott from the December 12, 1856 edition of The Evening Star.

Many 19th century piano dealers were German Americans, products of Germany's extensive musical conservatory system and its celebrated instrument manufacturing companies. William G. Metzerott (1831-1884) was one. Metzerott learned the piano making trade in Hildburghausen, his hometown, and came to the U.S. at age 18. He first settled in New York City, where he worked alongside the Steinway brothers in the piano firm of Bacon & Raven. In 1856, Metzerott moved to Washington to take over George Hilbus' store on Pennsylvania Avenue at 11th Street NW. Metzerott eventually opened a large recital hall on the second floor over his store. Metzerott Hall became an important venue for concerts, lectures, and other social events in the decades after the Civil War.

1896 letterhead from the Metzerott Music Company, depicting its later locations (author's collection).

During the war, Metzerott took in a future partner, Edward F. Droop (1837-1908), whose name would become one of the best known in the Washington music business. Born in Osnabrück, Germany, Droop arrived in America in 1857, first working as a tobacconist in Baltimore. Moving to Washington to stay with an uncle, he started working for Metzerott. He lived nearby on 10th Street, just a few doors down from Ford's Theatre, and was on the scene of the Lincoln assassination shortly after it transpired, keeping for the rest of his life a small cluster of flowers and swatch of red wallpaper from the President's box. A large and gregarious man sporting mutton chops that would put Chester A. Arthur to shame, Droop was also a committed bodybuilder ever ready to boast of his personal feats of physical strength.

Edward F. Droop (Source: The Washington Journal, November 13, 1897 via Library of Congress).

By 1867, Droop became a partner in Metzerott's business, working side by side with him for the next 18 years. That year he married Sophia Schmidt of Trenton, New Jersey, a talented young singer who had been contemplating a career as a concert vocalist before marrying Droop. Sophia, known as Sophie, was the younger sister of Rosa Cluss, the wife of celebrated architect Adolf Cluss. Within the tight-knit local German community, it was the Clusses who introduced Droop to Sophie. In addition to bearing two sons with Edward, Sophie charmed Washingtonians as an amateur choral singer. Tragically, in 1874 she died from tuberculosis at just 29 years old. The Washington Saengerbund performed at her funeral at Oak Hill Cemetery, with hundreds in attendance.

The Droop store on Pennsylvania Avenue, circa 1887. (Source: Library of Congress)

After Metzerott died in 1884, Droop inherited the music store, fending off a legal challenge from Metzerott's widow. Henrietta Metzerott and her sons subsequently opened a separate Metzerott's store on F Street, while Droop continued at the Pennsylvania Avenue address under his own name. Droop's Music House became one of the best known DC stores and a major dealer in Steinways and other pianos. "Every American Citizen should have a piano in his home," declared a 1907 Droop's advertisement. "Years ago, this was a luxury; now it is almost a necessity." At the time of Droop's death in 1908, his store was said to be the oldest continually operating commercial store on the avenue. His sons Edward H.—an accomplished musician—and Carl continued the business for many more years, at least into the 1940s, eventually adding a second store at 13th and G Streets NW.

Washington's piano merchants faced stiff competition from out-of-towners like New York-based Freeborn G. Smith, who sold Bradbury pianos at 1103 Pennsylvania Avenue (author's collection).

De Moll and Juelg: The Rise of G Street

In the early 1900s, music stores had begun to clusters in the blocks around F, G, 12th, and 13th Streets NW, largely abandoning Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the dealers to set up shop here was Otto J. De Moll (1878-1942), a DC native who got an early start in the music business. In 1902, at age 24, he took over Henry White's music store at 1231 G Street NW, just as piano sales were reaching their peak years across the nation. A 1904 advertisement in The Washington Post, called De Moll "one of the youngest, yet oldest in point of experience, in the business." Four years later, De Moll needed more room and commissioned a new, four-story building on the southwest corner of 12th and G Streets to house his growing store.

In 1909, Otto J. De Moll's piano store moved into this new building, designed by B. Stanley Simmons, on the southwest corner of 12th and G Streets NW. (Author's collection).

Designed by B. Stanley Simmons, one of Washington's best architects, the new building provided space on the first floor for baby grands and art-case (highly decorated) pianos as well as mahogany-paneled offices for transacting business. The second and third floors housed player pianos and square pianos, while the top floor was for music rolls. Customers could try out the rolls on player pianos in a soundproof room. The repair department was also on the fourth floor. All floors were serviced by a "modern combination electric passenger and freight elevator." The company prospered at this location, remaining in business until the 1950s.

Etching of the Juelg Piano Company store at 13th and G Streets NW, from a business card (author's collection).

At the other end of the same block, another piano entrepreneur soon set up shop. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Harry H. Juelg (1875-1953) was a salesman who tried his hand at a variety of products. In 1900, he co-owned a bicycle shop in Peoria, but within a few years he moved to Washington, where he jumped into the red-hot player piano business, selling new and used pianos at 1206 G St NW, across the street from De Moll's. His firm grew to some 50 employees, prompting the construction of a new, four-story store on the northeast corner of 13th and G Streets NW, in 1912. In addition to player pianos, Juelg sold sheet music and piano rolls from this store, claiming it was the largest piano roll exchange in the south. But the Juelg Company was destined to be short-lived. Juelg sold the store in 1915 and moved to Baltimore, where he became a manager in the Maryland Piano Company and later an automobile salesman.

Jordan and Kitt

Far more lasting in his impact on the local piano industry was the man who bought Juelg's business, Arthur Jordan (1855-1934). Jordan an out-of-towner who visited Washington frequently as an adult but only lived here briefly as a child. Born in Madison, Indiana, Jordan considered Indianapolis his hometown. During the Civil War, his father worked for the government, bringing his family temporarily to Washington before moving back to Indianapolis. As a young man, Arthur Jordan worked in an Indiana subscription book sales company. He rose to become its owner, then branched out into many other businesses, from poultry and refrigerated transportation to banking and insurance. By the 1920s, he was a wealthy man with business interests primarily in Indianapolis and New York. After dying in a Park Avenue apartment in New York City in 1934, Jordan was brought home to Indianapolis for burial, the local newspapers hailing him as one of their most prominent financiers and philanthropists.

Jordan would come to Washington to visit his sister, and he began investing in real estate here in the 1910s. In 1912, he was the owner of the new building being constructed for the Juelg Piano Company. He took the next step in 1915, jumping into the piano business by buying out the Juelg company as well as another nearby piano store run by George Kennedy. By 1917 Jordan had consolidated the two in the former Juelg building under the new name of the Arthur Jordan Piano Company.

Crowds form outside the Homer L. Kitt store in this undated photo from the 1930s (author's collection).

Jordan called on an old friend, Homer L. Kitt (1880-1944), who was running a music store in Chicago, to come to Washington and take over management of the Jordan store. Born in Huntington, Indiana, Kitt began his career in a piano factory there. He seems to have been an excellent manager, the Arthur Jordan Piano Company prospering under his watch. In 1922, the company purchased another G Street rival, the DC branch of Knabe Warerooms, Inc., located at 1330 G Street NW. Knabe was a venerable piano manufacturer with roots going back to 1835, when German immigrant William Knabe founded the company in Baltimore.

Kitt personally took over operations of the former Knabe store, rechristening it the Homer L. Kitt Company. Though the Jordan and Kitt stores were both owned by Jordan, they appeared to be rivals, selling different brands of pianos and undoubtedly gaining more business overall than if the two stores had been merged. Their separate sales forces were said to be fierce rivals of each other. The Kitt store, originally sporting an elaborate Spanish Revival facade, was seriously damaged in a fire in September 1938 that was determined to be arson. After the store was rebuilt, it featured a stylish Art Deco look.

Postcard showing the rebuilt Kitt's Music Store (author's collection).

In 1949, the Jordan Company took a much more dramatic step, replacing its store with a slender, nine-story “skyscraper,” designed by the firm of Donald S. Johnson and Harold L. Boutin. The streamlined, International-style structure wrapped around the corner in a smooth curve, its limestone façade looking distinctly out of place as it shot up from the surrounding motley assortment of older commercial structures. Five of the ten floors contained pianos, but at this point Jordan also devoted considerable space to radios, phonographs, and televisions. Kitt's did the same.

Postcard of the new Jordan Piano Company building, which replaced the former Juelg building at 13th and G Streets NW in 1949 (author's collection).

Piano sales had begun to plummet in the 1920s. More than half of all piano sales in 1910 had been player pianos, but those sales evaporated after the advent of radio and the proliferation of phonographs. The last American player piano was manufactured in 1932. Although the golden age of pianos had ended, Jordan's and Kitt's continued in business. The Arthur Jordan Foundation, which owned both, finally merged them into Jordan-Kitt's in 1968. The store at 1330 G Street was the last music store operating in downtown Washington when it closed in 1986. It was not the end of the Jordan-Kitt's Music Company, however. The firm continues to do business to this day with four locations in Maryland and Virginia.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included: Gerald Carson, “The Piano in the Parlor,” American Heritage (Dec 1965); Rachael Christian, "William Metzerott and the D.C. Music Trade," Washington History (Fall 2016); James Parakilas et al., Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (1999); Frank H. Pierce III, The Washington Saengerbund: A History of German Song and German Culture in the Nation's Capital (1981); Adolf Cluss: From Germany to America - Edward F. Droop House; and numerous newspaper articles.

Brookland's Lost Sidney Estate: Thomas Jefferson Slept Here

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 11:26:00 +0000

A grassy knoll on the campus of the Catholic University of America, just to the northwest of the university's main library, is the site where one of the city's most historic country farmhouses once stood. Called Sidney by its owners, Samuel Harrison Smith and his wife Margaret Bayard Smith, the estate became a cherished refuge from the dirt and grime of the early capital city and an early social center. Margaret saw her country residence as a place to preserve "this sweet glow of the soul." The stolid house would survive more than a century and a half, weathering two wars and eventually being subsumed into CUA as a relic of the past, the city growing rapidly around it.

Circa 1920 postcard view of St. Thomas Hall at the Catholic University of America. The original 1804 "Sidney" farmhouse is in the center part of the building (author's collection).

Samuel Harrison Smith (1772-1845) had just married Margaret Bayard (1778-1844), his second cousin, when the couple moved to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1800. Samuel, a native of Philadelphia, had ventured into the publishing business with a small newspaper, The New World, that faced much competition in Philadelphia and made little money. Smith was well connected, however. He had become close friends with Thomas Jefferson when he served as secretary of the American Philosophical Society in 1798 while Jefferson was its president. Jefferson urged Smith to move to Washington City to start a newspaper to support the Democratic-Republican Party (then called simply the Republican Party), which Jefferson, Albert Gallatin and others had formed in opposition to the Federalists, who had controlled the government up to that time. Smith, who would remain steadfastly loyal to Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, agreed to the idea. He seems to have been persuaded that his new paper would face little competition in the fledgling national capital. The result was The National Intelligencer, which would go on to become the city's newspaper of record for many decades to come.

Though Samuel and Margaret would live the rest of their lives in Washington, Margaret was disheartened when the young couple arrived at what seemed like a frontier outpost in 1800. They lived in a modest, newly finished house on New Jersey Avenue on Capitol Hill that Samuel rented along with another new building for his print shop.

In 1804, the Smiths purchased a 160-acre tract known as Turkey Thicket in Washington County (the part of the District outside the original L'Enfant city). The farm was located at a fork in the quiet country road that ran northeast as an extension of North Capitol Street (now Lincoln Road NE and part of Michigan Avenue NE). The Smiths renamed the estate Sidney, for Algernon Sidney, a revered theorist of republicanism beheaded in England in 1683. They soon built a country cottage on the site.

Margaret loved the place, writing to her sisters:

"At five this afternoon we got a hack, and visited our retreat. I shall not pretend now to describe it. All I will say is that I am delighted with it. A good house on top of a high hill, with high hills all around it, embower'd in woods, thro' an opening of which the Potomack, its shores and Mason Island are distinctly seen. I have never been more charmingly surprised than on seeing this retreat, but enough of it by and by. We go there Wednesday.... When I get among my little mountains and towering woods, I shall write you wonderful letters...."

As she predicted, Margaret thoroughly enjoyed her time at Sidney, even if it was primarily in the warmer months and often without Samuel, who continued to be consumed with work on the Intelligencer. She became a writer, penning novels and children's books at Sidney. The couple entertained many visitors, including good friend Thomas Jefferson, who likely stayed the night on at least one occasion, as well as Henry Clay and his wife Lucretia, with whom Margaret had become fast friends. James and Dolley Madison also visited, as did William and Anna Maria Thornton, and Albert and Hannah Gallatin. Margaret's letters describing the many social events the Smiths attended form an important commentary on early Washington society.

This sketch of Sidney first appeared in the November 13, 1889, edition of The Evening Star.

Samuel eventually grew weary with the newspaper business and sold the Intelligencer in 1810 to his protégé, Joseph Gales. Margaret was delighted to have more time with him at Sidney, where she insisted his health improved. She wrote her sister, "Oh how I rejoice that we have thrown anchor into the beautiful haven of private life." The respite was brief, however; Smith turned to finance, joining the Bank of Washington as a director. In 1813, President James Madison appointed him as the first commissioner of revenue of the Treasury Department, and in 1814 he became Secretary of the Treasury.

As the British marched on Washington on August 24, 1814, the Smiths were warned by a neighbor boy that the enemy was near: "The enemy are advancing, our own troops are giving way on all sides and retreating to the city. Go, for God's sake, go." The couple hurriedly hid valuables in the cellar and fled to Brookeville, Maryland. Soon after the battle, they returned with trepidation at what damage they might discover but found all was quiet. They encountered a broken and abandoned cannon and met a few straggling soldiers passing across their grounds. One, who was standing with his musket at their front gate, asked if he could have a drink of water. Otherwise, the only damage was from the violent summer storm that had wrecked fences and trees. Margaret wrote that "Hundreds, I may say thousands of our flying troops pass'd thro our farm after the engagement. The English got within half a mile of us and have plunder'd our neighbors on the adjoining farms,—the intervening wood hid us from them." Separately, she noted that "The battle was very near to us. In the next farm, there was skirmishing, and 10 dead bodies were found..."

The Smiths finally sold Sidney in 1839, and in 1844 James Middleton and his son Erasmus J. Middleton (1804-1882) purchased a 62-acre portion of the estate, including the Smith house. Erasmus Middleton, said to be a quiet and gentle soul, was clerk of the D.C. Criminal Court for over 30 years, spending his whole career at the court. After his father James died in 1869, Erasmus lived on the estate with his wife Ellen, their son and daughter, and as many as seven enslaved individuals, who worked the fields. According to a 1987 report on historic resources in Brookland, the Middletons ran their estate as a working farm, powered virtually entirely by enslaved labor. One enslaved man, Augustus "Gusty" Shaw, was described in 1862 emancipation records as an "excellent farmer, gardener, and marketeer" who had overseen the operations of the entire Middleton farm since 1857. Erasmus Middleton also undertook the first of several major additions to the original house built by the Smiths, adding an eastern wing with a covered veranda.

Sketch of the entry hall of the Sidney farmhouse, from The Evening Star, November 13, 1889.

The Civil War once again brought soldiers to the area, although no military engagements took place. (Fort Stevens in Brightwood was the only D.C. fort to see action, when Confederate General Jubal Early unsuccessfully attacked Washington from the north in July 1864.) The ring of forts that protected Washington City ran directly through the Middleton farm, with Fort Slemmer located a few hundred yards to the northwest of the house and Fort Bunker Hill less than a mile to the east. Fort Slemmer was a small earthen redoubt equipped with four cannon. Its greatest impact to the Middleton farm came from the clearing of trees to improve sight lines and from the poorly disciplined volunteer soldiers of the 2nd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery, who occasionally foraged from Middleton farm animals and who, with much idle time on their hands, brawled incessantly among themselves.

Erasmus Middleton died in 1882, and four years later his widow, Ellen Middleton, sold the farm to a group of Roman Catholic bishops who planned to build a new Catholic University of America there. For years, church leaders had debated the wisdom of establishing an American research university dedicated to the Catholic faith. The location was debated as much as the purpose, and eventually Washington, DC, won out. After young heiress Mary G. Caldwell donated $300,000 to jumpstart the effort, the old Middleton farm was purchased, and planning began for the university's first major building, a grand Romanesque Revival structure completed in 1889 and eventually dubbed Caldwell Hall.

There had been some grousing about the university's location within DC—that it was too far out in the country—but the 62-acre Middleton farm was purchased anyway. The Washington Daily Critic reported in May 1885 the sale was to go through as soon as the previous owners "guaranteed the removal of any nuisance that might be in existence of the new university." The nuisance in question was an objectionable odor emanating from "the bad drainage of a house on the property." Apparently, it was resolved by the time the sale was finalized in October.

The former Middleton Manor as it appeared in 1896, before major additions were made. Photo courtesy of Special Collections, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

"The Middleton place, now known as the Catholic University grounds, has a picturesque and commanding location," The Evening Star observed in May 1888. "An old-fashioned drive-way, between rows of trees leading to the old house, starts from the intersection of Lincoln avenue [Lincoln Road NE] with the Bunker hill road [Michigan Avenue NE]." This long pathway from the main road up to the old house was one of the university's distinctive early features.

A boarded walkway lined with cypress trees ran from what is now Michigan Avenue NE to the door of St. Thomas College, dimly visible in the distance of this 1900 stereoview photo (author's collection).

With the university initially focused on constructing its large new building, the old Sidney/Middleton farmhouse stood unused and neglected a short distance to the east. However, the university solicited individual religious orders to establish their own affiliated "houses of studies" in and around the university as living quarters and study centers for their members. The first to accept this offer were the Paulist Fathers, officially known as the Missionary Society of Saint Paul the Apostle, a group whose mission was to convert non-Catholics in America. In 1889 the university leased the Middleton farmhouse to the Paulists as its first affiliated house of studies, to be called St. Thomas College.

Ten Paulist students moved into St. Thomas College, along with Fr. Augustine Hewitt, one of the founders of the order and a university instructor. A reporter for The Washington Post visited the house in 1893, noting "On entering the house the barrenness of the formerly well-decorated walls is apparent. But there is one object that draws attention. It is the large wheelchair of Rev. Father Hewitt, the aged survivor of the five founders of the Paulist Order. For years, Father Hewitt has been a very great sufferer, and for a long time he has been unable to walk, except with much pain. He almost lives in his invalid chair."

The initial 10 students grew to 22 by 1897, when the house was expanded with a third floor and an addition on the north side. The following year, the Paulists received permission to the extend the new addition another 40 feet. Further work may have been completed in 1899, resulting in a sprawling structure that looked little like the farmhouse originally built by the Smiths.

Postcard view of St. Thomas College as it appeared when the Paulists were using it (author's collection).

These additions were only a temporary fix, however, and by 1907 the Paulists were actively fundraising to build a new, much larger seminary building. The Evening Star commented that the building "has been patched and rearranged to meet conditions until it is well-nigh to the point of being uninhabitable" and The New York Times predicted "The old Middleton manor, which [the Paulists] lease, will soon be torn down." It wasn't; the building would remain in serve for many more decades.

When the Paulists finally moved to their imposing new seminary at 3025 4th Street NW in 1914, CUA renovated Middleton Manor for use as a dormitory for lay students, renaming it St. Thomas Hall. "Though not so stately as the other great residence halls [which were largely for priests and upper class men], St. Thomas Hall is an attractive home for our young students," the university's monthly bulletin cheerfully observed in early 1915.

On the whole, however, students and university administrators alike scorned the old building as a ramshackle eyesore. Occasionally, glimmers of the house's rich past occasionally struck a chord. After another round of interior renovations were completed in 1934, The Tower noted "All the stairways have new treads and landings and we haven't yet become quite accustomed to them. Somehow we yearn for those old hallowed steps, worn by the feet of ages and for the myriad squeaks of the old wooden floor."

1950s postcard view of St. Thomas Hall (author's collection).

A 1949 article in the Catholic University Bulletin noted that the pebble-dashed walls of the original house could still be made out on the south elevation of the structure, later extensions engulfing it on all sides. At the time, the house served as the CUA Child Center and the School of Social Service. Several original interior features were still visible—a few window frames and door frames as well as distinctive arches in the cellar. But the clock was ticking.

1960s postcard view of St. Thomas Hall. The trees on the left may date from the same trees seen lining the path to St. Thomas College in the circa 1900 stereoview image (author's collection).

In 1962, the District adopted a new fire code that would require several safety updates to St. Thomas Hall, including closing off stairwells, eliminating blind corridors, and improving ground floor egress. The university had until 1971 to make the necessary modifications, which in December 1968 it estimated would cost $146,000. University officials, never ones to love the old building, decided the time had come to forego further investment and take the venerable old building down.

In July 1970, after most students had left the campus for the summer break, the Ace Wrecking Company demolished Margaret Bayard Smith's beloved Sidney. "Washington lost one of its landmark structures this week when wreckers leveled old Sidney, recently named St. Thomas Hall, in the heart of the campus of Catholic University," the Washington Post reported, adding that "A spokesman for the University stated the reason for destroying the old relic was its poor condition, difficulty in heating and unsuitability as a campus building."

The site of Sidney as it appears today. The sidewalk traces the original route to the house from Michigan Avenue (photo by the author).

Given the decades-long scorn for the historic house, it's remarkable that it lasted as long as it did—and a pity that it did not last another decade or two, until the era of historic preservation was more firmly established in DC law. The site where it stood has remained empty to this day, sidewalks still marking the paths that once led to the Smiths' bucolic retreat.

* * * * *

Special thanks to Dr. Maria Mazzenga and Brandi Marulli of the CUA Archives for their gracious assistance. Information about Sidney from the Archives can be found here and here. Another key source for this article was the letters of Margaret Bayard Smith, compiled by Gaillard Hunt, ed., in The First Forty Years of Washington Society (1906). Other sources included: William E. Ames, A History of the National Intelligencer (1972); Benjamin Franklin Cooling III and Walton H. Owen II, Mr. Lincoln's Forts (2010); Roy J. Deferrari, Memoirs of the Catholic University of America 1918-1960 (1962); John Tracy Ellis, The Formative Years of the Catholic University of America (1946); Robert P. Malesky, The Catholic University of America (2010); C. Joseph Nuesse, The Catholic University of America: A Centennial History (1990); Robert Verrey and Laura Henley, Report of the Results of the Brookland Community/Catholic University Historic Resources Survey (1987); Hayden Wetzel, Historic Landmark nomination for St. Paul's College (2017); Kim Williams, Lost Farms and Estates of Washington, D.C. (2018), and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

Briefly Noted: The Joseph Gales Mansion, also known as "Eckington"

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 14:42:00 +0000

The original “Eckington” included this mansion, built in 1815 by Joseph Gales, publisher of the National Intelligencer, on top of a hill on a 112-acre estate in what was then Washington county. The current location would be 200 T Street NE.

Illustration from John Clagett Proctor, ed., Washington Past and Present: A History (1930).

Here Gales welcomed the Marquis de Lafayette during his triumphal trip to America in 1824. Gales died in 1860, and the house subsequently served as a hospital during the Civil War. Developer George Truesdell purchased the estate in 1887, subdividing most of the land for one of the city’s first streetcar suburbs. In 1892, he converted the Gales Mansion into the Eckington Hotel, adding two large wings designed by architect James G. Hill. The hotel burned spectacularly one night in 1894 but was subsequently rebuilt.

Two years later, Truesdell sold it to Rev. Flournoy Menefee (1854-1927), who converted it into the Washington College, a boarding school for girls. Menefee, a native of Missouri, had run the Liberty Ladies College in Liberty, Missouri, before moving the Washington to open the Washington College.

Postcard mailed in 1909 from Washington College (author's collection).

In 1922, the Carmelite Sisters purchased the former school and repurposed it as the Mount Carmel Retreat House.

Undated postcard (author's collection).

The retreat house did not last long. By the mid 1930s, the property had been sold again. The Gales Mansion was demolished, and the grounds were subdivided for residential development.

The Hotel Commodore, reborn as the Phoenix Park

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Thu, 05 May 2022 12:54:00 +0000

Early postcard rendering of the hotel (author's collection).

The Phoenix Park—originally the Commodore—is one of the few hotels around Union Station that survive from the days when almost everyone who visited Washington arrived by train. That magnificent railroad terminal, opened in 1907, once served as the primary transportation gateway to the nation’s capital, welcoming visitors from far and wide. In the decades after it was built, countless thousands of newcomers disembarked from their trains and wandered outside in search of a place to stay. Strategically located a short block away at North Capitol and F Streets NW, the Commodore was an easy choice.

A string of hotels opened here in the 1910s and 1920s, including the Hotel Harris (1909), Continental (1911), Capitol Park, (1914), Grace Dodge Hotel for Women (1921), Pennsylvania (1926); Commodore (1927); Bellevue (1929), and Stratford (1930), all located along or near North Capitol Street. Still more were built across the plaza on the east side of Union Station. These were mostly small or moderately sized establishments of about seven or eight stories and under 400 rooms. Of them, only two—the Commodore (now Phoenix Park) and the Bellevue (now the Hotel George)—continue to operate as hotels.

The Stratford, around the corner at 25 E Street NW, was designed by the same architect, Frank G. Pierson, and completed in 1935. It is now an office building. (Author's collection).

The site of the Commodore, so close to Union Station, was eyed for hotel development even before the new train depot was completed. In 1905, the Anheuser-Busch brewing company purchased three adjoining lots on the southwest corner of North Capitol and F Streets NW from the Bakers Co-operative Association for $55,000. The company announced that the property would be used for construction of a “modern, up-to-date” hotel, although specific plans had not been finalized. If the planned hotel had been built as planned, it would have been the first in the Union Station area. However, this didn’t happen. The site remained undeveloped for another 21 years.

The property changed hands, and a group of Washington investors finally announced plans to build a hotel in May 1926. Originally to be called the Milestone, the hostelry would contain 140 guest rooms and cost $750,000. The guest rooms were tiny by today’s standards, but each included a private bath—a feature that was becoming standard around this time. A comfortable lobby, reading room, stores and restaurant filled the ground floor, making it a full-service hotel. The building’s accomplished architect, Frank G. Pierson (1870-1941), would go on to design the nearby Bellevue and Stratford hotels as well as the Library of Congress’s Adams Building.

Early postcard--with other nearby buildings expunged from view--emphasizes the proximity of the hotel to the Capitol and the Washington Monument (author's collection).

For the Commodore, Pierson adopted a Georgian Revival style, accenting the building’s functional brick façade with elegant, classically trimmed limestone cladding on the first two floors and large ground-floor display windows. Completed in the spring of 1927, the hotel was christened the Commodore (not the Milestone) and was originally managed by the New York-based Intercity Hotels Corporation.

Matchbook cover from the 1940s (author's collection).

In 1932, a room at the Commodore could be had for $2.50 per night. The hotel advertised that each room was furnished with a Simmons bed and Beautyrest mattress, easy chair, reading lamps, and writing desk. Despite the Depression, newcomers to Washington were plentiful at the time, increasing the population of the District of Columbia more in the 1930s than in any other decade since the Civil War. Many of them came to Washington to work on the extensive government programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; some undoubtedly first stayed at the Commodore.

Excerpt from a 1930s brochure. Click to enlarge (author's collection).

The hotel’s cocktail lounge, the Cork and Bottle, drew local residents, Capitol Hill staff and out-of-towners alike. Restaurateur Jack Melrose (1904-1965) told the Washington Post in 1937 that the place was “just crowded to the gills.” Melrose also ran the hotel’s Melrose Restaurant, which offered full dinners for $1 in 1944. A menu from that year warns customers that the cocktail lounge’s hours would be limited due to scarcity of liquor—one of many shortages that plagued the country in the 1940s.

Menu from February 1944. Click to enlarge. (Author's collection).

The years after World War II—the 1950s and 60s—saw widespread decline in the older parts of downtown Washington, including the Union Station area. As travelers increasingly rode airplanes instead of trains, business dwindled. The problem was compounded by the broader trend of “white flight” to the suburbs; affluent whites increasingly lived, worked, and sought entertainment in the suburbs, deserting downtown restaurants and hotels. Hotel managers, including the Commodore’s, offered specials to lure guests, such as free rooms for children under 14 accompanied by their parents. When a couple from Puerto Rico and their eight children showed up to stay at the Commodore in July 1960, manager J.F. McCormick cheerfully posed for a newspaper photograph to celebrate the family’s bargain accommodations.

Despite the challenges, the Commodore advertised itself as “Washington’s finest small hotel.” The hotel’s fortunes began to turn around in March 1974, when restaurateur Daniel J. “Danny” Coleman, opened the Dubliner, an Irish Pub, in the ground floor restaurant space. Coleman had grown up working in his immigrant Irish father’s pub in Syracuse, New York, and he was determined to bring a similarly authentic Irish pub to DC. The new location was historically fitting; this neighborhood, known as Swampoodle in the 19th century, had been home to poor Irish immigrants, many of whom worked in the nearby Government Printing Office.

Coleman’s pub was one of the first successful watering holes to draw people back to the neighborhood and help revive its fortunes, but the hotel itself had seen better days. When it became available for purchase in 1980, Coleman seized the opportunity to extend the Irish theme to the entire building. Rechristening it the Phoenix Park, after Dublin’s famed 1,760-acre urban park, Coleman and his partners renovated the hotel, increasing room sizes and adding facilities for meetings and parties. The massive renovation, completed in 1982, resulted in a luxurious, boutique hotel that celebrated the Commodore’s architectural heritage while adding a new penthouse floor on top of the historic building as well as many new amenities. The decorative plasterwork, chandelier, and marble floor of the lobby’s lounge area were restored to new elegance, and a grand staircase was added to connect directly with new public space on the second floor, including a new restaurant—the Powerscourt—the city’s only formal Irish eatery.

The lobby of the Commodore prior to renovation and conversion to the Phoenix Park (author's collection).

In 1985, the Washington Post proclaimed that the neighborhood around Union Station was poised for a comeback, with many new restaurants, hotels, shops, and office buildings in the pipeline. By the time a dramatically restored Union Station reopened in 1988, the transformation that the Phoenix Park had pioneered was unstoppable. New restaurants were opening, and tall, modern office buildings were replacing many of the older hotels. The rejuvenated Phoenix Park bucked the trend.

The Phoenix Park had become a mecca for politicians and other VIPs seeking luxury accommodations in the relaxed and intimate setting of a boutique hotel close to the Capitol, Union Station, and U.S. Senate office buildings. The 88-room “bastion of Irish hospitality,” as the Post called it, needed more space. In 1995, Coleman and his partners undertook another major renovation of the hotel, this time expanding it significantly by adding a new adjoining tower on the south side of the building, doubling the number of rooms to 149 and adding a new ground-floor ballroom and other meeting spaces. The expansion came just in time for a major initiative, spearheaded by former Senator George Mitchell, to broker a peace deal in Northern Ireland. Irish politicians coming to the U.S. to negotiate an agreement stayed at the Phoenix Park, and the Dubliner served as their primary rendezvous while hammering out what would be known as the Good Friday accords, ratified in 1998.

The hotel seen in 2010 (photo by the author).

Having found its niche, the Phoenix Park has continued to prosper and attract distinguished guests in the 21st century. Distinguished guests have included President Bill Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Speakers of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill and Paul Ryan. O’Neill chose the Phoenix Park as the site of his 80th birthday celebration. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both worked on debate preparation at the Phoenix Park when they were candidates for President. And on St. Patrick’s Day in 2012, President Barack Obama dropped in for a surprise visit to the Dubliner, an event now commemorated with a plaque on the pub’s wall. The hotel completed its most recent, $8 million renovation in June 2016, adding a crisp, contemporary design to the hotel’s guest rooms and public spaces. The 2,000-square-foot Phoenix Ballroom was renovated in 2019. Aside from short breaks such as these for construction and renovation, the hotel has been in continuous operation since the Commodore first opened its doors in 1927, making it one of the longest continuously operating hostelries in the city.

* * * * *

Special thanks to the Phoenix Park Hotel, which commissioned this history, and especially to Danny Coleman, owner, and David M. Hill, area general manager.

Art Deco on Capitol Hill: The Church of the Reformation

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 14:13:00 +0000

The Lutheran Church of the Reformation was not the first Lutheran church in the city; eight others already existed when it was formed. But its current home at 212 East Capitol Street NE on Capitol Hill is among the most distinctive of the city’s houses of worship from that era. Architecturally, it is a blend of classical design elements and Art Deco embellishments. Massive and dignified, it projects authority and mystery.

Photo by the author.

As early as 1866, Capitol Hill residents who were members of St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church (the first Lutheran church in Washington) began meeting as a separate group in their homes. In 1869, they were formally recognized as the Church of the Reformation when they held their first services in a surplus army hospital barracks at 1st and C Streets SE, which they had obtained from the government. It was a modest wooden building with little or no heat in the winter, and after ten years the congregation sorely needed something better.

The congregation then purchased a lot on the north side of B Street (now Independence Avenue SE), just to the east of the Library of Congress. Work soon began on a new church—a typical red-brick, Victorian Gothic Revival structure with lancet windows, a steeply gabled roof, and a four-story bell tower. Begun in 1881, the building’s festive dedication in November 1883 featured an elaborate floral display, including contributions from the White House Conservatory. The handsome church was “crowded to its fullest capacity, even the aisles being filled,” according to The Washington Post.

Postcard from the 1911 showing the first Church of the Reformation on Independence Avenue SE. The postcard celebrates the fact that the church's mortgage was finally paid off, allowing a ceremonial burning of the mortgage documents (author's collection).

The church prospered for four decades at this location, but ultimately its close proximity to the Library of Congress spelled its doom. When the Library started to plan a new annex (now known as the John Adams Building, at 120 2nd Street SE) in 1928, federal officials asked the church how much it wanted for its property. The church asked for $190,000, and the library countered with an offer of $66,500. Needless to say, the church did not accept the counteroffer. Eventually a court ruling awarded the church $103,700, and plans to move and build a new church began in earnest.

The distinguished local firm of Irwin S. Porter (1888-1957) and Joseph A. Lockie (1881-1949) was tasked in 1933 with designing the new church. Porter and Lockie were noted for their skill in incorporating Art Deco design motifs into Washington commercial and institutional buildings. According to architectural historian Richard Striner, the Church of the Reformation is Porter and Lockie’s finest work.

Completed in 1935, the church is clad in Indiana limestone, as are many of Washington’s most distinguished buildings from this era. The main portal in the otherwise blank central block stands 32 feet tall and features oak doors that are 15 feet tall and 10 feet across. Crowning the portal is a sculpted pediment featuring Christ with a boy and girl at his sides. Rays of light tufted with billowy clouds spread downward from his halo. The pediment recalls the tympanums of Gothic cathedrals, but in a flattened, Art Deco interpretation. The façade also features subtle classical elements, including fluted pilasters and two large windows screened with crosses and Xs in heavy limestone.

Closeup view of the pediment (photo by the author).

Inside, the church sheds monumentality in favor of a gentler Arts and Crafts look. A deep blue, wood-beamed ceiling arches over the interior space in the tradition of German and Scandinavian hall churches. The narthex is partially paneled in oak, which is repeated in the chancel at the front of the church, adding a touch of the modern, Art Deco feel to the largely traditional interior. The delicate detailing, decorative cross designs, pale yellow walls, and oak furnishings lend a warmth to the space that contrasts with the stark exterior façade.

Since completion in 1935, the church has seen one major addition. In 1939, a new Parish House was constructed on the west side of the church. Completed in 1951, the modernist, limestone-finished, three-story hall appears as a natural extension of the church. It has seen a number of community service functions, including as a school and community health clinic. Over the years, the church has also acquired several townhouses adjoining its property to accommodate its growing mission. Since 1995, It has undertaken a number of renovations of its main building, rebuilding the organ, redesigning the chancel, updating the heating and air conditioning system, and restoring the stained-glass windows.

* * * * *

Sources for this article include: George E. Hutchinson, Celebrating Our Past with a Vision for the Future: Lutheran Church of the Reformation 1869-1994, (Washington, DC: Lutheran Church of the Reformation, 1994); Elizabeth Johns, The Architecture and Symbolism of the Lutheran Church of the Reformation (Washington, DC: Lutheran Church of the Reformation, 1985); Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Hans Wirz and Richard Striner, Washington Deco: Art Deco in the Nation’s Capital (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984); and numerous newspaper articles.

Chinese Restaurants in D.C. at Mid-Century

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 12:04:00 +0000

We previously chronicled some of the very first Chinese restaurants to open in Washington. Traditional Chinese restaurants became ubiquitous here, as in other American cities, during the 1920s and 1930s. While going out for Chinese food offered a touch of the exotic, it was generally not an expensive undertaking, and it was accessible to many. Washingtonians became accustomed to eating Chinese food—Chinese American food, that is—on a regular basis.

The Peking Restaurant, at 711 13th Street NW, opened in 1957 (author's collection).

Chinese restaurants branched out from Chinatown to open as casual neighborhood eateries across the city. Most were not segregated. During World War II, the most successful Chinese restaurants in the city were several large nightclubs—including the Casino Royal and Lotus restaurants on 14th Street and Treasure Island on K Street—that offered a variety of live entertainment as well as typical Chinese American fare.

From the start, many Chinese restaurants had offered authentic Chinese cuisine “off the menu.” You could find it if you knew where to look and what to ask for. The Chinese Lantern, for example, had a special menu of 257 authentic Chinese dishes that were available to those who expressed an interest. Sam J. Chan (1889-1957) opened that restaurant at 8 Massachusetts Avenue NW in 1928, and it became a favorite of Chinese and other diplomats. However, before World War II, restaurants like the Chinese Lantern were relatively few.

A page from the Chinese Lantern's special menu (author's collection).

Then, in the years after the war, Chinese restaurants rose to a new level. An era of fine dining came along that celebrated the most sophisticated Mandarin dishes for an American public that largely had known only chop suey, chow mein, and fortune cookies. Postwar economic growth and confidence likely spurred customers’ interest in new patterns of self-indulgence, including new culinary adventures. Increasing international trade also improved the availability of specialized foods from foreign sources. Equally important was the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943 (Magnuson Act), which lifted the ban on Chinese immigration to the United States after 61 years (but left in place strict annual immigration quotas), and the subsequent passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart–Celler Act), which finally removed the Magnuson Act’s stringent limitations.

Three examples of mid-century Washington restaurants that specialized in fine Chinese cuisine were the Peking; the Yenching Palace; and the Empress.

The Peking

In 1947, the Peking Restaurant opened at 5522 Connecticut Avenue NW in Chevy Chase. It was founded by Chuon Ming Lo (1918–1980), a Cantonese native who had come to Washington in 1941 as a chef at the Chinese Embassy, and four of his friends. Lo offered “Peking-style” dishes, including moo shu pork and Peking duck, which quickly gained a following among diplomats and local connoisseurs. According to Lo, the Peking was the first restaurant in the country to offer northern Chinese cuisine. Other exotic novelties included 00 soup and eight precious rice. For special occasions, the Peking would serve a ten-course meal centered on Peking duck that won for the restaurant the Washington Winers and Diners Club award for excellence in authenticity, taste and service in 1954. In succeeding years, the New York Times and Holiday magazine, among others, ranked the Peking as one of the city’s best restaurants.

Interior of the Peking Restaurant (author's collection).

Postcard with accolades from Holiday and the New York Times (author's collection).

After ten years of success, in 1957, Lo opened a downtown branch, at 711 13th Street NW, which had a distinguished twenty-year career of its own. As Lo told the Washington Star in 1977, the Kennedy White House would sometimes order sizable late-night takeout meals from the downtown Peking. The restaurant became the pre-eminent branch of the small Peking chain, which eventually grew to four restaurants. It continued to be widely recognized as one of the best of Washington’s restaurants. The downtown Peking finally succumbed to pressures from Metro construction and downtown redevelopment, closing in 1977. The original Chevy Chase branch survived until the early 1990s.

Yenching Palace

The Peking’s success inevitably inspired imitators, most notably the Peking Palace, which opened in 1955 just down the street from the Peking at 3524 Connecticut Avenue NW in Cleveland Park. The Peking Palace took over the building of an older restaurant known as the Seafare, which had opened in 1945 and had been created by combining two 1920s storefronts into one building.

S. Van Lung (1926–1991), the restaurant’s founder, had previously worked at the Peking Restaurant, as had his business manager, twenty-three-year-old Paul Dietrich. Lung, the son of a top Chinese Republican army general in World War II, copied many aspects of the groundbreaking restaurant he had previously worked in, including the extensive menu of exotic dishes. So much so that the Peking Restaurant filed suit against Lung for unfair competition, arguing that both the name and the similarity of the new restaurant’s menu unfairly implied a connection between the restaurants that didn’t exist.

Matchbook cover from the Yenching Palace (author's collection).

The new restaurant lost the legal battle and was forced to change its name. However, as the Yenching Palace, it gained a loyal following, soon eclipsing the Peking in Chevy Chase. Already in 1956, it was adverting that it “entertained more diplomats daily than the White House.” The restaurant gained a unique spot in history as one of the “secret” sites where ABC News reporter John A. Scali (1918–1995) met with Soviet emissary Aleksandr Feklisov (1914–2007) to negotiate the terms for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The fashionable Yenching Palace, already well known as a rendezvous for statesmen and diplomats, was a natural spot to meet.

Page from a Yenching Palace menu (author's collection).

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met Chinese representatives there in 1971 to discuss reestablishing diplomatic relations. In keeping with its Cold War legacy, there were even suggestions that at least one of its booths was fitted with secret listening devices—although which side was supposedly doing the listening remains a mystery. The Yenching Palace continued in business for several more decades, closing in 2007. The building was subsequently renovated as a Walgreens pharmacy but is now vacant.

The Empress

Passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart–Celler Act) finally removed remaining restrictions on immigration by Chinese nationals, and two years later Washington benefited with the opening of the Empress, a sophisticated Chinese restaurant staffed by four Chinese chefs with many decades of experience. Owner David Lee, who had previously served as an officer in the Chinese Republican army, had immigrated to America in 1938. He settled in DC and for many years ran the Seven Seas Grill, a seafood restaurant in Brightwood. After switching to a career in real estate, he was persuaded to return to the restaurant business when he at last had the opportunity to invite experienced Chinese chefs to come to Washington and help him open an authentic Chinese eatery.

Matchbook cover from the Empress (author'c collection).

The result was the Empress, a highly regarded restaurant at 1018 Vermont Avenue NW that opened in 1967. Like the Peking, the Empress offered authentic Mandarin dishes, considered the cuisine of royalty in China, and it wowed Washington critics. “The Empress…is a restaurant not to be missed,” wrote the Evening Star’s John Rosson. “But it isn’t the spot in which to order chow mein. You might be laughed at.” Unlike traditional Chinese restaurants, it was formal and pricey, but Rosson and other critics thought it was well worth it.

Postcard view of the dining room of the Empress (author's collection).

Echoing the Peking restaurant’s special occasion dinners, Lee began offering gourmet banquets on the second Tuesday of each month. For a flat $10 fee (expensive at the time), you would be treated to a 10-course dinner of classic Mandarin dishes, none of them repeated from month to month. The special dinners, served at three large communal tables, showed off the talents of the Empress’s star chef, Shuo Tian Shih. Offerings included lotus float abalone soup, shrimp with sizzling rice crust soup, boneless duck in oyster sauce, birds’ nest and chicken sauté, squab with walnut and Mandarin cake, silver thread pastry, and the very popular Empress shredded chicken.

In Washington Post dining critic Donald Dresden’s opinion, David Lee was the dean of Chinese restaurateurs. Just as numerous exceptional French chefs from Blais Gherardi’s Rive Gauche in Georgetown went on to open or work in many other French restaurants in the area, so too did Lee bring a long list of distinguished Chinese chefs and restaurateurs to the Empress who went on to open their own eateries. A new tradition of fine Chinese dining became well established here, reflecting the truly extraordinary depth and sophistication of authentic Chinese cuisine.

Matchbook cover from David Lee's Empress at 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW (author's collection).

By the early 1970s, the Empress had four locations. Then, in 1974, the restaurants’ two owners agreed to divide the eateries between them and go their separate ways. David Lee took the two that were located at 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, just north of Dupont Circle, and in the Rockville Shopping Mall in Rockville, MD. The original Vermont Avenue location, along with one on Thayer Avenue in Silver Spring, MD, went to Lu Hu Chuen “Trudie” Ball (1924-2015), who had partnered with Lee on the original Empress. Born in Shanghai, Ball had served as a member of the Taiwanese delegation to the United Nations in the 1950s and came to Washington in 1960. In addition to the two Trudie Ball’s Empress locations, she opened Trudie’s, at 33rd and M Streets NW in Georgetown in 1976.

Pages from the menu at Trudie Ball's Empress (author's collection).

In the spring of 1974, just after the split, food critic Dresden sampled both Trudie Ball’s Empress on Vermont Avenue and David Lee’s Empress on Connecticut Avenue, finding them equally excellent. The rival Empresses continued in business into the 1980s but by some accounts were never as good as the Empress had been in its heyday. In any event, by the 1980s Chinese restaurants of all types, from simple Chinese American carryouts to sophisticated, high-end culinary destinations, were here to stay.

* * * * *

Some parts of this article previously appeared in different form in Historic Restaurants of Washington, DC: Capital Eats.

Pete Macias and the Heigh-Ho Club

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 13:40:00 +0000

Joseph Shirley “Pete” Macias (1898-1947) was a native Washingtonian who served in the Naval Reserve in World War I and became a popular local nightclub entertainer in the 1920s, both as a bandleader and a pianist.

Pete Macias and one of his bands poses in the 1920s on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of 14th Street. Pete is the one with the baton on the far right. (Source: Library of Congress).

Macias gained a following at multiple venues before striking out on his own with the Heigh-Ho Club, which he opened in an old mansion on the southwest corner of Connecticut Avenue and Q Street NW in 1933. Macias’s Heigh-Ho Club was a swanky, much-hyped watering hole with smooth entertainment catering to the upper crust of DC’s thriving 1930s supper club scene. Designed by local society figure Wolcott “Doggy” Waggaman, the club was up a grand marble staircase in a grand, oak-paneled space on the second floor of the old mansion. It was a “favorite of the top hat and white tie crowd,” according to the Evening Star. “The room’s small and you almost have to know a cabinet officer to get a table on Saturday nights.”

Matchbook cover from the Heigh-Ho Club (author's collection).

The club lasted until 1939, when it apparently closed after neighbors objected to the noise. Macias, who had become the city’s best-known bandleader at the Heigh-Ho Club, continued to lead his orchestra at the Lounge Riviera, located on the rooftop of the Hotel 2400 (now the Envoy) on 16th Street NW, through the World War II years. In 1946, he took his first vacation in years but never returned to the club, succumbing to an illness at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1947 at age 48.

(Author's collection).

In the 1950s, the former Heigh-Ho Club space was briefly used as the 20th Century Dance Club, a meeting spot for singles to dance or learn to dance. The distinguished mansion was torn down some time after that, and now the Dupont Circle Metro entrance is on this spot.

The short, exuberant life of Washington's Café République

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 12:14:00 +0000

The restaurant business is famously risky, and perhaps the greatest risks are taken by those who invest in elaborate new eateries without a sound plan for making them profitable. Such is the cautionary tale of the posh Café République, an extravagant enterprise that flourished for just a few years in downtown Washington in the 1910s, serving as a quintessential expression of the fragile exuberance of its times.

The main dining room of the Cafe Republique. In September 1911, a certain Maggie Mae sent this postcard to her friend Agnes Collins in Auburn, New York. She wrote: "Your pal Magie is---having one fine time. Just had luncheon at this cafe. Some class-Washington. Gee Agnes its a case of When Dreams Come True." (Author's collection.)

In April 1910, a group of local investors organized as the Columbia Cafe Company to open the Café République in remodeled space at the northwest corner of the Corcoran Office Building, located at 15th and F Streets NW, across the street from the Treasury Department. After a whirlwind construction effort, the new eatery was ready to open its doors in late September.

Architects Oscar G. Vogt and Milton Dana Morrill, whose offices were in the Corcoran Building, traveled to France to inspect the finest French restaurants, then to New York and Philadelphia to see the best that America could do, before developing their ne plus ultra design. The result was lots of ferns and frills, an over-the-top Edwardian fantasy garden. An elaborate fountain with goldfish and aquatic plants stood in the center of the dining room, which was festooned with vines and hanging lights. In addition to the main dining room, there was a “sanitary” lunchroom, with burnished copper gleaming throughout the kitchen and a seating area with walls “enameled to the whiteness of alabaster” that could be flushed out with a hose. Downstairs in the basement was a Flemish-inspired rathskeller with heavy oak wainscoting and rustic tile walls.

Advertisement from the September 29, 1910 edition of The Washington Times.

Public announcements stressed the cafe's up-to-the-minute amenities, including telephones at every table and wires for electric chafing dish attachments. Dozens of electric fans, hundreds of electric lights, and a wide variety of electric kitchen equipment marked the café as the embodiment of cutting-edge technology. For the business-minded lunchtime crowd, the rathskeller was equipped with a stock ticker and, of course, all the latest newspapers from Washington and other cities.

“At last Washington is to possess a truly great café—a café which, in the magnitude of its proportions, the elegance of its furnishings, and the completeness of its equipment, will express adequately the ideals demanded by a large and growing cosmopolitan community,” exclaimed the Washington Post in a full-page feature that raved about the trendy new restaurant. “Many a social conquest and many a political coup will be planned by society leaders, statesmen, and diplomats over the little round tables of the Café République,” it continued. Noting that the café was an entirely local enterprise, the Post concluded that “it must be the wish of every progressive, public-spirited Washingtonian that the success of the Café République be at once decisive and instantaneous.”

This postcard view of F Street NW (as seen facing east from 15th Street) features the Corcoran Building on the right. The Cafe Republique fills the ground floor as it wraps around the corner (author's collection).

Though its appointments were marketed as the height of luxury, the café was in fact meant to be broadly appealing. The café’s expensive-sounding “truffles, paté de foie gras, and baked ice cream” were all available at “reasonable” prices, management insisted. The restaurant business, which heretofore had catered primarily to wealthy white men, was poised for sea change as the increasingly prosperous middle classes sought diversions outside of their homes and large numbers of women began patronizing eateries on the own. Young couples out on dates needed a place to dine that was suitably elegant and yet at the same time affordable. The Café République's owners aimed to draw in large numbers of these customers.

This advertisement appeared in a 1912 DC theater playbill (author's collection).

Patrons indeed thronged to the new café on its opening night, with every table taken from 8pm to midnight and many potential customers turned away. A year later, adjoining space in the Corcoran Building was leased allowing the addition of a new tearoom off the main dining room. Another grand opening was held for the new space in September 1911, with music by a Hungarian orchestra and American Beauty roses given to each female customer.

Then, in August 1912, the house of cards began to collapse. The restaurant had not been paying its bills. Several of the café’s many unpaid creditors, including the American Ice Company, the Frazee-Potomac Laundry Company, and the Arlington Bottling Company, forced the café into bankruptcy and receivership. The Columbia Cafe Company was found to have over $122,000 in debts and just $41,178 in assets. The receivers at first were instructed to keep the café running, but they soon found that it was "a hopeless task to make the fashionable restaurant pay," as the Post reported. On the last day before it was shut down, "many handsomely gowned women and their escorts sat round the small tables eating with a degree of unconcern, while the stoic expression of the white-aproned waiters would never have revealed the fact that the pantry shelves were practically bare." After the food was gone, trustees auctioned off all the restaurant's fixtures and furnishings.

But the Café République was not a historical footnote quite yet. Joel Hillman, a successful hotelier who ran Harvey’s Oyster House, purchased most of fixtures and used them to reopen the café in October 1912, shortly after it had closed. The restaurant continued in much the same vein as before. A January 1913 advertisement offered lunches at 40 to 50 cents, a very moderate price. Entertainment was provided by the Ladies' Viennese Orchestra. Apparently this wasn't enough to turn the tide of profitability. By April, the cafe was closed again, its fixtures put back on the auction block. This time there would be no reopening.

1914 postcard of the Jardin de Danse (author's collection).

The vacated space at the base of the Corcoran building would never have another long-term tenant. Instead it was leased for a succession of short-lived purposes. After the great success of the Women's Suffrage Parade in March 1913, suffragists used the former cafe space for a five-day demonstration kitchen to show off their cooking skills, for example. Then, in October 1914, Miss Bertha King, "one of this country's recognized authorities on dancing," according to the Post, opened the Jardin de Danse in the still elaborately decorated dining hall. In addition to dance lessons, the studio offered light lunch and evening fare, and it was apparently also rented out for charitable events. Soon after it opened, the District Federation of Women's Clubs held a fundraiser in the space to assist the Red Cross on the European battlefields of World War I. In December another charitable event to collect donations for Belgians ravaged by the war was held here. Bu the Jardin de Danse doesn't seem to have lasted past 1915. In 1916, another charitable drive to support Emergency Hospital was headquartered out of the space, which this time the Post described as "the big room on the first floor of the Corcoran building, which since it ceased to be the Cafe Republique...has had a gloomy existence."

This is what the corner of 15th and F looks like today. The Hotel W looms where socialites once gathered at the Café République (photo by the author).

All the while, negotiations had been underway to sell the Corcoran Building, which William Wilson Corcoran had constructed in 1875 and which had been famous in its heyday for its many artist studios, and were soon concluded. In early 1917 the building was torn down to make way for the new Hotel Washington. Even if the Café République had somehow managed to survive that long, and even if the Corcoran Building hadn't been demolished, the restaurant probably would have closed soon anyway. In November 1917 Prohibition came to the District, the ban on alcohol sales dealing a death blow to many of the city's long-established restaurants. With a world war and a pandemic also close on the horizon, life would never be the same.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included James M. Goode, Capital Losses, 2nd ed. (2003); Andrew P. Haley, Turning The Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (2011); Michael Lesy and Lisa Stoffer, Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century, 1900-1910 (2013); and numerous newspaper articles.

The Rise and Fall of the Hotel Continental near Union Station

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Sun, 02 May 2021 21:14:00 +0000

Back when Union Station was the primary gateway to the city, the blocks nearby were filled with moderately priced hotels catering to the thousands of travelers and tourists disgorged by arriving trains. One of the earliest and longest standing of these was the Hotel Continental at 420 North Capitol Street NW near E Street NW, about a block away from Union Station and equidistant to the Capitol.

1930s postcard from the Hotel Continental (author's collection).

The completion of Union Station in 1907 marked an important shift in Washington's hotel business. Trains previously arrived at two different stations at other locations: the Baltimore and Potomac station, which serviced Pennsylvania Railroad trains, was on the Mall at present-day Constitution Avenue and 6th Street NW, where the National Gallery of Art now stands. Several hotels clustered in the immediate vicinity, including the National, the Metropolitan, the St. James, and others. Trains from the competing Baltimore and Ohio Railroad arrived at a station on New Jersey Avenue NW, several blocks southwest of where Union Station was later built. That area had its hotels as well, but it had become run down by the early 20th century, when many of the buildings in the neighborhood were razed.

That left the neighborhood to the north, around Union Station, as a ripe location for new hotels, and at least half a dozen were built in the 1910s and 1920s. Completed in 1911, the Continental, was designed by Appleton P. Clark, Jr. (1865-1955), the dean of Washington architects, who designed many schools, churches and other public buildings as well as apartment houses and private homes. Clark was a prominent DC businessman and real estate investor who chaired the Board of Directors of the Washington Hotel Company, the developers of the Continental. One can easily imagine Clark and his board meeting sometime shortly after Union Station's completion to plan their lucrative new hotel.

Appleton P. Clark, Jr. (Washington Past and Present, 1930)

Clark designed an elegant, moderately-sized hotel of seven stories and 150 rooms. The ornate Beaux-Arts style was fashionable at the time and in keeping with the style of other large public buildings in the city. The building was constructed as a steel-frame structure dressed in beige pressed brick and Indiana limestone with terracotta trim. Interior finishes were of marble, tile, and hardwoods, and the tiled bathrooms—one for every suite—were equipped with plumbing fixtures "of the best quality." Guest rooms were fully carpeted, with brass beds and mahogany furniture. Spacious lobbies dominated the first and mezzanine floors, where dining rooms, ladies' parlors, and writing rooms were also available. In the basement were an Old Dutch-style grill room, buffet, barber shop, and billiard room. The rooftop featured a garden for taking in the striking views of the nearby Capitol as well as the rest of the city skyline. The Washington Hotel Company characterized the Continental as a "first class hotel where rooms and service can be procured at reasonable rates."

An early postcard from the hotel (author's collection).

The first-floor cafe (author's collection).

The mezzanine (author's collection).

When it opened in March 1911, the Continental was the first to appear in the Union Station area. "Visitors to the Capital who arrive at Union Station after sundown will no longer be confronted by a screen of darkness, broken only by the weird illumination of the Government Printing Office, for across the great plaza can now be seen an inviting edifice, shedding a glow of light from its many windows, suggestive of hospitality and luxurious comfort," wrote The Washington Herald. The previous day, the newspaper's reporter had attended the hotel's grand opening, along with a crowd of Washington VIPs, to "admire and enjoy the beautiful interior, the delightful music, and the delectable luncheon." The reporter concluded that "While the Continental will not be as large as some of the new hotels [planned for Union Station Plaza], it will be one of the prettiest and coziest."

The Hotel Continental (foreground) and the Capitol Park Hotel, circa 1915 (Source: Library of Congress).

Another hotel was already in the works when the Continental opened. The Capitol Park, a similarly-sized hotel was completed in 1914, just three years after the Continental, on the northwest corner of North Capitol and E Streets NW. More would follow, including the Grace Dodge Hotel for Women, located around the corner from the Continental on E Street; the Commodore (now the Phoenix Park) opened in 1927 at the southwest corner of North Capitol and F; the Hotel Pennsylvania adjoining the Commodore at 20 F St NW, opened in 1926; the Bellevue Hotel for women (now the Hotel George) opened in 1929 on E Street across from the Dodge Hotel; and the Stratford Hotel, next to the Bellevue at 25 E St NW, completed in 1930.

This 1935 postcard, like much of the Continental's advertising, emphasized how close the hotel was to the Capitol (author's collection).

The hotel re-imagined for the Art Deco 1930s (author's collection).

Several extensions to the "cozy" Hotel Continental were soon added, turning it into a sprawling complex. In 1916, a two-story addition provided room for a large ballroom to accommodate luncheons, dinners, and other gatherings of civic groups. In 1924, a 100-room addition was completed at the rear the main building, bringing the total number of guest suites to 250. Another large conference hall was added in the 1950s.

1930s sales brochure--click to enlarge (author' collection).

A broad assortment of civic and religious groups held meetings at the centrally located hotel, including the Church of Two Worlds, formed by the National Spiritualist Association, which held its opening service at the Hotel Continental's ballroom in 1936. The church, which maintains that it is possible to communicate with the sprits of the dead, continued to hold services and lectures at the Continental into the 1940s. (Since 1960 it has been located in a 1906 Methodist church building in Georgetown). In 1933, 13-year-old astrologist Jack Barry captivated a crowd of 200 in the Continental's ballroom with his lecture on how all of history had been foretold in the Bible. Other groups convening at the Continental in the 1920s, 30s and 40s included a mass meeting of railway postal clerks in 1922, the formation of the Washington chapter of the National American Society, devoted to "Americanization," in 1923; annual bird shows in the 1930s of the National Capital Canary Club; the 1937 annual meeting of the Sons and Daughters of Liberty; and several meetings in the 1940s of the Curley Club, a Catholic charitable group named in honor of Archbishop Michael J. Curley.

The hotel as it appeared in the early 1960s (author's collection).

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Continental's fortunes began to decline. Many downtown hotels lost business as travelers became leery of unsafe downtown areas, which had been hollowed out by white flight to the suburbs. Further, the rise of air travel meant that Union Station's pre-eminence as the travel portal of Washington would prove to be astonishingly short-lived. As lucrative business travelers opted to stay in modern hotels further uptown, the neighborhood around Union Station was relegated to tourists arriving mostly by automobile. In 1970, the Continental's parent company opened a new Capitol Hill Quality Motel on New Jersey Avenue (now the Yotel Washington DC) directly behind the venerable Continental. The boxy new structure was the largest motel in the city at the time.

A 1960s postcard that once again emphasized the hotel's proximity to the Capitol (author's collection).

In 1971 local investors purchased the Continental, perceiving it only as something out-of-date and unprofitable. The elegant Beaux-Arts architecture, which could have been a draw for hotel guests many decades into the future, was lost on the new owners. They soon decided to tear the beautiful building down. If it had only been able to hang on another 10 or 15 years, it would have benefited from the city's 1979 historic preservation law and doubtless would have been restored to become a flourishing grande dame on Capitol Hill. An auction was held in February 1972 (run by the same firm that had sold off all the furnishings of the Willard Hotel in 1969). "More than 1,000 bargain hunters, antique collectors and scavengers took advantage of an unusual sale and mauled the now dead Hotel Continental, at 420 North Capitol St," the Washington Post reported. Even several of the 20-foot marble pillars in the hotel lobby were sold (for $5,000 apiece). Soon after the building was gone.

In its place, the Hall of States, a boxy u-shaped office building designed by architect Vlastimil Koubek, took its place at 444 North Capitol Street NW in 1976. Several other neighborhood hotels, including the Capitol Park and the Grace Dodge are gone as well, although others, such as the Hotel George and the Phoenix Park, still stand. Union Station, revived as a cultural destination in the 1980s, awaits further expansion as a new wave of railroad travelers is anticipated.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included Cleland C. McDevitt, The Book of Washington (1930), John Clagett Proctor, ed., Washington Past and Present (1930); and numerous newspaper articles.

Briefly noted: The former Ingram Memorial Church on Capitol Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 12:40:00 +0000

The striking Beaux Arts building at 10th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NE, now the Capitol Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church, has a unique heritage. In 1907, the Rev. Dr. John W. Frizzell (1863-1916), a Congregationalist minister preaching in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, decided to move to Washington, D.C., and form a congregation here. He convinced lumber baron and philanthropist Orrin Henry Ingram (1830-1918), Eau Claire’s wealthiest and most prominent resident, to fund the construction of a new church in memory of Ingram’s son Charles, who had passed away in 1906 at age 49. The result was this gleaming white Ingram Memorial Congregational Church, designed by local architect James H. Warner and dedicated in 1910.

Vintage postcard photo of the church (author's collection).

Shaped in the form of a Greek cross, the church was supposed to be built of stone but was ultimately finished in painted concrete. Ingram wanted it to be a place of recreation and refreshment for young people as well as a house of worship, and so it was fitted out with a swimming pool, bowling alleys, gymnasium, showers, and even a smoking room with pipe racks. President William Howard Taft participated enthusiastically in both the cornerstone laying ceremony and the dedication exercises. Pleased that this church of Puritan heritage would cater to the physical as well as spiritual needs of its community, he declared “there is nothing inconsistent between religion and duty and happiness and rational amusement.”

A more recent photo of the church (photo by the author).

By the 1960s, membership dwindled. In 1963, a church study considered moving to the suburbs, but the congregation decided to stick it out at their historic location and look for ways to better serve their community. Nevertheless, membership continued to decline, and in 1970 the congregation disbanded, selling the building to the Montello Avenue Baptist Church, which changed its name to the Montello Ingram Baptist Church. The Baptists stayed in the building until 1987, when the Capitol Hill Seventh Day Adventist Church took over.

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On the Mall, the Agriculture Department's Botanical Emporium, 1868-1930

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 13:38:00 +0000

The Department of Agriculture is the only federal agency with offices located directly on the National Mall. Agriculture's early presence on the Mall was no accident; it reflected the central importance of agriculture in 19th century America. Before the Civil War, most Americans were farmers, and after the war the advancement of scientific techniques for creating ever more diverse and productive farmlands was one of the country's central aspirations. Late 19th century tourists to Washington regularly visited the elegant red-brick Agriculture Department building, exploring its museum, marveling at its greenhouses and gardens on the Mall, and coming away reassured of America's scientific and economic pre-eminence.

Author's collection.

The department's origins were within the Patent Office, one of the country's oldest government agencies and the one most closely associated with scientific advancement. In the 1830s, commissioner Henry Ellsworth devoted space at the Patent Office to preserving rare specimens of seeds and plants collected by American diplomatic missions abroad, and in 1839 a formal agricultural division was created. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the law establishing the Department of Agriculture as an independent agency "to acquire and diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture...and to procure, propagate, and distribute among the people new and valuable seeds and plants." The new department's first offices were a basement suite in the Patent Office building on F Street NW.

The Army cattle depot on the Monument grounds, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Feb. 1, 1862 (via Library of Congress).

The department was also assigned a plot of land on one end of the National Mall for use as an experimental farm. During the Civil War, the Army had driven vast herds of cattle through Washington to feed the troops fighting nearby in Virginia, and a large stockyard was set up on the Mall, near the unfinished Washington monument. This ground—some 35 acres—was turned over to the new Agriculture Department in April 1865. Sorghum, wheat, rye, and other grains and vegetables were grown on the new experimental farm.

A New Jersey farmer named Isaac Newton, who had worked in the agricultural division of the Patent Office, became the first commissioner of the Agriculture Department (the department did not gain cabinet level status until 1889). Newton lobbied to have a dedicated building for the Agriculture Department constructed on the Mall, and Congress appropriated $100,000 for that purpose in 1866. The architectural firm of Adolf Cluss and Joseph W. von Kammerhueber won the competition for the new building, which was to be located between the Smithsonian (now the Smithsonian Castle) and the Washington Monument.

One hot July day in 1866, Newton heard a thunderstorm approaching. He rushed out to the experimental farm on the Mall to see that the samples of wheat, then being harvested, were protected from the rain. The exertion and heat were said to have brought on sunstroke from which the Commissioner never recovered. After a long illness, he died in 1867, while the new headquarters building was still under construction.

The building shortly after it was completed (author's collection).

Another early view (author's collection).

Completed in July 1868, the Agriculture Department building was a wonderful example of the eclectic architectural style of its time. Adolf Cluss, known as the Red Architect, was Washington's pre-eminent public architect of this era, designing numerous pressed-red-brick buildings, including the Center Market, the Charles Sumner School, the Smithsonian's National Museum (Arts and Industries Building), and the Franklin School in addition to the Agriculture building. The four-story structure was somewhat eccentric in design, conveying the overall look of a Renaissance palace but featuring the distinctive mansard roof of the Second Empire style and incorporating brownstone trim, string-courses, and other elaborate decorative details from Romanesque, Italianate, and other sources.

A later postcard view (author's collection).

The great double-height windows on the second floor, highlighted with gaudy tapestry-brick surrounds, brought a flood of natural light into the building's oft-visited museum space. Entomologist Townend Glover (1813-1883) had advocated for a departmental museum ever since the agency was part of the Patent Office, selling his personal collection of meticulously crafted plant models to the government in 1867 to form the core of the new museum.

Image from a stereoview of the museum inside the Agriculture Department (author's collection).

Visitors passing through the building's great oak front doors entered into an impressive example of Victorian public art. A colorful, encaustic-tiled foyer greeted them with frescoed eagles aloft on the ceiling holding a graceful arbor of vine foliage. Next one might peek into the commissioner's office, paneled in birds-eye maple and bordered by friezes of mahogany and blistered walnut, punctuated with satinwood-inlaid panels, and then proceed up the wrought-iron double staircase to the museum on the second floor. There an attendant would greet visitors and explain the layout of the large museum hall, crammed with 22 walnut display cases full of models and artifacts related to the history of agriculture. Townend Glover's beautiful plaster models of fruits and vegetables were proudly displayed here, as well as an obligatory assortment of stuffed exotic animals and antique agricultural tools. Overhead, busts of Indians stared down from bracketed pedestals around the ceiling, interspersed with the shields of all 38 states of the Union. Ascending a staircase to the third floor, visitors could glimpse the department's extensive collection of preserved botanical samples brought back to the U.S. by various exploratory missions, including Admiral Charles Wilkes' famous expedition to explore the Pacific from 1838 to 1841.

Author's collection.

Statue and "spring house" on the Agriculture grounds (author's collection).

View east from the Agriculture upper garden, with the Smithsonian Castle in the background (author's collection).

Suitably edified, tourists leaving the museum stepped out to admire the elegantly landscaped gardens and grounds that stretched across the Mall from the Agriculture building to where the Smithsonian Museum of American History now stands. The grounds were divided into upper and lower gardens, the upper garden (closest to the building) enclosed by a neoclassical balustrade topped by decorative urns and accented by ornamental pavilions ("spring houses") at the north and south corners. The upper garden was the formally designed space, laid out in geometric patterns with flowers and other low-growing plants, so as not to obstruct the views of the building and the Mall. Several "rustic" statues also added a Romantic flair to the space. A much wider variety of plants were grown in the lower garden area, which was laid out by horticulturist William Saunders as the "American Arboretum," with winding walks and plants grouped according to botanical classifications. By the 1870s, over 1,600 specifies of plants were represented.

View from the Agriculture Building looking north, across the Mall. The balustrade enclosing the upper garden is visible near the bottom of the photo. A long footpath lined with ginkgo trees runs northward (author's collection).

Visitors in front of the main Agriculture building. The conservatory is to the right (author's collection).

The conservatory (author's collection).

Immediately to the west of the main building, a massive, 320-foot-long, tee-shaped conservatory was constructed in 1870 as a greenhouse for tropical plants. The department's' experimental farm was moved to space behind the conservatory, an area that in time became crowded with a motley assortment of farm plots, a stable, a seed processing plant, laboratories, greenhouses, and even a separate museum building (in 1883), when the department's collection outgrew its original 2nd floor space.

A high-wheel bicycle is parked amid the plantings in the lower garden (author's collection).

All told, the museum, conservatory, gardens, arboretum, laboratories and experimental farm formed an incredible botanical menagerie the likes of which have never been seen again in this city. The terraced gardens were said to be a "blaze of color" when in bloom, and "nearly every plant indigenous to our country, from the luxuriant vegetations of the tropics to the dwarfed and hardy foliage of our Northern borders" could be found somewhere on the grounds, according to Mary Logan's 1901 guide to the capital. With the Agriculture Department at one end and the U.S. Botanic Garden at the other, the Mall was an extraordinary emporium of natural beauty.

There was even a unique observation tower from which to survey it all. In 1894, a treehouse made from a section of a felled Giant Sequoia tree, known as the General Noble Redwood, was set up on a plot just to the northeast of the main Agriculture building. The tree house, originally part of the Federal Government's exhibit at the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, was named for John Willock Noble, a Civil War general and Secretary of the Interior from 1889 to 1893. Topped with a house-like roof and dormer windows, the treehouse offered fine views across the Mall to the few visitors who could fit inside at one time.

The General Noble Redwood treehouse. The Agriculture Building is to the left (author's collection).

—So what happened to all of this natural beauty? Massive changes began at the turn of the 20th century, propelled by the uncompromising vision of the McMillan Plan, which sought to impose an oppressive, unnatural homogeneity on what had been the Mall's wellspring of biodiversity. The McMillan Commission perceived the Agriculture Department's grounds, though laid out with painstaking care, to be disconnected from architect Andrew Jackson Downing's delightfully meandering pathways to the east, which, in turn, were unrelated to the Botanic Garden's grounds at the foot of Capitol Hill. Better, apparently, to have one vast empty lawn stretching from the Washington Monument to the Capitol than an eclectic assortment of restful pleasure grounds. Claims were made that Peter L'Enfant intended it this way.

As for the Agriculture Building, by the 1890s it was doomed by its relatively small size and out-of-date appearance. Victorian pressed red-brick buildings (the "red" Washington) were being replaced wherever possible with gleaming white marble structures (the "white" Washington, modeled on the 1893 Columbian Exposition's "White City" in Chicago). The new Agriculture Building, designed by the Philadelphia architectural firm of Rankin, Kellogg & Crane, was one such structure, projecting imperial splendor and power as much as classical ideals. President Theodore Roosevelt prevailed on the Secretary of Agriculture to align the new building according to the McMillan Commission's plan. Begun in 1904, it became the first major building on the Mall to reflect the new order. The building went up in two phases: the outer wings were constructed between 1904 and 1908; the center block was added in 1930.

The new Agriculture Building as originally planned. When completed in 1930, it was built without a dome in the center (author's collection).

The department's museum, which had been operating since 1868, closed in 1905, when the conservatory and many of the smaller buildings on the Agriculture site were razed to make way for new construction. The museum's collections were distributed to the Smithsonian and other interested government agencies. The original Agriculture building continued in use while its replacement was under construction. Then in 1930 it was demolished, and the elegant gardens on the Mall were cleared away. The General Noble Treehouse, another reminder of the eccentricities of the 19th century, was removed in 1932.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included Gladys L. Baker et al., Century of Service: the First 100 Years of the United States Department of Agriculture (1963); Randolph Keim, Keim's Illustrated Hand-Book of Washington and Its Environs (1876); Alan Lessoff and Christof Mauch, eds., Adolf Cluss: From Germany to America (2005); Mrs. John A. Logan, Thirty Years in Washington (1901); Richard Longstreth, ed., The Mall in Washington, 1791-1991, 2nd ed. (2002); Peter R. Penczer, The Washington National Mall (2007); Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009); Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Great Flood of 1889 in D.C.

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 13:30:00 +0000

A massive storm system lumbered up the eastern United States from the Gulf of Mexico at the end of May 1889, dumping extraordinary amounts of rain everywhere it went. As it hammered the mountainous region of western Pennsylvania, the sheer quantity of water overwhelmed a poorly maintained dam, causing it to fail and send millions of gallons of water roaring down a narrow valley to destroy Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Over 2,000 lives were lost. While Washington fared far better than Johnstown, the flood of the Potomac river was still the worst the nation's capital had ever seen. A total of 4.4 inches of rain fell, and at the peak of the flood parts of Pennsylvania Avenue were covered with from 1 to 4 feet of water.

A souvenir postcard of the flood, issued on its 20th anniversary in 1909 (author's collection).

The disaster at Johnstown happened on May 31, the second of two days of drenching rain. As usually happens, riverine floods in Washington come about a day after heavy rains, because it takes time for the runoff to fill the Potomac and arrive downriver at Washington. In this case, the floodwaters came on June 1 and June 2, when the Potomac crested at a full 12.5 feet above flood stage.

A widely-circulated stereoview of the wreckage of the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania. The "dead body" in the foreground is an actor lying in the wreckage for dramatic effect (author's collection).

On the morning of Saturday, June 1, The Washington Post warned that the river was likely to overflow its banks. "The rain had been coming down almost in a continuous sheet all day long and a quarter part of the night," the newspaper reported. Lights at the U.S. Signal Service, predecessor to the Weather Service, had been burning all night long, and officials were worried. Already, small streams had turned into raging torrents. Rock Creek was "higher than ever was known," according to The Evening Star. "Great masses of timbers from shattered structures up the creek came tumbling down the stream, bumping into piers, smashing into walls, burying themselves in banks."

Down on the Georgetown waterfront, the water began overflowing its banks around 10:30 on Friday night, imperiling the commercial wharves. Workmen frantically tried to remove stacks of wood from the Wheatley Brothers lumberyard, knowing much of the lumber would probably be swept downriver. Nearby Libbey & Bro. would lose $2,000 worth of Florida pine from its wharf. The Independent Ice Company loaded ice on dozens of wagons to be hauled to higher ground but would later lose an entire frame storehouse containing 1,500 tons of ice. Workers at Cissel's flour mill carted away as many barrels of flour as they could. As Saturday wore on, the Potomac continued to rise. Several thousand tons of coal that had been in tall heaps on the H.C. Winship wharf were swept into the river.

Spectators crowded the railings of the Aqueduct Bridge to marvel at the mighty river as it steadily rose and grew in power. "The water swirled and swung under the Aqueduct bridge, boiling as it struck the piers, and whipping up a foam with a roaring and grinding sound that was frightful," the Star reported. Several large boats on the C&O Canal in Georgetown rammed themselves against the bridge that carried K Street over the creek and shattered to pieces. Boathouses flooded, their ground floors disappearing under the water.

(Author's collection).

The flooding spread Saturday night not only on the Georgetown waterfront but along Pennsylvania Avenue, Potomac Park, the C&O Canal, and even at the Navy Yard, along the Anacostia. The Potomac was "a wide, roaring, turbulent stream of dirty water," carrying logs, telegraph poles, and all kinds of debris. Rail lines were cut off, both to the north, where the route to Baltimore was partially washed out, and to the south, where the Long Bridge was battered and broken but still standing. The boathouse of the Analostan Boat Club, located just south of Rock Creek in Foggy Bottom, was swept off its foundation Saturday night and carried out to sea in pieces. The southwest waterfront, home to many commercial wharves and steamboat docks, was completely submerged. "The ruin wrought is at present time incalculable," the Post observed.

The most vulnerable part of the city to flooding was the area between Pennsylvania Avenue and B Street NW (now Constitution Avenue), where the Washington City Canal once flowed (The canal had been filled in, and the stream that fed it, Tiber Creek, had been turned into a large sewer). The flood swiftly re-established the waterway. "It looked like ante bellum days on B street," noted the Post, "but instead of a sluggish, ill-smelling canal, as in the sixties, there was a rapid stream..."

Photo appearing in Willis Fletcher Johnson, History of the Johnstown Flood (1889).

In the heart of this flood zone stood the great Center Market, flanked by several blocks of merchants' warehouses, stocked full of groceries and other goods, many of which were stored in basements. Dozens of workers had spent Saturday hauling goods from cellars up to higher floors as the water slowly rose. "Fluttering chickens, scared calves, and bleating lambs" were hurried away to safety. Some stores, like that of merchant James S. Barbour, were kept temporarily clear by pumps that ran all day Saturday, but inevitably they were engulfed in the rising flood. By Sunday morning, cellars were submerged throughout the area, water covering the street to the depth of a foot or more. Center Market itself was inundated, forcing an "army of rats" to frantically flee their homes beneath the market stands. A large turtle that would have been turned into soup escaped into the broad open water and was never seen again.

The Baltimore & Potomac station is in the rear in this view; the Howard House Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue is in the foreground (Source: Library of Congress).

The ornate Baltimore & Potomac railroad station, its train sheds extending out on to the Mall, stood in more than a foot of water. Anxious passengers, hoping against hope that they could board trains out of town, were forced to face reality and retreat from the raised steps of the station on Saturday afternoon. Trains stood immobilized in water. Sometime on Saturday, the United States Fish Commission's large ponds near the Washington Monument quietly merged with the floodwaters, dispersing many thousands of fish. One large German carp was caught on Pennsylvania Avenue, while another was found swimming inside the ladies' waiting room of the Baltimore & Potomac station.

View of 6th Street crossing the mall, wit the B&P train station on the left. A train can be seen under the shed at the rear of the station. (Source: DC Public Library David Sterman Collection, with assistance of Ryan Shepard).

On Pennsylvania Avenue, bubbling whirlpools at street corners were the only signs of submerged sewer holes. Several nimble entrepreneurs managed to get hold of small boats and provide ferry service across the avenue, charging five cents a ride. Others offered carriage rides, where the water was not too high for horses to navigate. An African American man carried stranded guests on his shoulders to the St. James Hotel. Several times he fell, dumping his passengers in the water with a great splash and drawing laughter from spectators. Meanwhile, the Belt Line's horse-drawn streetcars remained in service, despite the water reaching almost to the floor of the cars.

(Author's collection).

Around 3 pm on Sunday the water began slowly receding. The weather had cleared, and to many well-to-do Washingtonians, the natural disaster was a source of great entertainment. Spectators crowded not only Aqueduct Bridge and other outlooks in Georgetown but also the edges of the flooded parts of Pennsylvania Avenue, marveling at the sight of the new Venice on the Potomac. The streetcar companies did "an enormous business," every car being "packed to its utmost capacity." Families picnicked on Observatory Hill in Foggy Bottom, which offered a panoramic view of the water. Georgetown saw 50,000 visitors, and "there was a continuous stream of carriages going up to the Chain Bridge all day long," according to the Post. (To the south, Long Bridge, still standing but heavily damaged, was barricaded to keep spectators away.) Even President Benjamin Harrison and First Lady Caroline Scott Harrison got in on the fun, observing the flood from the library of the White House with the aid of a telescope obligingly provided by the U.S. Lighthouse Board.

Enjoying the spectacle on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Washington Post observed that: "At various points photographers were busy, and no doubt in a few days views will be on sale, preserving the scenes for future generations." (author's collection).

Others were not so fortunate, especially those who lived in low-lying areas near the Georgetown waterfront or in Southwest, where many African American families had their homes. "A number of families, especially of the poorer classes, have lost nearly everything, and to them the hardships are doubly great," the Post observed. "The history of the misery and ruin wrought by the rushing waters can never be told." As the floodwaters rose on Saturday night, Southwesters still at home were awoken by the sound of water and debris sloshing at their doorsteps; they were forced to flee at once, leaving all their possessions behind. Similarly, African American families living in small frame "shanties" on B Street (Constitution Avenue) were driven from their homes during the night. The full story of their losses has indeed never been told.

Loss of life, thankfully, was small, despite rumors to the contrary. The first reported fatality was that of Charles Sparshaw, a maintenance worker for the Washington & Georgetown streetcar company, who lived in Rosslyn and was down by the river on the Virginia side attempting to salvage lumber from the floodwaters when he slipped and was washed out to sea.

As early as Sunday afternoon, Washingtonians started cleaning up the mess that was left behind. Fear of disease drove the rapid response. Workers labored all Sunday night to clean out Center Market, which proudly opened for business as usual on Monday. The city's street cleaners likewise had Pennsylvania Avenue clear in short order.

Excerpt from a map showing the extent of flooding (outlined in blue) from the 1889 flood. (Source: Library of Congress).

Longer term issues remained, however. Flooding of the area south of the White House had grown more and more frequent since the Civil War, due to extensive deforestation upriver and the resulting silting of the river. Great marshy flats had developed that were feared to be a source of malaria. Beginning in 1882, the Army Corps of Engineers had been working to dredge deeper channels in the flats and build up the dredged material into new dry land, called Potomac Park, that was protected by stone seawalls. While the Army's efforts were set back by the flood of 1889, work continued under Major Peter Hains. After the project was completed in the 1890s, flooding was less common.

Georgetown's commercial waterfront had been bustling before the flood of 1889, but it would never recover. The devastation along Water Street, with the pungent remains of fertilizer, coal, and timber strewn about, was profound. Most important, the C&O Canal, which supplied Georgetown with raw materials like grain, coal, and timber, had been wrecked. Along the Palisades stretch above Georgetown, there were gaping holes where the canal's earthen walls had stood. The day after the flood, Maryland Senator Arthur P. Gorman told the newspapers that he doubted the canal would ever reopen. In fact, it took two years to get the waterway back in operation, by which time much of its traffic had been diverted to other destinations via the B&O Railroad.

The silting of the Potomac at Georgetown had been a growing problem throughout the 19th century, and the various floods of the 1870s and 1880s only accelerated the process. Technology was also leaving the old commercial port behind. Modern, steam-powered gristmills in the midwest were producing higher-grade flour at a lower cost than Georgetown's old-fashioned waterwheel-driven mills, which depended on the canal for power. Georgetown was already being called "West Washignton," reflecting its gradual change from a once-thriving, independent port to less-prominent, residential section of the larger capital city.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included: Kevin Ambrose, Dan Henry, and Andy Weiss, Washington Weather (2002); Willis Fletcher Johnson, History of the Johnstown Flood (1889); David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (1968); National Capital Planning Commission, Report on Flooding and Stormwater in Washington, DC (2008); Pamela Scott, Capital Engineers: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Development of Washington, D.C. 1790-2004 (2005); Kathryn Schneider Smith, Port Town to Urban Neighborhood: The Georgetown Waterfront of Washington, D.C. 1880-1920 (1989), and numerous newspaper articles.

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Rock Creek and Other Ginger Ales in Washington DC

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 12:37:00 +0000

The origins of major soft drink brands, like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, are well known—they were the creations of late 19th century druggists searching for rejuvenating elixirs. The broader business of selling sparkling waters and flavored sparkling drinks goes back much further. Washington had a thriving sparkling beverage industry from its very early days. Though national brands dominated in the 20th century, there were many local producers before that, offering soda water, flavored drinks, and, especially, ginger ale, which was invariably seen as the true measure of a bottler's skill and quality.

A 1927 bottle label for "ozonized" Rock Creek Pale Dry Ginger Ale (author's collection).

Since ancient times, naturally carbonated mineral waters have been prized as healthful tonics. In the mid 18th century experimenters in Europe devised the first practical methods of artificially carbonating mineral water as a commercial product. One of the most successful was Johann Jacob Schweppe (1740-1821), a Swiss jeweler who refined a carbonation technique invented by British scientist-theologian Joseph Priestley and started the Schweppes Company in 1783 to make and bottle sparkling water.

Ginger ale, like seltzer water, was seen as a healthy alternative to alcoholic beverages. Early ginger ales and ginger beers were cloudy, fermented yeast beverages, a type of "small beer"—with a very low alcohol content. As early as 1820, a beverage merchant named Lewis Horton set up Horton's Mineral Water Establishment—an early soda fountain—at Pennsylvania Avenue and 6th Street NW, near Center Market. Horton offered a variety of soda waters and ginger ales. "The medicinal virtues of these Waters are well attested, and generally known," Horton advertised. "Their moral tendency is equally obvious to a discerning community." Similarly, French-born Agricol Favier sold sparkling mineral waters in the 1840s from his confectionary stand at 19th and H Streets NW, offering a variety of flavors, including raspberry, strawberry, and lemon, as well as ginger ale. An 1835 advertisement in The Daily National Intelligencer claimed that ginger ale "unites and emits the salutiferous qualities of alleviating thirst, perpetuating health, and of producing an equilibrium in the system. The nomenclature of words and the blandiloquence and suaviloquence of language might be employed in adding fame and celebrity to the quiddity and quintessence of this luxuriant and scintillating ne dement"—whatever that means.

Advertisement from the January 8, 1835, edition of the Daily National Intelligencer.

Georgetown was an early center for the production of ginger ale and other sparkling beverages. In 1847, Julius Rother opened a soda water factory on the southeast corner of Olive and Green (29th) Streets, where a natural spring provided a convenient supply of fresh mineral water. In advertising his new enterprise, Rother offered a statement signed by nine local doctors that his establishment was clean and up to the highest standards. Rother's carbonation machines were said to be "so constructed as to ensure a full and perfect saturation of gas to a degree heretofore unknown to us."

One of DC's most prominent bottlers in the 19th century was Samuel C. Palmer (1839-1914), a native of Georgetown. In 1861, Riley A. Shinn, who had taken over Rother's depot, hired Palmer as a clerk. Ten years later, Palmer took charge of the business for himself. In addition to soda water, he offered a variety of sparkling beverages, including Cantrell & Cochrane's Belfast Ginger Ale, imported directly from Ireland. The firm of Cantrell & Cochrane is generally credited with first producing ginger ale in the 1850s that was not fermented from yeast but made by adding ginger to artificially carbonated water. For decades, C&C was considered the best ginger ale, noted for its clarity, crispness, and sophisticated aroma. Many imitators substituted capsicum, a much cheaper substance than ginger, to provide the drink's "bite." Samuel Palmer proudly advertised that his American Ginger Ale was "equal to the best" (meaning as good as Cantrell & Cochrane's). He also sold a variety of cider, beer, porter, and stout, and was the exclusive D.C. agent for Schlitz beer from Milwaukee.

Samuel C. Palmer (photo courtesy of Randy Palmer).

According to an 1884 survey of Washington businesses, Palmer's enterprise employed upwards of 50 men and boys and had 12 wagons and 22 horses at its disposal to deliver bottled beverages to local druggists, grocery stores, and other businesses. His bottling plant was equipped with the latest technology, including steam power, lightning bottle washers, patent filters, and advanced bottle filling and corking machines. Palmer also supplied soda and mineral water in casks, along with syrups in a variety of flavors, such as lemon and sarsaparilla. He would rent out marble-topped soda fountains to dispense his product in pharmacies.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Palmer had plenty of competitors. One of the largest was the Hermann Bottling Works, founded by John Frederick Hermann (1837-1927), a German immigrant, in 1874. Hermann's plant was initially at 809 2nd Street SE and through many decades of business was always located at a Southeast address. Hermann's son, August George Hermann (1862-1936), took over the business in 1902. The Hermanns produced a variety of bottled drinks and were perhaps best known for their ginger ales, including Tiger Ginger Ale, later known as "the ginger ale with a bite." Another turn-of-the-century competitor was Frank H. Finley & Son, at 1206 D Street NW. The senior Finley (1834-1892) had started as a cigar maker but turned to bottling in the 1870s. His son, also named Frank, advertised in 1896 that he would regularly load up a beer wagon and travel around to local D.C. suburbs, including Brookland, Bladensburg, Hyattsville, and Takoma Park, selling both beer and soft drinks to thirsty residents along the way.

Advertisement from the June 1, 1927 edition of The Evening Star.

Prohibition, which came to Washington in November 1917, was devastating to many local restaurants and breweries, but it brought new life to ginger ale and other non-alcoholic beverages. Ginger ale became one of the most commonly used mixers to improve the tase of bootleg alcohol. Particularly suitable was Canada Dry pale ginger ale, advertised as "the champagne of ginger ales." Canadian pharmacist John McLaughlin had first offered ginger ale for sale in Toronto in 1900, but some customers thought it too heavy and sweet, so he developed a pale-colored, lighter version, which became Canada Dry ginger ale. In 1923, two partners bought the company and brought Canada Dry to America, where sales skyrocketed. Surveys suggested that as many as three quarters of drinkers used the ginger ale to mask the flavor of bootleg alcohol.

A couple of old Washington breweries, the Christian Heurich and Abner-Drury companies, tried their hands at producing soft drinks. Christian Heurich, the city's largest brewer, created an apple drink called Liberty Apple Champagne. However, the juice fermented in the old beer barrels it was stored in and became too alcoholic to sell. Abner-Drury, located like Heurich along the Foggy Bottom waterfront, produced ginger ale. Abner-Drury's bottle labels for its "Celtic Club" ginger ale claimed that the drink was "manufactured in accordance with original Belfast, Ireland formula from Jamaica Ginger, Zanzibar Chillies and Pure Fruit Juices." Cantrell & Cochrane won a court injunction in 1921 prohibiting Abner-Drury from using "CC" on its label or referring to Belfast—tactics that were viewed as intended to confuse customers into thinking they were buying Cantrell & Cochrane ginger ale. Abner-Drury continued to sell ginger ale, surviving Prohibition, but the company folded in 1935, two years after the dry era ended.

A bottle label from the Yankee Bottling Company (author's collection).

As demand for mixers grew, new companies ramped up to meet it. Some were quite small, like the Yankee Bottling Company, which produced a variety of carbonated drinks in the 1920s and 30s out of a small alley building at 640 C Street NE on Capitol Hill. The Capitol Bottling Company, started in 1906 at 10th and P Streets NW, produced Capitol Club ginger ale, another double-C name that subtly invoked the Cantrell & Cochrane brand. The Massachusetts-based Clicquot Club, widely advertised in Washington, was yet another ginger ale with a name that alluded to Cantrell & Cochrane—as well as to Veuve Clicquot, a well-known champagne.

Capitol Club advertisement (author's collection).

One of the most successful bottlers of this era was the Rock Creek Ginger Ale Company, started in 1920 by Lindsey P. Rawley (1888-1978) and his two younger brothers, Glenn (1893-1963) and William (1900-1977). The Rawleys were from Mount Airy, North Carolina. They bought an old bowling alley at 215 7th Street SW and fixed it up to use as a bottling plant. Despite the name, the company used water from the Potomac, not Rock Creek.

As recounted by Washington Post columnist Bob Levey in 1978, the Rawleys worked long hours in their early days to make a living. They had purchased a foot-operated bottling machine capable of turning out 40 cases an hour. Lindsey was in charge of mixing the product; his two brothers distributed and sold it via truck. Their first years produced little profit, but, armed with a contract for 3,000 cases a month from Safeway, Rock Creek soon became a well-known name. Evidence of its success lies in the fact that, by the 1930s, a rival company called the Root Rock Ginger Ale Company was also in business in the District, attempting to capitalize on Rock Creek's popularity.

Rock Creek Root Beer label from 1954 (author's collection).

Root Rock label from the 1940s (author's collection).

Rock Creek eventually became one of the largest independent bottlers in the country. In 1957, the company constructed a massive new 90,000-square-foot bottling plant at 500 Penn Street NE, just off of New York Avenue in Brentwood. The plant could spit out 400 bottles a minute and had storage capacity for 100,000 cases. In the early 1970s, Lindsey Rawley retired to Arizona, but he returned to DC to take over operations of the company after his brother William died in 1977. Lindsey spearheaded a drive to expand the company's operations, despite the fact that it was already the only independent soft drink bottler left on the East Coast. Sadly, Rawley died in 1978, only months after describing his ambitious plans to columnist Levey. Within a few years, family heirs sold the company to Canada Dry.

Matchbook cover from Rock Creek's final years, when it adopted the motto, "Come Home to Rock Creek" (author's collection).

Canada Dry continues to produce some soft drinks, such as cherry soda, that are branded with the Rock Creek label, but only in very limited quantities. The drinks occasionally can be found in convenience stores and a few grocery stores. With the success of local breweries in recent years, perhaps we will see more interest in local ginger ales and ginger beers in the future.

* * * * *

Special thanks to Chosi's Washington DC Area Beer and Soda Bottles, which offers extensive and detailed information about D.C. area bottlers and their wares. Other sources for this article included Elmer E. Barton, Historical and Commercial Sketches of Washington and Environs (1884); John Hull Brown, Early American Beverages (1966); Tristan Donovan, Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World (2014); K. Anne Ketz and Theresa Reimer, Breweries and Bottling Companies in the Washington Area (1990); Garrett Peck, Capital Beer (2014); Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (2007); Stephen N. Tchudi, Soda Poppery: The History of Soft Drinks in America (1986); Kim Williams and Andrea Mones, "Pure Water and the Red Oak Spring Company" (2015); and numerous newspaper articles.

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Rediscovering DC's Earliest Chinese Restaurants

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 11:41:00 +0000

Chinese culture in the nineteenth century was profoundly strange to Americans. The story of how Chinese restaurants developed—transforming a cuisine that was considered strange and disgusting into a veritable American comfort food—is a startling one, fraught with white Americans' racism, cruelty, and insensitivity but matched by great resiliency and adaptability on the part of Chinese immigrants. As Washington's earliest Chinese restaurants gained their footing at the beginning of the 20th century, they spearheaded an enduring presence in the city's culinary culture.

Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in significant numbers in the 1850s, when poor farmers and laborers from China’s Pearl River Delta region sailed to San Francisco to join in the California gold rush. Many were employed by the railroads at hard labor, carving new routes through the rocky, unforgiving terrain of the west. Almost all were men, and they faced intense hostility from whites, who saw them as competition for scarce jobs. Gradually some began moving east to the larger cities, including a small number who came to Washington. Wherever they went, virulent racism limited what they could do and where they could live. The danger of violence from whites was ever-present, and it led to the formation of self-sufficient Chinatowns in larger cities for the protection and sustenance of their inhabitants.

From The Washington Times, Dec. 14, 1902.

According to sociologist Esther Ngan-ling Chow, the first Chinese resident of Washington was a man named Chiang Kai, who settled on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1851. D.C.’s Chinatown, or “Little China” as it was originally called, began to develop in the 1880s. It was little more than a block long, on the south side of Pennsylvania at 4 1/2 Street NW, a stretch of road that now separates the National Gallery of Art’s east and west buildings. By the late 1890s, it was a small, self-contained community, and this is where the city's first Chinese restaurants opened.

Washingtonians had certainly heard about Chinese restaurants long before they actually were able to eat in one. Reports from the West Coast and from travelers to China described exotic dens of mystery and intrigue where strange foods were served, matching the perceived strangeness of the people. In February 1877, the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, located just a couple blocks north of where Chinatown would later develop, hosted a charitable bazaar fitted with various international “restaurants,” including a Vienna bakery, a Japanese tearoom, and a Chinese restaurant. The mock Chinese restaurant served rice and curry, and “for relishes, rats, cats, mice and dogs have been artistically prepared: but you will not be asked to eat them, unless your appetite craves that kind of food,” according to the Daily National Republican. The belief that Chinese ate dogs, cats, and rats was widespread. And thus, for 1870s Washingtonians, the idea of a Chinese restaurant was more akin to a circus freak show than an actual eatery. Much still needed to change.

As the city's Chinatown slowly grew on Pennsylvania Avenue, negative publicity in the press, fueled by the racist preconceptions of the city's white residents, gave it a mysterious and unsavory reputation. The tiny neighborhood was regularly reported to be a lawless den of inequity, where the inhabitants spent their time either smoking opium or robbing and killing each other—little of it true. Most residents were actually men who struggled to earn a living, working hard at menial service jobs or in laundries, the only work open to them. Not content to leave these people alone, white Washingtonians were fascinated by their exoticism. It was perhaps inevitable that they would go slumming in Chinatown, lured by the cheap thrill of braving a mostly-phony sense of danger.

From The Washington Times, March 29, 1903.

As early as 1894, the Post reported on the popularity of slumming excursions to dangerous places in D.C., especially Chinatown. Much of the peril to slummers was self-inflicted. A local beat cop was reported as saying “Another thing about the slumming parties that come through here—the girls always want to buy everything in sight. Why, these fellows just rob them right and left.” After the visit of the great Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) to Washington and other American cities in 1896, slumming excursions into Chinatown grew ever more popular.

This fanciful drawing of DC's Chinatown on Pennsylvania Avenue appeared in The Sunday Star on July 31, 1932.

One of the first of the city's Chinese eateries to be patronized by the slummers was the Hong Far Low Restaurant, located on the second floor of 314 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, above the Quong Sang Lung Company store. Taking its name from a pioneering Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, the Hong Far Low was in business by the mid 1890s. According to an 1897 Washington Post article, this was Chinatown's only restaurant, an exotic place of mystery that was abandoned during the day but teeming with life at night. “The savory odors of chop sui and rice, the crackling of Lichee gum nuts, the bubble and sparkle of cold tea and the ceaseless hum of strange, guttural conversation, beguile the senses,” the newspaper observed.

San Francisco Chinese restaurant, c. 1900 (author's collection).

The Washington Times noted in 1903 that Chinese dishes “have become a fad among the smart set, and a visit to a Chinese restaurant is looked upon as an excursion into Bohemia, a taste of slumming, as it were. In Washington there is hardly a night that the Chinese restaurants are not patronized at some hour of the night by fashionably dressed women with escorts in evening attire…”

Hard as life was for Chinese immigrants, especially after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned new immigrants from China, they proved tenacious and resourceful. Few were trained as cooks, and even fewer would have imagined themselves operating or working in a restaurant, but that is where many ended up. They had brought with them a stir-fry cooking technique that could be used with various meats and vegetables; its name comes from the Cantonese zap tsui, meaning “mixed pieces.” Tailored to American tastes, the dish was called chop suey, and it became wildly popular across the country as slummers descended on Chinatowns in every major city.

Propelled by the popularity of chop suey, Chinese restaurants began proliferating in the early 1900s. Most of DC's early chop suey eateries were near or along Pennsylvania Avenue from 3rd Street to 13th Street. While some were modest, informal establishments whose names and stories are lost to history, others advertised in the newspapers, hoping to lure non-Chinese customers. Examples include the Man Far Law at 317 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Oriental Cafe at 926 Pennsylvania Avenue, both of which opened in 1900. Also in 1900, Sam Hing operated a chop suey restaurant, its name unrecorded, at 408 13th Street, just south of Pennsylvania Avenue. Among these, the Man Far Law made a point of offering both Chinese and American dishes in what would become a common practice.

With more and more Washingtonians wanting to jump on the chop suey fad, Chinese entrepreneurs were further emboldened to venture out of Chinatown to open new restaurants. An early destination was the entertainment district on 9th Street just north of Pennsylvania Avenue. As described in our previous article about the Gayety Theater, 9th Street was the center of the city's nightlife, the "Broadway of Washington," as it would later be called. Here two of Washington's most successful early Chinese restaurateurs, Charlie Bing and Ung Wah, opened restaurants across the street from each other in the early 1900s.

Charlie Bing's establishment, the Hong Kong Low Chinese Cafe, was located at 518 9th Street, on the second floor above the Holmes & Co. Rubber Goods store. The narrow storefront building abutted the hulking Washington Loan & Trust Company building (later Riggs Bank) that still stands on the corner of 9th and F Streets. In a 1905 advertisement, Bing proudly proclaimed that "The most costly and handsome Chinese restaurant furnishings imported direct from China serve to make this the most attractive and interesting oriental cafe to be found anywhere." Bing embellished the building's second-floor balcony with dragons and other elaborate Chinese decorations signaling the restaurant's exotic allure. How Bing financed the restaurant is not known, although he likely pooled resources from a number of Chinese supporters, possibly including investors in China.

Postcard view of the Hong Kong Low (author's collection).

Bing's restaurant lasted more than a decade, through Bing's various personal ups and downs. In May 1909, the restaurant made the front page of The Evening Star when Bing's staff of four cooks and waiters were all arrested one evening at the height of the dinnertime service. An immigration inspector had shown up demanding to see their papers, and when they could not produce any, the four wait staff were apprehended as illegal aliens in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Released on $500 bail each, they were all acquitted of the charges a month later. All were native Americans; three had been born in San Francisco and one in Seattle.

Charlie Bing worked hard to assimilate into his adopted country, converting to Christianity at an early age and joining the Episcopal Church. As a merchant, he was exempted from the Exclusion Act's constraints, and he was able to bring his wife Mamie to the U.S. Charlie and Mamie's original Chinese names are not known. They had two children, Mary Parsons Bing and Robert Parsons Bing, both named after the family physician. Tragedy struck the Bings when little Mary died from tuberculosis in May 1910, when she was just two and a half years old. The family had joyfully celebrated the birth of her little brother, Robert, just two months earlier. Charlie Bing reportedly was "was so greatly shocked that he was unable to attend the funeral," which was held at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension. Mary Bing was buried as a proud Washingtonian at Congressional Cemetery.

Ung Wah was even more successful than Charlie Bing, though he had his close calls with the authorities as well. Wah reportedly spent many years working in the household of a rich benefactor, becoming an accomplished chef and acquiring the invaluable social skills associated with catering to the wealthy. He must have saved money as well, because in 1900 he was one of the co-owners of the Oriental Café on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 1902, Wah enlisted in the U.S. Navy, to serve as a cook on the presidential yacht, The Mayflower. The circumstances of this unusual move are murky; it would appear that Wah likely intended merely to sign up temporarily as a cook, perhaps to cater an event or events held on the yacht. Did Wah know that he was enlisting in the Navy for an extended term, or was he deceived by Navy recruiters? Whatever the case, he was arrested for desertion when he tried to go home one day. Wah had connections with important people—likely through the unidentified wealthy benefactor he had originally worked for—and he gained the services of an accomplished lawyer, Edward A. Moseley, who argued tenaciously for Wah’s innocence. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Wah’s supposed enlistment was invalid.

It was one of several harassments Wah suffered. Also in 1902, he was arrested for the theft of a diamond ring belonging to an officer stationed at Fort Myer. Two pawnbrokers fingered him as the thief who tried to pawn the ring. Then, after the ring was recovered from Sam Hing, the 13th Street restaurateur, the charges against Wah were dropped. A simple case of mistaken identity, the newspapers reported.

Wah must have done well with his stake in the Oriental Café on Pennsylvania Avenue, because in 1905 he struck out on his own, opening the Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant and Catering Company at 515 9th Street NW, across the street from Charlie Bing’s just-opened Hong Kong Low. Like Bing, Wah invested heavily in decorating his restaurant to meet American tastes and expectations. The building he took over was a former Methodist church originally constructed in 1835 and enlarged in 1879. According to Wah’s advertisement, his new restaurant was “gorgeously furnished with teakwood tables, inlaid with pearl.” A rare postcard view of the interior of the building shows the Gothic windows and sharply peaked ceiling of the former church complemented by a large, intricately carved Chinese screen, hiding the kitchen area, and tables likewise sporting elaborate Chinese carving and inlay.

Postcard view of the Port Arthur (author's collection).

Wah lived nearby, in an apartment over a 9th Street nickelodeon, with his second wife, Daisy, and his son Lee Yue. His rivalry with Charlie Bing was apparently very real, although undoubtedly exaggerated in the press. In 1907, the Washington Post reported on a supposed feud between Wah and Bing, in which each accused the other of plotting to injure his business and reputation. The Post’s reporter took obvious delight in describing how heated the dispute had become, as if the two restaurateurs were children fighting on a playground, but it’s unclear how serious the “feud” really was.

East side of 9th Street NW, circa 1901. The Port Arthur restaurant was in the Gothic style building with the gabled roof (Library of Congress)

By 1909, Wah was reported to be “one of the most prominent Chinamen in Washington,” and his Port Arthur restaurant was supposedly the largest Chinese restaurant in the city. He owned considerable property and was contemplating a $30,000 real estate deal, according to press accounts. He also had a contract to superintend the cooking and serving of all food at state dinners hosted by the Chinese legation. Few could rival this kind of success. Yet what kind of person was this Wah? His name was in the newspapers that year over a scandal involving a young 14-year-old girl that he had helped to immigrate to America. At first, the girl stayed with the Wahs as a companion to Wah's wife. But after two years, Wah sent her to live with a Chinese family in New York. She then ran away from that household and told the police that Wah had sold her to the New York family for $500. Few other details of the case are available. It certainly raises serious unanswered questions about Wah.

Postcard view of the Nankin (author's collection).

In 1916, Wah expanded his business by adding another restaurant on 9th Street, perhaps overextending himself in the process. The new restaurant was the Nankin, at 510 9th Street. Like the Port Arthur and the Hong Kong Low, the Nankin was a second-floor restaurant located over another store. Following the pattern of the most successful Chinese restaurants, it was lavishly decorated with marble-topped tables inlaid with mother of pearl, mahogany bentwood chairs, and silk-embroidered panels farmed in inlaid panels on the walls. Despite the significant investment, Wah only operated the Nankin for three years. In 1919, new management took over and expanded the restaurant by adding the downstairs space as a cafe. The restaurant closed in 1927.

The Port Arthur also continued in business into the 1920s, when it offered live dance music by a three-piece ensemble to accompany dinner. By the early 1930s it had closed, likely a victim of the Great Depression, which upended the restaurant business across the city. By that time, a new generation of Chinese restaurants was taking hold, some of them much larger than the early restaurants on 9th Street. By the 1930s, the newest entertainment district was on 14th Street, where during World War II, large Chinese restaurant/nightclubs like the Lotus and the Casino Royal would do a booming business catering to the thousands of war workers, government girls, and GIs that passed through the nation's capital.

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Some parts of this article previously appeared in Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C: Capital Eats (2013), which includes a more complete discussion of the city's historic Chinese restaurants. Additional sources included Francine Curro Cary, ed., Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, D.C. (1996); Yong Chen, Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America (2014); Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (2009); John Jung, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants (2010); James Morgan, The Life Work of Edward A. Moseley in the Service of Humanity (1913); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Holmes Modern Bakery, one of DC's largest

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 10:50:00 +0000

The Holmes Bakery, whose slogan "Holmes to Homes" was familiar to many Washingtonians in the first half of the 20th century, was one of the city's most successful family-run businesses. The company capitalized on growing consumer trends favoring store-bought bread and home delivery to create a thriving business that now stands as a unique reminder of the city's commercial past.

Holmes Bakery postcard from the 1910s (author's collection).

James Holmes (1832-1907) was born in Philadelphia, one of seven children. As a boy he worked in his father's Philadelphia store. In 1865, shortly after the Civil War ended, Holmes, his father, and four of his brothers all moved to Washington, where James opened a grocery business. He became a successful businessman, well-liked, and involved in the city's turbulent Reconstruction-era politics. "He was one of the best-known men in Center Market and had a great many friends there," according to his 1907 obituary in The Evening Star.

But it wasn't James who made the Holmes name famous; it was his son, Lewis (1861-1922). As a young man in his twenties, Lewis joined his father in his grocery store at 1st and E Streets NW, a few blocks east of Judiciary Square. In 1892, the two went a step further, opening a bakery called Holmes & Son just north of the grocery store. Lewis, the prime driver behind the new bakery business, knew what he was doing. Previously, most people baked bread at home or purchased it at a corner market from a neighborhood baker, but by the 1890s, commercial bakeries were taking over a large percentage of the business. "Home-made bread is a back number," crowed an 1893 article in the Star. "Machine-made bread takes the cake. The twentieth century bakery is a thing of beauty and the up-to-date baker is a joy forever."

Advertisement for Holmes' Milk Bread from the July 3, 1910 Washington Times (click to enlarge).

The rise in commercial bakeries went hand-in-hand with the growing nationwide obsession over food sanitation, which would culminate in Upton Sinclair's famous The Jungle, about the horrors of the meatpacking industry. The cleanliness of bread-making had been a concern for some time before that. An article in the New York Times in 1896 excoriated small traditional bakeries in that city ("The walls and floors are covered with vermin, spiders hang from the rafters, and cats, dogs, and chickens are running around in the refuse...") and asserted that "the cause of this trouble is that small bakeries are owned by ignorant persons. The large bakeries are conducted in an exemplary manner."

Lewis Holmes appears in this full page add from the April 10, 1910 Washington Times (click to enlarge).

Lewis Holmes, at 6' 2" and 245 pounds, cut an imposing figure. An amiable, natural salesman, he was a walking testimonial to the healthfulness of his breads and pies. By 1902, he had built a large factory on the site north of Judiciary Square where he cranked out thousands of loaves of bread and other baked goods every day. That year, he escorted a Star reporter through the factory, enthusiastically pointing out its modern, sanitary processes. "I noted then the cleanliness of everything," the reporter wrote, "the perfection of the process, and especially the fact that the fruit that was being put into the pies was fresh fruit of the choicest kind—strawberries, large and luscious, the kind they serve with cream and sugar at the Raleigh or the Shoreham, blackberries and huckleberries and cherries." Even the floor "was clean enough to eat off of, with the acme of holystone whiteness that you see on a deck of a man-o'-war Sunday morning before service. This is whiter than paint, whiter than marble, and nothing but snowy linen seems its equal in suggesting cleanliness..." It should be noted that Holmes regularly purchased a significant amount of advertising space in the Star at the time.

An early electric delivery van (author's collection).

Holmes distinguished itself from other bakeries by offering home delivery, which boasted several advantages over store-bought bread. "Bread bought in any other manner is first left in bread boxes at grocery stores," the company explained. "It is handled more or less, exposed to the air, becomes dried out and when it reaches your table the greater part of its original goodness has departed." In contrast, "Holmes' Home-made Milk Bread reaches you direct from the oven fresh every sunrise with a quality and flavor unsurpassed, free from dust and dampness," according to a 1910 company ad in The Washington Times. 'Milk' bread was simply bread to which milk had been added in the baking process. The Holmes Bakery advertised that it received fresh milk daily from Montgomery County dairies, including William Getzendanner's farm in Barnesville, Maryland.

Delivery trucks parked outside the Holmes bakery (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1904 Holmes moved to a new bakery at 1st and F Streets NW, a block north of its original site. The company gradually expanded its plant here, taking up more and more of the block between 1st, 2nd, F and G Streets NW, adding separate bread and pie making factories, an administrative building, and stables for its many horses and delivery wagons. Holmes adopted motorized delivery vans in the 1910s as it grew to be one of the city's largest commercial bakeries. With an addition in 1917, Holmes boasted that it was one of the largest bakeries in the country and began offering factory tours six evenings a week.

The Holmes Weekly Bulletin from May 1939 (author's collection).

Holmes & Son continued to bake bread and pies for several decades after Lewis Holmes' death in 1922, continuing to distinguish itself with its "Holmes to Homes" delivery service. But local bakeries were an endangered species by the 1920s, when national companies took over other large D.C. bakeries. In 1956, the company sold both its business and its real estate, effectively going out of business. The General Baking Company, makers of Bond Bread, took over the old Holmes delivery routes and also continued to sell Holmes products, but they were baked at other facilities. Holmes bread continued to be produced and delivered to D.C. homes into the 1960s. It disappeared at a time when home delivery of milk and bread was rapidly dying out.

1940s Holmes bread wrapper (author's collection).

By 1965, the huge former Holmes bakery complex was gone, replaced by a parking lot covering the block between 1st, 2nd, F and G Streets NW. In June, the Georgetown University Law School announced that it had purchased the site. The law school has redeveloped the site with many modern buildings; there is no sign of the sprawling factory complex that once stood here.

Georgetown Law School facilities at 1st and F Streets NW, former site of the Holmes bakery (photo by the author).

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The 200-year-old U.S. Botanic Garden in Early Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 13:01:00 +0000

First given a marshy plot of land on the National Mall in 1820, the U.S. Botanic Garden celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. The delightful conservatory on the Mall and its surrounding gardens have always been a point of pride for the country as well as a practical laboratory for horticultural research. While we are unable to visit in person right now, we can take this opportunity to look back at how the Botanic Garden appeared more than 100 years ago, as captured in historic stereographs and other photos. Click on any of the images to see larger versions.

The idea for a national botanic garden was proposed as early as 1796. George Washington thought it a splendid idea and suggested several prominent sites as possible locations. Like many things in the new capital, it took awhile for anything to happen. In 1820, the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences opened the first botanic garden on five acres at the eastern end of the Mall, below the Capitol. The privately funded institute went out of business in 1837, however, and no images survive to show what its garden on the Mall looked like. The abandoned site soon became an unofficial trash dump.

After next being housed in the 1840s in a greenhouse behind the Patent Office, the U.S. Botanic Garden finally returned in 1850 to the spot on the eastern end of the Mall where it had begun, which was drained and cleaned up, and a small greenhouse was constructed.

The 1850s Botanic Garden conservatory (Source: Library of Congress).

The greenhouse, or conservatory, was designed by an unknown architect in the fashionable Gothic Revival style, with arched Gothic windows, ornamental spires on the rooftop, and even little ledges on the piers between the windows that evoked Gothic buttresses. Surrounding the conservatory were several acres of gardens. As described by the Evening Star in 1859, "Sinuous and gravel walks, tastefully bordered with box, invite the visitor through a labyrinthine garden, where, on all sides, the senses are agreeably saluted by the grateful perfume and variegated colors of rare and beautiful flowers of infinite variety..."

Pleasant as the garden was, it suffered from its proximity to the notorious Washington City Canal. The canal was a key original element of the L'Enfant plan for the city; it was intended to allow commercial boats to traverse the center of the city. Starting at the Potomac, the canal traveled east along what is now Constitution Avenue before jogging to the center of the Mall at about 7th Street and then turning south at 3rd Street, just before reaching the Botanic Garden. Poorly engineered, the canal never had a proper water flow and repeatedly silted up, leaving it as little more than a broad open sewer.

1861 Boschke map excerpt showing the route of the Washington City Canal, from lower left across to center right. Note the Tiber Creek joining the canal on the grounds of the Botanic Garden (Source: Library of Congress).

As the canal turned south at 3rd Street, it was joined by Tiber Creek, which ran down from the area to the north, beyond North Capitol Street. In 1867, Congress appropriated funds to enlarge the Botanic Garden's conservatory and to cover over Tiber Creek so that open, dry land could be reclaimed in front of the Botanic Garden's expanded conservatory.

A Civil War-era view of the Mall. The 1859 Botanic Garden conservatory is at the bottom. At the bottom right, Tiber Creek curves in to connect with the Washington City Canal (Source: Library of Congress).

While one contractor worked on covering over Tiber Creek, another began expanding the conservatory. A large circular pavilion was added on the west side of the original greenhouse, connected to it by an enclosed passageway, or hyphen. Thus the old greenhouse became the east wing of the new conservatory complex.

Construction underway on the new central pavilion of the Botanic Garden's conservatory, circa 1867 (author's collection).

Two men stand on the reclaimed land north of the conservatory where the Tiber Creek has been covered over (author's collection). More than 100,000 cartloads of fill were brought in to level the ground.

The fetid Washington City Canal is at the center of this view, which was taken from further west on the Mall. The unfinished Botanic Garden conservatory is visible in the middle distance (author's collection).

The architect for the new pavilion was Edward Clark, who had taken over the Capitol expansion project when Thomas U. Walter resigned in 1865. Clark designed the large rounded pavilion to be the center of the new conservatory complex, with the old conservatory serving as the east wing and a new, matching west wing to be constructed on the other side. The three parts would be connected by hyphens. The central domed pavilion, made of an iron framework mounted on a marble foundation, was to be filled with tropical plants, while the two wings would contain house plants. At the request of William R. Smith, the Botanic Garden superintendent, the central pavilion featured rounded windows. Smith thought the Gothic arches in the original conservatory did not admit enough light.

The expanded conservatory is seen here with both wings in place, circa 1873. This view is from the south, with northwest Washington visible in the distance (author's collection).

The fully expanded conservatory was not completed until 1873, but proved to be a popular leisure spot for Washingtonians. The central pavilion, known as the Palm House, included a staircase in the center that spiraled around a chimney (for keeping the building warm in the cooler months) and led up to a catwalk on the roof.

View from the west of the 1867-1873 conservatory complex. Note the young trees planted along the allee to the left (author's collection).

View of the Capitol as seen from the catwalk on top of the Botanic Garden conservatory (author's collection).

Here are some interior views of the conservatory from the 1870s to the 1890s:

(Author's collection).

This appears to have been taken in one of the smaller greenhouses that were located to the south of the main conservatory complex (author's collection).

This view inside the Palm House was taken in 1898 (author's collection).

In 1877, at the urging of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., the government purchased an iron fountain that had been part of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia as a permanent addition to the Botanic Garden. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who would later sculpt the Statue of Liberty, designed the ornate fountain, which was placed in the center of a basin in front of the Botanic Garden conservatory. In 1885, 36 gas lights were added.

Sightseers at the Bartholdi Fountain on the Mall in 1901 (author's collection).

The Botanic Garden became a perennial favorite of many Washingtonians, who enjoyed strolling in the outdoor gardens, admiring the exotic plants in the Palm House, or attending lectures on how to grow better plants at home. But not all observers were sanguine about the garden. The 1897 edition of Rand McNally's Handy Guide to Washington and Its Neighborhood scoffed that the Botanic Garden was "where Congressmen get their button-hole bouquets, and their wives cuttings and seeds for pretty house-plants." Moreover, the garden "long ago outlived its scientific usefulness, and has never attained excellence as a public pleasure-garden or park, while its cost has been extravagant."

In 1901, the Senate Park Commission, known as the McMillan Commission, released its pretentious vision for revamping the Mall in a display of imperial splendor. The commission proposed eradicating the leisurely nature walks and the vast biodiverse assortment of plantings that existed in the Botanic Garden and other gardens across the Mall. In their place, a vast alley of nothingness would extend from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and beyond. Instead of a celebration of nature's beauty at the foot of Capitol Hill, a new memorial to war and military victory—the Ulysses Grant memorial—would rise up to remind people of what the Commission believed made America great. Naturally, there was a massive public outcry at the callous destruction that was being contemplated. The Botanic Garden's conservatory complex would be demolished, and more than 200 trees in the garden around it would be cut down.

Widespread opposition delayed the project for two decades, but in 1933 it was carried out. The Botanic Garden moved to a new, larger facility on the southern edge of the Mall, where it stands today. Fortunately for us all, the garden is as rich in exotic delights as ever and remains a remarkable oasis of natural beauty in the heart of the nation's capital.

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Sources for this article included Anne-Catherine Fallen, A Botanic Garden for the Nation (2007); Randolph Keim, Keim's Illustrated Hand-Book of Washington and Its Environs (1876); Karen D. Solit, History of the United States Botanic Garden 1816-1991 (1993); Rand McNally, Handy Guide to Washington and Its Neighborhood (1897); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Hecht Company, last of DC's department stores

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 11:47:00 +0000

When Hecht's finally ceased to exist in 2006, it was more than just the end of one of Washington's oldest and most successful businesses. It was the end of large-scale, locally-owned retail as an industry. Other local department store giants, some of which we have previously chronicled, had already fallen: Lansburgh's in 1972, Kann's in 1975; Garfinkel's in 1990; and Woodies in 1995. For a long time, Hecht's bucked this trend. When the company built a brand-new, freestanding store downtown in 1985, it seemed to breathe new life into a tired enterprise and bolster the resurgence of downtown as a shopping destination. But nothing lasts forever.

The former Hecht Company store at 13th and G Street NW (photo by the author).

Hecht's was not a native Washington company; it began in Baltimore after the arrival in 1844 of Simeon Hecht, a native of the small Bavarian town of Langenschwarz. Simeon began the first of several Hecht family enterprises when he opened Hecht's Red Post Store in Baltimore in 1848. His financial success allowed him to bring other family members over to America, including his brother Samuel (1830-1907), who arrived in 1847 and opened a separate furniture business. It was Samuel's son Moses (1873-1954) who set his sights on Washington, opening his "dream store" at 515 7th Street NW in 1896.

This was the golden era of department stores, prime inventors of modern consumer culture. Offering a vast assortment of stylish goods to make modern life comfortable proved enormously profitable, and the new Hecht's enterprise faced competition from several established D.C. firms. Lansburgh's had been around since 1860 and was located just a block south of Hecht's on 7th Street. On Pennsylvania Avenue, the Palais Royal started in 1877, followed by Woodies (as the Boston Dry Goods Store) in 1880. Kann's had opened as a low-cost alternative in 1893.

A newspaper advertisement from 1899 (Source: The Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1899).

Despite this competition, Hecht's thrived. A notice in The Washington Post in 1897 claimed that the store's fall opening gala that year drew a remarkable 10,000 patrons. The following year, the store took over the adjoining building at 513 7th Street, doubling its floor space. A second, six-story addition was built at 517 7th Street in 1903, further expanding the store. Twenty new departments filled the space, including a large furniture department on the top floor. In 1912, Hecht's tacked on another addition, four stories tall, at 511 7th Street.

The red brick and brownstone structure seen here is a double storefront that includes 513 and 515 7th Street. Hecht's began in 515 (to the left) and added 513 after Rudden's furniture store moved out in 1898. The company built 517 (with the large green bays) in 1903, and added the beige-brick 511 in 1912 (photo by the author).

That Hecht's customers could make their purchases on credit (not just by paying in installments) was touted in the newspapers as key to the store's early success. "It is one of Washington's best-known business houses," the Post proclaimed in 1908, "catering to a large and important portion of the citizenship...the highest official and the daily wage worker sharing the advantages made possible by the unique system of 'buy now—pay later' that has become so famous." Special discreetly-enclosed booths for applying for credit were installed, "into which the customer enters, is waited on by a bookkeeper, and passes out unobserved by the shoppers," according to a 1903 Post article. Once approved, delighted customers snapped up the fancy goods displayed in the gleaming plate-glass and mahogany cases.

As historian Richard Longstreth has explained, the department store business surged after World War I. With the sacrifices of the war over and the economy booming, consumers began spending money on items they had never know they needed. Department stores expanded to meet the growing demand and implemented modern managerial efficiencies to streamline their massive operations and offer even better prices.

In 1919, Hecht's purchased the Federal Building at the corner of 7th and F, adjacent to its existing store, as well as the Shubert-Garrick Theater adjoining it on F Street, to make room for a large new addition. The theater and the Federal Building's tenants were allowed to run out their leases; then both structures were demolished. In July 1924, groundbreaking took place for a lavish new building, completed the following year. Designed by Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt (1859-1941), the new eight-story store was a forceful statement of the company's success and future aspirations. The glazed terracotta façade, intricate ironwork decoration, and large clock over the intersection of 7th and F Streets, created in a style called "American Gothic" at the time, contributed to the "new conception of shopping convenience and beauty" that the company conveyed. The $3 million building tripled the store's floor space and led to a doubling of its staff, from around 500 to more than 1,000 employees.

Workers put finishing touches on the new Hecht's store in 1925 (Source: Library of Congress).

Hecht's boasted that enough electricity for a small town was used to power all the lights and equipment in the new store. The massive plate glass windows at street level, like those at other department stores, enticed customers with fetching and often whimsical displays of the latest fashions and household gadgets.

The Hecht's building as it appears today (photo by the author).

The clock at 7th and F Streets (photo by the author).

Hecht's never managed to gain the prestige of Woodies or Garfinkel's, but aimed squarely to satisfy the common man. As a 1925 advertisement explained, the store's ambition was "to be one of your best stores. Not your most exclusive store, or your most expensive store, or your ritziest store, but simply one of your best stores—to take our place in the sun with the other splendid department stores in Washington." When Woodies put elaborate displays in its windows at Christmastime, Hecht's didn't try to compete. "Woodies was solid middle class, with an air of gentility but no arrogance. Hecht's was blue collar," wrote Post reporter Roxanne Roberts in 1995, when Woodies closed.

One problem for a multi-story retail establishment like Hecht's was moving customers from one floor to another. Elevators were slow and cumbersome. The answer was escalators. In 1934, Hecht's installed the city's first escalators in its 7th Street store. It held an elaborate dedication ceremony in September, with the chairman of the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation on hand to cut the ribbon and take the first ride, implicitly assuring onlookers that Hecht's modern escalators were an emblem of better times ahead.

Sketch of the store from a Hecht's pocket directory (author's collection).

The company continued to add to its department store complex, endlessly fighting to match or outdo its competitors. The company gradually took over most of the block where the main store was located. In December 1935, Hecht's purchased the historic home of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873) at 6th and E Streets NW on the far side of the block. The handsome Greek Revival mansion, built in 1851, had hosted many an elegant fete during the Civil War years, but Hecht's had no interest in preserving such history. The company wanted the site for automobile parking—a crucial amenity needed to keep customers coming downtown. The Chase house was torn down and replaced initially with a parking lot. In 1937, a modern, utilitarian parking garage was constructed on the site. Hecht's was the first downtown department store to build such a garage. This was followed in 1941 by a new six-story annex on E Street to house Hecht's "bargain store."

This sketch, from a 1940s matchbook, shows the parking garage to the rear and bargain store on E Street, to the right. The size and placement of these additions has been exaggerated, and other buildings are not shown (author's collection).

As it expanded, Hecht's, like Woodies, sought to transfer much of its service operations outside of the downtown area. The solution was a new, beautifully-streamlined Art Deco warehouse along New York Avenue NE in Ivy City, which opened in 1937. The building remains one of the city's finest examples of Art Deco styling. The Washington Herald noted that the building was "symbolic of an arresting type of architecture that is destined to precipitate a revolutionary transformation in the appearance and utility of the buildings..." Expanded several times, the structure was used by Hecht's as a warehouse until 2006. It was converted to apartments in 2015.

The Hecht Company warehouse around the time it was completed (Source: Library of Congress).

The glass-block lantern on the roof of the Hecht warehouse (photo by the author).

After World War II, it became clear that branch stores would be essential for any department store that wanted to thrive in the automobile age. A huge base of customers lived in the suburbs, and fewer and fewer of them wanted to come downtown to do their shopping. In 1947, Hecht's opened its first full-service suburban branch in a hulking structure at the corner of Fenton Street and Ellsworth Drive in Silver Spring, Maryland (now part of the Ellsworth Place shopping center). By the 1960s, suburban stores had redefined the retail business. Hecht's opened some 20 more outlets in the Baltimore/Washington area between 1947 and 2005.

The company logo in the 1960s.

As suburban shopping expanded, downtown business withered. Hecht's location in the "old" part of downtown, which declined precipitously after the 1968 riots, became a liability. By 1980, the company was losing as much as $1 million per year on the downtown store, and company officials began searching for a better location. Partnering with developers Oliver Carr and Theodore Hagans, the company decided to build a new store on a site adjacent to the Metro Center subway stop, where downtown redevelopment was beginning to take hold. The proposed site, owned by the city's Redevelopment Land Agency, was on G Street between 12th and 13th Streets, within a few blocks of the Woodies and Garfinkel's stores.

Construction on the block-long store began in 1984. Seven small businesses were evicted from their vintage storefront buildings, which were razed. The vast, new Hecht's structure, the first new department store downtown since before World War II, rose in their place and opened in 1985. Designed by the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, the postmodern structure was solidly sheathed in precast concrete, trimmed with pink granite. Like many a suburban department store, the Hecht's building lacked windows, focusing shoppers' experience on the interior displays. At a height of five stories, it was designed so that office space could be built on top at a later date (the One Metro Center offices were added in 2003).

Hecht's sought to win over affluent shoppers with the new store's luxurious marble floors, mahogany paneling, and brass fixtures, which contrasted dramatically with what had become the tired, bargain-basement look of the old building. None of the merchandise from the old store was brought over to the new. No thrift shop or bargain department, in the basement or elsewhere, was to be found. Upscale brands like Anne Klein, Christian Dior, and Ralph Lauren, never seen before in a Hecht's store, graced the new shelves. Prices were substantially higher too, and the strategy worked. Sales increased, and the store became a lasting element of the downtown retail landscape.

The old Hecht's store was redeveloped as office space, now called Terrell Place in honor of civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell (photo by the author).

But Hecht's, as a brand, is gone. The original, independent Hecht Company had come to an end in 1959, when it merged with the May Department Stores conglomerate. Individual stores had retained the Hecht's brand name but became part of a vast national network of many different labels. In 2006, the May Company merged with Federated Department Stores, which owned the Macy's and Bloomingdale's brands, among others. Wanting to turn Macy's into a national brand, Federated closed some Hecht's stores and rebranded the rest as Macy's (or in one case, Bloomingdale's). Suddenly Hecht's was gone, after 110 years in Washington. Although perhaps not as fondly remembered as Woodies, Hecht's had many followers, and its loss was widely lamented. Post columnist Marc Fisher called it "the last big goodbye in a long series of losses of local retail names."

Macy's remains open in the big box on G Street, still sporting "The Hecht Company" in huge letters chiseled across its façade. In the age of Amazon, who knows how long that store will survive.

* * * * *

Sources for this article included James M. Goode, Capital Losses 2nd ed. (2003); Robert Hendrickson, Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America's Great Department Stores (1981); Michael J. Lisicky, Baltimore's Bygone Department Stores: Many Happy Returns (2012); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993); Richard Longstreth, The American Department Store Transformed 1920-1960 (2010); G. Martin Moeller, Jr., AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. 5th ed. (2012); Jan Whitaker, The World of Department Stores (2011) and Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class (2006); Hanz Wirz and Richard Striner, Washington Deco: Art Deco in the Nation's Capital (1984); Henry F. and Elsie Rathburn Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (1956); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The rise and fall of Samuel Rutherford's National Benefit Life Insurance Company

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 11:35:00 +0000

“The National Benefit Life Insurance Co., of Washington, D.C., is not only the largest of Negro insurance companies but the greatest Negro business enterprise of any kind in the United States, if not the world,” declared the Baltimore Afro-American in June 1927. The company’s success in the early decades of the 20th century was a proud beacon of black achievement, proof that black enterprises could prosper despite Jim Crow constraints. Perhaps it seemed that the company had such a golden touch that any investment it made was sure to be a good one. However well intentioned, the company made several bad real estate investments, and after the Great Depression hit, it went into receivership when its capital reserve was depleted. Partially implicated in the financial collapse, founder Samuel Rutherford left a mixed legacy. Nevertheless, his achievements outweighed his failings.

Samuel Wilson Rutherford was born on a farm outside of Jonesboro, Georgia, in 1866. His grandparents had purchased their freedom before the Civil War and owned the farm on which he grew up. He attended Sunday School, learning what he could from a catechism and Webster’s Spelling Book. As a young man, one of his first jobs was as a salesman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He also opened a grocery store in Rome, Georgia, and later served as a regional sales agent for Singer in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Samuel W. Rutherford (Source: The Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 20, 1913).

After his first wife died in 1897, Rutherford moved to Washington. Despite a lack of formal business training, he founded the National Benefit Association, a fraternal aid association offering life insurance based on member contributions, in 1898. For six dollars a month, the fledgling association rented a small room at the back of the black-owned Capitol Savings Bank at 609 F Street NW. Staff consisted of Rutherford and one assistant.

Circa 1909 postcard from the National Benefit Association (author's collection).

More postcard views of the offices (author's collection).

Through conservative investments and convincing salesmanship, Rutherford’s company gradually grew and prospered. It benefited from the fact that African Americans had trouble getting insurance from white-owned companies, which balked at the high mortality rates among African Americans. Helping to fill the gap, the National Benefit Association accumulated over 116,000 dollars in assets by 1909. It jumped at the chance to buy the building it occupied at 609 F Street when the Capitol Savings Bank failed, owning it free and clear within three years. By 1913, the successful company employed 750 workers. In December of that year, a conference was held at the prestigious Metropolitan A.M.E. Church on M Street that celebrated the company's achievements, which had “immeasurably aid[ed] in the emancipation of the Negro from business bondage and plac[ed] him upon the business map of the country,” according to the Baltimore Afro-American.

NBL's headquarters is the tall building in this view of the 600 block of F Street from the 1920s (Source: Joseph E. Bishop photograph collection, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.).

(Author's collection.)

The enthusiasm for the company’s success was in sharp contrast to the overall state of African American affairs. The harsh repression of the Jim Crow era had shut blacks out of white society’s privileges and prosperity, and in 1913 conditions were only getting worse. Woodrow Wilson had been inaugurated earlier that year, the first southerner since Andrew Johnson to lead the country, and soon the government began systematically dismissing blacks from federal jobs, a trend that had a devastating impact on many Washingtonians. Booker T. Washington wrote, “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”

Against that tide, blacks like Rutherford worked hard to build an independent and self-sufficient community separate from white Washington. In 1917, his firm was officially converted to an “old line” insurance company, which meant that it had accumulated a sufficient reserve of capital assets, conservatively invested in bonds and blue-chip stocks, to support a for-profit status and reliably pay out benefits. Changing its name to the National Benefit Life Insurance Company, it was the first such company operated by African Americans.

Samuel Rutherford is seated at the right in this postcard view of his office (author's collection).

In that era, whites and blacks alike often assumed that black-owned businesses were not as well run as white-owned businesses. Banks and other financial institutions run by blacks were particularly suspect. Everyone knew what had happened with the Freedmen’s Savings Bank, an institution founded in 1865 to encourage former slaves to save for the future. The bank had millions of dollars in deposits by 1873, when it became clear that white bank officials had misused deposits for their own enrichment and to help their friends. The bank failed during the financial panic of 1873, robbing many African Americans of their hard-earned savings and resulting in widespread cynicism about financial institutions within the black community. NBL’s success was thus all the more remarkable.

Beneficiaries of NBL's success included several hundred young African American women who were hired as clerks and bookkeepers—jobs they could never get from white-owned companies. One of these young women was a certain Beatrice G., who apparently hailed from the small Eastern Shore town of Whaleysville, Maryland. Beatrice took a trip around 1920 to Chester, Pennsylvania and sent the postcard shown at the top of this article to her friend Francis Jones in Whaleysville. Beatrice teases Francis, stating “I met some one up here that knows you but will not tell you who it is until I hear from you.” She also points out that she is one of the diligent workers depicted on the front of the card.

Back of the postcard shown at the top of this article, showing the message from Beatrice G. (Author's collection).

The bookkeepers on the postcard all appear to be hard at work, and this is consistent with the serious tone Rutherford set for his employees. He was known to have little patience for those who were careless or slacked off. Anyone whose books could not be exactly reconciled at the end of the month was required to make up the difference from their personal funds or be fired.

“You must have faith in your fellow man to succeed,” Rutherford told his employees at a company meeting in 1923. That faith must have been sorely tested the following year when Rutherford was shot in the mouth by a disgruntled employee. Arthur Joadson, a 38-year-old bookkeeper, had been terminated when shortfalls were found in his accounts. After arguing with Rutherford about his dismissal, he suddenly pulled out a gun and fired twice. One bullet went wild, slicing through a woman’s hat hanging on a rack; the other struck Rutherford in the mouth, shattering two teeth. Joadson fled, but a nearby policeman had heard the shots and chased Joadson down F Street, apprehending him. Rutherford was initially treated at Emergency Hospital but subsequently transferred, at his son’s insistence, to Freedmen’s Hospital, where doctors removed the remaining bullet fragments. In time, the 60-year-old company manager fully regained his health.

Throughout the 1920s, NBL continued to expand its business to new states and to build its portfolio of investments. When NBL opened an office in Chicago in 1929, black business officials there begged Rutherford to move the headquarters of his famous company to the Windy City. Rutherford said that he was flattered by the request, but he declined. NBL was on top of the world, it seemed.

The Balfour Apartments (photo by the author).

In fact, the company was on very shaky ground, and the Depression was just around the corner. With operations in 28 states, NBL had expanded far too quickly, imperiling its limited resources. It had unwisely absorbed a failing Georgia insurance company, further eroding its own strength. NBL had also drawn on its limited capital reserves to invest in three risky local real estate ventures, against the advice of the company’s auditor. The acquisitions included paying top dollar for the Balfour Apartments at 16th and U Streets NW in early 1929, just before the stock market crash. NBL also purchased the famous Whitelaw Hotel at 13th and T Streets NW, the first high-class hotel ever built exclusively for African Americans. Completed in 1919, the combined hotel and apartment house was saddled with debt ten years later, when NBL bailed it out at auction. Around the same time, NBL also purchased the unfinished Prince Hall Masonic Temple at 10th and U Streets NW. This ambitious project had been floundering for lack of funds for several years, and NBL financed it by trading to the builder the company’s own headquarters building on F Street as well as two other small commercial buildings. Rutherford, who had a long association with the Masons, envisioned proudly moving NBL into the impressive new Masonic Hall on U Street when it was finally completed.

The Prince Hall Masonic Temple (photo by the author).

It was not to be. The company had been living on borrowed time, draining its capital reserve to almost nothing, and company insiders knew that trouble was brewing. A management shakeup occurred in early 1931; Rutherford retired from day-to-day management of the company, and his son Robert, who was president, was also sidelined, while new officers joined the board of directors. Regulators sensed something was wrong and immediately began examining the company books. By July, their findings were made public. NBL had far less reserve than legally required and was immediately put into receivership. The company’s questionable real estate holdings were soon sold at a loss, employees were let go, and policyholders were left unable to claim benefits.

NBL’s chief actuary, Alfred B. Dawson, had tried to warn its directors that they were headed for disaster. In February 1931, just before the executive shakeup, Dawson wrote a lengthy letter to the Rutherfords and treasurer Mortimer Smith laying out all of his concerns. It was to no avail. After the company collapsed in early July, Dawson was so devastated that he took his own life in his New York apartment.

Dawson’s confidential letter emerged two years later as part of public court filings. In his extensive comments, Dawson repeatedly made clear that he understood that the motive of NBL’s executives for making ill-advised investments was not personal greed at all; it was to do everything humanly possible to support the African American community in Washington. Rutherford, however, had been distracted, according to Dawson. He “has himself loaded to the gills with a lot of office detail that can well be performed by others...and being such a bear for daily labor he will not and does not take the time to examine into most important company transactions where the very life of the National Benefit is at stake....”

Dawson nevertheless admired Rutherford: “I have always found that when he was fully informed on a matter his advice and counsel were most beneficial” he observed, noting that in dealing with whites, Rutherford was “the one outstanding National Benefit gladhand artist—a most important asset to any company.” He even went on to say: “I do not believe the National Benefit Life Insurance Co., would be confronted with the mighty serious situation it has ahead of it today, if S.W. Rutherford had given the necessary personal time to important company problems, instead of merely stepping into the picture occasionally...”

The African American press was soon filled with stories about all the civil lawsuits that were filed. Criminal charges were also soon filed against Rutherford, his son, and other officers, including some of the officers that had been appointed when the two Rutherfords were sidelined in early 1931. They were accused of an assortment of illegal actions, including lying to regulators about the status of the company.

Excerpt of the front page of The Chicago Defender, April 29, 1933.

In 1932, nearly a year after the NBL officers had been indicted, Nannie Helen Burroughs, the influential civil rights activist and educator, came to Samuel Rutherford’s defense. In an article for the Baltimore Afro-American about Rutherford and the recently-deceased John Whitelaw Lewis, she wrote “These two divinely endowed men gave the little business which the colored people of Washington have today a foundation on which to stand, a faith with which to work, and a place of respect from which to look.” Of Rutherford specifically, she noted that “He built the National Benefit Life Insurance Company from a fifty-cent chair to a six-million dollar insurance company. This marvelous achievement made it possible for his company to give employment to an army of young men and women…. He put millions of dollars into the hands of employees with which they bought homes and made their families happy.” Burroughs, a staunch advocate for women’s rights, further pointed out that “But for the presence of the National Benefit, thousands of girls who desired business careers would have been forced into domestic service. Do not forget that.”

In 1934, the charges against Rutherford, his son, and the other company officers were dropped for lack of evidence. While extensive company assets were gone for good, it was difficult to pin the blame on any specific individuals. By the 1940s, litigants were more concerned about how to divide up what remained of the company’s assets. Over 4 million dollars’ worth had vanished by that time.

With his reputation diminished by the financial scandal, Rutherford lived the rest of his life away from the public spotlight, passing away in 1952 at age 87. His last days were spent at the Stoddard Baptist Home near Howard University, and his funeral was held at the venerable 19th Street Baptist Church. Despite his former prominence, the Washington newspapers took little notice of his death.

Buildings in the 600 block of F Street NW in May 1968. The former NBL building is the tall one near the intersection, occupied in 1968 by the Quaker City Linoleum Company. All these buildings were razed in the early 1980s. The Capital One Arena now occupies the entire block. (Source: Emil A. Press slide collection, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.).

Samuel Rutherford certainly seems to bear some responsibility for the downfall of the National Benefit Life Insurance Company, although it may have been more from neglect than active malfeasance. The company (albeit, to its own detriment) managed to preserve the Whitelaw Hotel as a going concern and to fund the completion of the Prince Hall Masonic Temple, two emblems of African American achievement. More importantly, Nannie Helen Burroughs’ defense of Rutherford also still rings true. He gave young bookkeepers like Beatrice G., opportunities they otherwise could not have imagined. What became of Beatrice and the other employees of NBL after the company folded, we do not know.

* * * * *

Special thanks to Jessica Smith of the D.C. History Center, for her assistance with photos of 609 F Street. Other sources for this article included Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (2017); Constance Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (1967); James B. Mitchell, The Collapse of the National Benefit Life Insurance Company: A Study in High Finance Among Negroes (1939); Carter G. Woodson, “The Insurance Business Among Negroes,” (1929); “Samuel Wilson Rutherford,” The Journal of Negro History 37, no. 2 (April 1952); and numerous newspaper articles.

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Trinity Episcopal Church, once one of the city's finest houses of worship

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:35:00 +0000

Trinity Episcopal Church once stood majestically on the northeast corner of 3rd and C Streets NW, an intersection now overwhelmed by the U.S. Labor Department’s sprawling Frances Perkins Building. When it was completed in 1851, Trinity was one of the most distinguished houses of worship in the city, and its congregation included civic leaders and other important Washingtonians who paid for the privilege of good seats in the church. Yet sweeping neighborhood changes would eventually spell the congregation’s doom. The elite neighborhood declined precipitously after the Civil War as wealthy congregants moved to newer residential communities farther to the northwest. Unable to sustain itself, the church was dissolved in 1922 and its beautiful building torn down in 1936—so that the land could be used for a parking lot.

Trinity Episcopal Church in 1862, as photographed by Matthew Brady (Source: Library of Congress).

Trinity was organized in 1828, after a group of influential Episcopalians met at City Hall and decided that an additional parish was needed between Christ Church on Capitol Hill and St. John’s on Lafayette Square. It has been said that the name Trinity was chosen for the new parish in part because it was the third Episcopal parish in Washington. The new congregation’s first building was completed three years later on Fifth Street NW, facing City Hall.

The Judiciary Square neighborhood in those days, also known as English Hill, was a mixture of scattered working-class frame dwellings to the north and east as well as elegant townhouses to the south and west. The neighborhood was dominated by the neoclassical City Hall building designed by George Hadfield, and built beginning in 1820 (see previous article). Francis Scott Key (1779–1843) moved to Judiciary Square from his house in Georgetown in 1830, after he was named district attorney for the city of Washington. He also served as the senior warden of Trinity Church. The church was well situated to serve congressmen, senators, judges, and other influential residents who chose to live near City Hall. John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun all worshipped at Trinity when they were in Washington. So did local officials, including many of the city’s early mayors—to the point that Trinity became known as the “church of the mayors.”

A photo of the original Trinity Church building on Fifth Street, taken in 1898, when the building was about to be torn down (Source: Library of Congress).

By the middle of the 19th century, a bigger building was needed for the burgeoning congregation. Many parishioners thought Trinity should serve, at least informally, as a national Episcopalian church and should be housed in a prestigious building. Perhaps, it was thought, the diocesan Bishop could be persuaded to move from Baltimore to Washington and designate Trinity as his pro-cathedral. That didn’t happen, but when the charismatic Rev. Clement Moore Butler (1810-1890) arrived as rector in 1847, he set himself to the challenge of building a suitable new house of worship.

At first, plans were simply to tear down and replace the church on Fifth Street. Fundraising was sluggish until wealthy banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888) stepped in to help the congregation purchase a new lot for the church on the other side of City Hall at 3rd and C Streets NW. Corcoran was an enthusiastic supporter and patron of architect James Renwick Jr. (1818-1895), who in 1846 had won the competition for the design of the Smithsonian Institution (the Smithsonian Castle) on the Mall. Renwick had first prepared a design for the Smithsonian in a high Gothic Revival style, which had been rejected. That discarded design became the basis for the new Trinity Church. It seems likely that Corcoran was the one who suggested that Renwick’s discarded design should be reused.

James Renwick's rejected Gothic design for the Smithsonian Castle. Trinity Church is a somewhat simplified version of the central part of this building. (Source: Library of Congress).

The cornerstone was laid in April 1850, and work progressed briskly at first. The church was primarily made of red sandstone from Seneca, Maryland, as was the Smithsonian Castle, which was under construction at the same time. By the end of July, the nave was built and largely roofed, and work on the towers was supposed to begin. Storm damage to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which was used to transport the cut stone from Seneca to the city, delayed completion of the towers until the following March. That month, a grand auction was held for the pews in the new church, with wealthy congregants vying for the best seats. A combination of sales and rentals brought in more than $19,000, substantially covering the costs of the new building.

Like Renwick’s 1846 Grace Church in New York City, Trinity featured a wealth of Gothic detail, including elaborate tracery on the windows and many freestanding pinnacles topped with fleurs-de-lis on the front facade. The church's twin towers were capped with unusual openwork wooden beams bent into bell-like spires—an apparent attempt to economize on costs. The footprint of the church was roughly square; within it, the nave was laid out octagonally, corresponding to the great octagonal lantern on the roof, which provided natural lighting.

Renwick's original drawing of the church's north (side) elevation shows elaborate buttresses and finials that were never built. Instead, a large octagonal cupola (lantern) crowned the church's single-story central space (Source: Library of Congress).

While the Gothic Revival details were strikingly elegant, they were actually much restrained in comparison with the architect's original plans. The church’s unusual shape (which resulted from the central section of Renwick's proposed Smithsonian building being constructed as a freestanding structure) struck some observers as ungainly. One newspaper commentator observed that the church, with its flat roof and two smokestack-like towers, looked “like a stump-tailed steamboat.” At some point later in the 19th century, the wooden openwork spires were enclosed in shingled caps, topped with crosses, and the surrounding pinnacles were removed.

Detail of an 1852 view of Washington. The new Trinity Episcopal Church is on the right, above the Senate (north) wing of the Capitol (Source: Library of Congress click to enlarge).

At the time of the Civil War, Trinity and many other established Washington congregations were staunchly pro-Southern. This put the church’s rector, Rev. Butler, in an awkward position. On the one hand, as chaplain of the U.S. Senate, he had been close friends with John C. Calhoun (1798-1850) of South Carolina, who reportedly “on his deathbed ordered a silver cup to be made and presented to Dr. Butler as a memorial.” On the other hand, Butler was a northerner (born in New York) and a loyal government chaplain. Conflict became inevitable. Members of the Trinity congregation “gave him a hard time after hostilities broke out, on account of his eminent loyalty to the Union,” leading Butler to resign in 1861 and move to Philadelphia.

Trinity was one of several church buildings that the Army commandeered in 1862 to serve temporarily as a hospital for the war-wounded. In such cases, the army would lay wooden planks across the tops of the pews to create a platform for hospital cots. The pews at Trinity bore the marks of nails and screws from this ten-month military service for decades to come. President Lincoln may have visited convalescent soldiers at Trinity during this time.

After the war, several renovations and expansions were undertaken. Notable was the construction in 1894 of a spacious parish hall, which nearly filled the rest of the square. Designed by local architect William J. Palmer (1863-1925), who would subsequently design the Ebenezer United Methodist Church on Capitol Hill (see previous article), the new hall allowed the Sunday School to move out of the basement of the church and also added a spacious dining hall. When the new project was announced in 1893, The Evening Star remarked that “an innovation in such structures will be a kitchen, a thing whose absence is nearly always missed at church suppers, and which will be a joy unspeakable to the ladies.” Then, in 1898, a major renovation of the church’s interior was completed, including a new marble altar, new brass and marble pulpit, and new carpeting and seat cushions for all the pews.

The outward prosperity demonstrated by the parish hall and interior renovations masked an underlying decline at Trinity parish. As early as 1891, an article in the Star noted that the church was losing its footing: “Trinity Church is a power in the city as an engine of good works, but owing to the growth of the city westward has lost somewhat of the stability and strength of its congregation which formerly characterized it.” By 1903, the church was begging for dismissal of the back taxes it owed on its rectory: “This church has lost heavily in wealth by the constant removal of parishioners to the northwest, where they have become attached to other parishes, and the income of this parish thereby being terribly impaired. The people whom we serve are now of a much poorer class than those to whom we ministered some years ago.”

Trinity Church circa 1920, near the end of its life. Note the enclosed towers. (Source: Library of Congress).

Trinity’s role as a charitable mission grew during World War I, when it provided both spiritual and physical support to servicemen passing through the capital. In 1922, after a three-year trial period, the Washington diocese of the Episcopal Church took full control of Trinity from its vestry, effectively dissolving the old parish. From this point on, the church served exclusively as a diocesan mission and downtown outreach center, providing a range of services to disadvantaged members of the community. The old parish hall, now called the Trinity Community House, proved particularly useful, featuring a gymnasium and recreation hall, dining hall, emergency room, five large clubrooms, library, and even a “mental hygiene clinic room.”

A postcard view of Trinity Church (author's collection).

In 1928, the church held a special service and banquet, attended by Bishop James Freeman, to celebrate its 100th anniversary. It would be one of the last such events to take place in the venerable old building. In 1936, faced with ever increasing debts, the diocese agreed to raze the church buildings and lease the land to Auto City Parking Company, which would pay $43,000 in rent to use the property as a parking lot for ten years.

This advertisement appeared in The Evening Star on September 22, 1936.

An article in The Washington Post noted that some former parishioners were very upset about the destruction of the church, calling it “sacrilege, heartless and commercial.” With no historic preservation laws on the books, however, there was little they could do. Demolition proceeded, and, as was customary at the time, the wrecking contractor sold off a variety of salvaged structural elements, including stained glass windows, pews, Seneca sandstone blocks, and Peach Bottom roof slates. Some items went to other local churches, including the old pews and the communion rail, which were installed in the St. Patrick’s Chapel on Foxhall Road (since demolished). Other items, including the church’s cornerstone, were sold to a family in Camp Springs, Maryland, where they were said to be used to build a house.

The intersection of 3rd and C Streets NW as it appears today. Trinity Church was on the far corner. The space is so overwhelmed by the Department of Labor building that the church's location is hard to visualize (photo by the author).

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Thanks to Allyn Gibson for finding the 1852 Sachse view of Washington that includes Trinity Church. Other sources included James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Lorenzo D. Johnson, The Churches and Pastors of Washington, D.C. (1857); Garrett Peck, The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry (2013); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Long and Colorful History of the 14th Street Bridge(s)

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Tue, 21 May 2019 11:33:00 +0000

It’s now a sprawling complex of five separate spans across the Potomac River: three for cars, one for trains, and another for Metro. They are among the plainest and most utilitarian of the city’s many bridges, associated in most people’s minds first and foremost with rush hour traffic tie-ups. Yet this is actually one of Washington’s oldest river crossings, with a long and remarkable history.

View from the Virginia side of the five bridges that currently make up the 14th Street Bridge complex, taken in November 2013 (Source: detail of photo by Antony-22 on Wikimedia Commons).

This was the city’s third crossing, after Chain Bridge above Georgetown and a bridge across the Eastern Branch (Anacostia) river. In 1808, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law the authorization for a new bridge to be constructed at the foot of Maryland Avenue and 14th Street SW to provide a direct crossing from Washington City to Virginia. There was much rivalry in those days between promoters of the fledgling Washington City and businessmen representing the more established upstream port of Georgetown. The Georgetowners objected to the location of the new bridge, arguing that it would cause silting, flooding, and other impediments to river traffic. Their objections (which would soon come true) were overruled by federal officials who were more concerned about developing the new capital than promoting business in Georgetown. The privately-owned Washington Bridge Company was soon organized to raise funds from investors and build a toll bridge over the river.

A map of Washington from 1835 shows the Long Bridge, in pink, crossing the Potomac to Virginia (Source: Library of Congress).

Opened in May 1809, the nearly mile-long bridge was the longest in the country. At the time, the river was much wider at this spot than it is today. The Tidal Basin, East Potomac Park, Hains Point—none of them yet existed. The wide expanse of the river included a vast area of shallow submerged flats that wouldn’t be dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers until much later in the 19th century. Across this expanse, a low and rickety wooden-pile bridge was constructed, aptly called the Long Bridge, with its narrow roadway only about 10 feet above the water. Standing at one end, it would have been impossible to make out what was happening at the other.

Fire

And so it stood in August 1814, when the British invaded Washington, the only time enemy troops have set foot in the nation’s capital. The British invaded from the east, first clashing at the town of Bladensburg, Maryland, with a small force of American militia, which they scattered. Some of the retreating Americans, having run all the way through Washington, fled across the Long Bridge to the safety of Virginia and then burned the Virginia end of bridge to keep the British from following. When the British troops saw smoke rising at the other end of the bridge, they promptly burned the Washington end to keep the Americans from crossing back into the city. It would be two years before the badly damaged bridge would be repaired and re-opened.

Of course, fire wasn’t the bridge's greatest enemy. Such a flimsy structure was never going to be able to withstand the power of the mighty Potomac when raging floodwaters came pouring through. The first destructive flood came in February 1831, when the bridge was severely damaged in 14 places.

The flood damage was just too much for the privately-held Washington Bridge Company. Its investors were sick and tired of footing the bill for the expense of maintaining the span, which had never made a profit. Friends in Congress saw to it that the federal government relieved them of their misery, buying out their interests. The next question was how the government should rebuild the bridge. Engineers recommending a larger, iron structure elevated higher above the river. True to form, Congress balked at the expense of building an iron bridge and instead only allocated enough money to rebuild the old wooden span. According to a later newspaper account, chief engineer George W. Hughes told observers that he considered this approach “very uncertain.”

Nevertheless, there were nothing but smiles and celebration in October 1835 as President Andrew Jackson and his cabinet proudly marched across the newly rebuilt bridge on foot. It was such a long trek that they returned to Washington in carriages rather than walk all the way back. After the next devastating flood occurred five years later, Georgetowners renewed their attack on the bridge, lobbying to tear it up and replace it with a new structure at Georgetown. Once again, powerful Washingtonians pressured Congress to authorize reconstruction, and the bridge remained in place. It would not be replaced until 1906. In the meantime, severe flood damage would occur again in 1856, 1860, 1863, 1866, 1867, 1870, 1881, and 1889, the last event resulting from the same storm that had caused the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania.

A view of the Long Bridge around 1860. The bridge crosses in the middle distance; a schooner is docked in the foreground, where a man stands on a load of lumber (author's collection).

The Bridge in Wartime

The bridge was a key strategic asset for the Union during the Civil War, serving as the primary connection between Washington and the extensive battlefields of Virginia. Fort Runyon was constructed just south of the Virginia end of the bridge to guard its approaches after Union troops crossed the bridge during their first action to occupy Alexandria, Virginia, in April 1861. Just three months later, panic-stricken Union troops fleeing the Battle of Bull Run would straggle back across the Long Bridge (which must have seemed very long indeed) to reach safety in Washington. Throughout the war, the bridge was a gateway to the South, a place of trepidation for young troops from the North crossing over for the first time into enemy territory. After the war was over, veterans sometimes returned to the bridge to remember the momentous crossing into the theater of war.

Civil War view of the Washington end of the railroad bridge built alongside the Long Bridge (Source: Library of Congress).

The bridge was upgraded during the war with a stronger, wooden truss structure to accommodate heavy military traffic. In 1863, the Alexandria and Washington Railroad Company was authorized to build a railroad bridge alongside the original structure. The new bridge paired with the old one caused serious obstruction to water flow in the Potomac, compounding the problem of silting that had ruined the port of Georgetown for seagoing vessels.

The wooden truss added to the original bridge can be seen in this Civl War view. The railroad bridge is in the foreground (author's collection).

The railroads—the Google, Facebook, and Apple of their day—held unstoppable power in the post-Civil-War years, and they found ways to lay their tracks wherever they pleased. In 1870, the federal government turned the Long Bridge over to the Baltimore and Potomac Railway in exchange for nothing more than an agreement to maintain it. The company removed the separate 1863 railroad bridge and laid its tracks on the downstream side of the original bridge. Railroad traffic then shared the bridge with horses, mules, wagons, carriages, and pedestrians, all of whom had to make their way directly alongside the tracks on the upstream side of the bridge. To shore up the heavily burdened structure, the railroad company dropped large amounts of stone riprap around its sandstone piers and wooden pile foundations, further reducing the river’s flow.

Traveling through the wooden truss that was later added to the railroad bridge (author's collection).

Guards on the Washington end of the bridge, May 1865 (Source: Library of Congress).

“All Kinds of Vice and Debauchery”

Like other border crossings around the world, the Long Bridge saw its share of the seamier side of life. In 1890 a new law went into effect prohibiting gambling within the District of Columbia. Local bookies with shops in D.C. were not about to simply stop doing business, so several of the more prominent ones moved just over the bridge in Virginia, where the Arlington authorities did not harass them. There had been a failed real estate development there called Jackson City, which consisted of handful of small frame buildings. The railroad also had a simple wooden platform here, and soon all of the passenger trains out of the city stopped at it. Saloons, pool halls, and opium dens relocated to Jackson City, which blossomed into a full-fledged den of iniquity, spilling out on to the bridge. The Washington Post later described the scene in vivid detail:

The bridge was used as a place to carry on all sorts of gambling games with dice. Drunken men and women fought, danced, and held high carnival on the staid old structure, their shrieks, groans, laughter, and curses driving the birds scurrying from their nestings among the girders. It was a thoroughfare where all kinds of vice and debauchery were rampant.

The customers did not all arrive by train. Many came on foot over the bridge—alone, at night. Issues inevitably arose. In 1895, for example, the Post reported on the murder of Frank Smith, a former government messenger who had been found lying unconscious on the bridge and later died at Emergency Hospital. An autopsy revealed that he had been fatally thumped on the head, probably with a sandbag. “Another crime added to the list connected with the Long Bridge,” the Post intoned, pointing out the bridge’s dangers: “The Long Bridge affords peculiar advantages for highwaymen... It is illy lighted, and the heavy crossbeams and supports afford good hiding places for thugs. Gamblers pass at all hours of the night, and no policemen are about.”

The crime and debauchery lasted for about a decade. By 1900, the District, responding to numerous complaints, began stationing police officers on the bridge around the clock to discourage crime. The highwaymen were not the only ones affected. “The great number of small boys who were able to buy beer and whisky at the bar over in Jackson City have been forced to abandon their trips,” the Post reported. Within a year, the railroad bought up all of the Jackson City property as a staging ground for the new railroad bridge it was about to build, and Jackson City suddenly disappeared.

Steel to the Rescue

By the late 19th century, complaints about the rickety, outmoded bridge were legion. Traffic was heavy, both over the bridge and in the water beneath. The two draw spans might be opened as often as 20 times in a day, fraying tempers all around. In 1901, work began on a pair of new steel truss bridges to replace the old wooden structure. The Pennsylvania Railroad was responsible for building a new, dedicated railroad bridge, and the freshly chartered Potomac Bridge Commission would oversee construction of its twin highway bridge.

The railroad bridge was finished first, in 1904. At a cost of 750,000 dollars, the Pratt truss bridge stood on twelve piers made of sturdy granite from Port Deposit, Maryland. The piers were many fewer and much stronger than their predecessors from the old Long Bridge, obstructing water flow less and designed to resist ice and flood damage. Rather than the two draw spans on the old bridge, the new one featured a single pivot (or swing) span in the center—a section of the bridge that swiveled out of the way rather than lifting up in the air to allow vessels to pass. The operator of the swing span worked out of a small cabin mounted on top of the cage-like steel superstructure, some 36 feet over the railroad tracks.

Postcard view of the 1906 Highway Bridge from the Virginia side. Don't be misled by the caption; this is not the railroad bridge. The pedestrian railings on the bridge indicate it is the Highway Bridge (author's collection).

The deck of the bridge was suspended 21½ feet above the water, a vast improvement over the 10-foot clearance of the old bridge. Its twin, the new steel truss Highway Bridge, opened in 1906, as a replacement for the original Long Bridge, which was finally dismantled. The Highway Bridge featured a spacious 61-foot wide steel deck, including two eight-foot-wide sidewalks, steel banisters, and electric lighting. It was a modern marvel “built of materials impervious to the passing of time and deemed adequate to serve the purpose for which it was built at least a century,” according to an article in the Post at the time it opened.

Undated view of the Highway Bridge with a streetcar crossing (Source: Library of Congress).

The railroad bridge still stands, having survived well over a century. It was strengthened to accommodate heavier traffic during World War II with additional piers and with steel girder sections that replaced the original truss spans. It may finally be replaced or augmented sometime soon.

Buckling Buckle Plates

The 1906 Highway Bridge, on the other hand, did not fare as well. Completed at the very dawn of the automobile age, its Army Corps of Engineers designers had no idea what overwhelming numbers of automobiles, trucks, and buses were destined to traverse it. As early as 1928, the steel “buckle plates” that covered the deck of the bridge had to be removed because they had warped under the heavy loads, creating an uneven surface. The plates were replaced with a grid of steel I-beams topped with creosoted wooden beams, all covered with a layer of asphalt.

An automobile passes under the railroad bridge on Ohio Drive. The Highway Bridge is in the distance (Source: Library of Congress).

By the 1930s, traffic tie-ups were common, though they didn’t always occur in the same patterns that happen today. In early November 1931, for example, a massive jam occurred on a late Sunday afternoon, as hundreds of motorists who had been out in Virginia during the day or weekend all tried to cross the bridge back into town. It took the combined efforts of police from Arlington, the District, and the Park Service three hours to untangle the mess.

As early as 1938, proposals to replace the bridge were introduced in Congress, but little happened. In 1943, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission recommended that a six-lane “super bridge” be constructed to replace the old highway bridge as soon as the war was over. But by 1946, District Highway Department director Harry C. Whitehurst foresaw that six lanes would not be enough. He argued for two new bridges, each four lanes wide; President Harry Truman agreed.

The Twin Bridges

In 1947, work began on the first of the new “twin” highway bridges, and it was completed three years later, in May 1950. Miss Washington of 1949 cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony. Perched on stone piers, the modern highway bridge—christened the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge in honor of the Revolutionary war hero—was much plainer than any of its predecessors. It featured a “bascule” draw span—a span in the center of the bridge that lifts up and is balanced by giant weights. A squat, stone-faced operator’s tower (which still stands) was positioned next to the draw span. The new bridge’s four lanes were dedicated to inbound city traffic. Meanwhile, the old 1906 bridge was used exclusively for outbound traffic. By 1951, these two bridges were carrying over 100,000 cars a day.

It took much longer than planners anticipated for the Rochambeau Bridge’s twin to be constructed. Funding, naturally, was slow to materialize, with a reluctant Congress always on the lookout for ways to cut costs. When the Senate finally approved a funding measure in 1957, it refused to pay for the draw span that was included in the bill passed by the House, thus saving about one million dollars. Construction of the new, fixed bridge—upriver from the older ones, began in February 1960 and was completed two years later. More than 100 District and federal officials gathered at the foot of the new bridge on a rainy day in January 1962 as “a soggy red and white ribbon was snipped” to inaugurate the bridge, according to the Post. The structure was dubbed the George Mason Memorial Bridge in honor of the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Postcard view of the Twin Bridges Marriott Motor Hotel, completed in 1957, and located on the Virginia end of the bridges. This was the very first Marriott hotel (author's collection).

Much debate ensued about whether the old 1906 Highway Bridge was so bad off that it couldn’t be saved as a backup for use during rush-hour, but it was in bad shape and would have required extensive rehabilitation. Finally, in 1967 it was dismantled and removed. Parts were floated down to the Navy base at Dahlgren, Virginia, where they were used as targets to train bomber pilots on how to attack bridges in North Vietnam.

In 1972, a third, unnamed highway bridge was added to the group. It was constructed alongside the George Mason Bridge, offering two lanes of traffic in each direction for use as express lanes. By this time, the days of draw spans opening on the Potomac were over. When the Rochambeau (1950) bridge was repaired in 1975, its bascule draw span was permanently disabled, and the operator’s tower next to it was closed up and abandoned in place.

Tragedy on the 14th Street Bridge

Many Washingtonians remember the fateful winter day in January 1982 when Air Florida Flight 90, taking off from National Airport during a snowstorm, quickly lost altitude due to ice on its wings and crashed on to the north side of the Rochambeau bridge. The plane struck four northbound cars and landed in the river just beyond the bridge. The crash and icy water killed 74 of the 79 passengers onboard as well as four motorists on the bridge.

Rescuers were deeply moved by the heroic actions of one of the passengers in the water, Arland D. Williams, Jr., who repeatedly passed a lifeline from the rescue helicopter to save other passengers. He finally disappeared in the frigid water while waiting for the helicopter to return. The Rochambeau Bridge was later renamed in his honor, and the Rochambeau name was transferred to the previously unnamed span next to the George Mason Bridge.

At this point there were four bridges: the George Mason (1962) and Rochambeau (1972) bridges next to each other, the Arland D. Williams, Jr., (1950) bridge a little further downstream, and the old 1904 railroad bridge furthest to the south. In April 1983, a fifth bridge was added—the Charles Fenwick Bridge that carries the Metro yellow line over the river just north of the railroad bridge. Thus, we have five heavily-used bridges at work today where a rickety, mile-long trestle first crossed the river 200 years ago.

The Metro bridge is at the center of the three bridges in this view. On the left is the Arland D. Williams bridge with its disused operator's tower. (Source: HABS).

In time, the derelict operator’s tower on the Arland Williams bridge became an eyesore, its glass windows replaced with bare plywood. In 2005, the District Department of Transportation, working with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, decided to hold a competition for an art installation to make the tower more attractive. Massachusetts artist Mikyoung Kim won the competition, and in 2009 the tower was refurbished and Kim’s kaleidoscopic artwork was installed inside. Six acrylic cones mounted inside the tower’s windows reflect light in different colors when viewed from different angles. The colorful, disco-like tower now adds a small note of interest to an otherwise harsh expanse of utilitarian bridges designed to serve their purpose efficiently and unobtrusively.

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Sources for this article included: Gary A. Burch and Steven M. Pennington, eds., Civil Engineering Landmarks of the Nation’s Capital (1982); Adam Costanzo, George Washington's Washington (2018); Fred A. Emery, “Washington's Historic Bridges” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 39 (1938); Historic American Buildings Survey, Long Bridge, Spanning Potomac River near Jefferson Memorial, Washington, District of Columbia, (HABS DC-50); Robert C. Horne, “Bridges Across the Potomac” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 53/56 (1956); Vincent Lee-Thorp, Washington Engineered (2006); Robert J. Kapsch, Building Washington (2018); Donald Beekman Myer, Bridges and the City of Washington (1974); Pamela Scott, Capital Engineers (2005); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Many Lives of George Washington’s Townhouses on Capitol Hill

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 01:53:00 +0000

A formidable pair of brick townhouses once stood just up the block from the Capitol building, though neither the houses nor anything else that was along that street nor even the street itself exist any longer. It is now carefully-tended open space, with a fountain right where the street once ran and a vast parking garage for senators and Hill staff underneath it all. It wasn’t always this way. For more than one hundred years George Washington’s twin townhouses stood here, and they witnessed the many fits and starts of Washington’s early history.

These are George Washington's two townhouses--much modified and expanded--as they appeared in the early 1900s (Author's collection)

George Washington had an abiding interest in real estate and was intimately involved in the development of the new capital city in the 1790s. The city had been slow to develop in its first decade, and in 1798, prominent local landholders, including Thomas Law, convinced Washington to invest directly in city property by purchasing a pair of lots close to the Capitol grounds on North Capitol Street. A pair of substantial townhouses at this location would be excellent investments, it was argued, as they could be rented out to Congressmen who would be moving to Washington with the federal government in 1800. Washington commissioned his good friend Dr. William Thornton—architect of the Capitol—to oversee construction of these townhouses. To perform the work, he hired George Blagden, superintendent of the masons working on the Capitol building. In one of many letters to Thornton about the project, Washington described the start of the project, at which point he already was thinking of design enhancements:

Enclosed is a check on the Bank of Alexa for five hundred dollars, to enable Mr Blagden by your draught, to proceed in laying in materials for carrying on my buildings in the Federal City.
I saw a building in Philadelphia of about the same dimensions in front and elevation that are to be given to my two houses—which pleased me. —It consisted also of two houses united, Doors in the Center, a Pediment in the Roof and dormer windows on each side of it in front, Sky lights in the rear.—
If this is not incongruous with the Rules of Architecture, I should be glad to have my two houses executed in this style. —
Let me request the favor of you to know of Mr Blagden what the additional cost will be.

In a later letter, he described the houses more fully:

Although my house, or houses (for they may be one or two as occasion requires) are I believe, upon a large scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol, yet they fall short of your wishes…The house are three flush stories of Brick, besides Garret rooms;—and in the judgement of those better acquainted in these matters than I am, capable of accommodating between twenty and thirty boarders. —The buildings are not costly, but elegantly plain.

Once work began on the houses in December 1798, Washington took a keen interest in their construction, often inspecting progress on the work with Dr. Thornton at his side. Although the houses were unfinished at the time of Washington’s death a year later, they were finished by his nephew and heir, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, who had seems to have had a Mrs. Frost operate them as a congressional boardinghouse, as George Washington had envisioned. Several prominent early legislators stayed there, including Speaker-of-the-House Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, and William Crawford of Georgia.

The two houses may have looked something like this when they were first built.

The next climactic event for the townhouses, as well as the city in general, was the invasion of the British in August 1814. Though the British were generally very scrupulous about burning only public buildings, the Washington townhouses got burned down as well. There are a couple of possible explanations for this. Anthony Pitch suggests the fire could have been accidental, if strong winds from the burning Capitol carried hot embers to the houses and caught them on fire. However, in the process of trying to protect official documents in advance of the British invasion, congressional clerks had stashed the records of several committees in “the house commonly called General Washington’s,” according to a later report. If the British knew this, it would certainly have been reason enough to torch the buildings. –Whatever the cause, the houses were burned.

The ruins were then sold in 1817 by George C. Washington, grandnephew of George. A certain Peter Morte gained ownership and used the remaining walls to rebuild the house and reopen it as a boardinghouse.

Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes (Source: Library of Congress).

By around 1840 or so, the house came into the possession of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, a colorful explorer and prominent figure during the Civil War. He led a famous expedition to explore parts of the Pacific that began in 1838 and continued to 1841. During the Civil War he took controversial actions, such as blockading a port that could have provoked the British to perhaps side with the Confederacy. He had a reputation for being arrogant and capricious, was a harsh disciplinarian at sea, and may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

While Wilkes owned the Washington townhouses, much activity was going on in the neighborhood. In 1848, North Capitol Street was graded, lowering it 10 feet in front of Wilkes’ house. At the time, he had a stone wall built around the house. Then in 1851, North Capitol Street was graded again, lowering it another 15 feet. All this road work had been precipitated by the effort beginning in 1850 to extend the Capitol building. Large marble blocks, shipped into town by rail, had to be drawn down North Capitol Street to the building site, and grading of the road became a necessity. As a result the Wilkes house stood perched precariously on an artificial hill until about 1870, when Wilkes had two stories added underneath the original building to bring it down to street level. Thus the building gained its final height and overall appearance as seen in the photo below.

Detail from a stereoview of the Hillman House (author's collection).

In about 1876, the building was acquired by N. J. Hillman, who operated it as a hotel, called Hillman House, until 1896. Then in 1899, it became the Kenmore Hotel, and as the Kenmore it achieved its greatest notoriety. In the wee hours of May 15, 1901, what The Washington Post called the “most mysterious murder that has occurred in Washington within a quarter of a century” took place at the Kenmore. A 21-year-old Census Bureau clerk, James Seymour Ayres, was shot to death in a fourth-floor room of the Kenmore. His assailant had apparently used Ayres’ own revolver against him and then left it behind at the scene of the crime. Neighbors in the hotel heard the shots, and some even heard groans and cries for help, but none ventured out of their rooms to see what had happened. A neighbor in an adjacent building looked out and saw a shadowy female figure in stocking-feet silently escape from Ayres’ window, descend two flights down the fire escape, and slip back into another hotel window. No clear identification could be made in the darkness. Police later found a bloody hand print on the window sill and blood stains on the fire escape.

From The Washington Post, May 19, 1901.

The case gained national attention because of its overtones of an illicit affair; an anonymous letter had been sent to the Congressional sponsor of the young Ayres, alleging that he was “associating with women and dissipating.” He was apparently popular with “all of the women at the Kenmore,” whatever sorts they may have been, and was known to have tumultuous relationships with more than a few of them, as well as women he met at the Census Bureau. He even had reportedly intimated that he was in a troublesome relationship with a married woman at the hotel and would be moving out soon.

Mrs. Lola Bonine (Source: Washington Post, May 21, 1901).

Suspicion soon began to focus on that woman, Mrs. Lola I. Bonine, aged 32. Five days after the murder, she turned herself in to police and confessed to the murder. According to Bonine, Ayres had lured her to his room on a pretext, saying he wanted to discuss the differences they had had. Once she was in his room, he drew his gun on her and announced, in so many words, that he was going to rape her. Mrs. Bonine, naturally, had no choice but to wrestle the revolver away from Ayres, shoot him three times with it, take off her shoes so as not to make any further noise, descend the fire escape to her apartment, clean herself up, and promptly go to bed. After laying all this out for police, she noted that, at her husband’s suggestion, she had learned the art of self-defense against assaults, and this is what had saved her. The police promptly arrested her.

Despite the implausibility of her story, Bonine garnered sympathy from the start. She was married to a respectable businessman and had two sons, aged 15 and 13. Everybody thought she was the nicest person. Her trial, beginning in late November, raked over many sordid details of the crime and challenged all the unbelievable aspects of her claims about what had happened, but in the end, after nearly a month’s proceedings, she was acquitted. The jury had bought her story.

By the following year, the Kenmore had closed, and the building was vacant. The Post reported in August that passersby invariably wanted to know which window was the one to the murder room (that one, on the fourth floor, without a curtain). “Many strangers, who are unaccompanied by a resident of Washington, and desiring to know the exact location of the room in which the tragedy occurred, frequently go out of their way and make inquiries of the firemen of Truck A, which is located directly opposite the hotel.”

This pedestrian plaza follows the path of the street where George Washington's townhouses were located. The historical marker on the left marks the site of the townhouses. (Photo by the author.)

The hotel later reopened for several years as the Hotel Burton and, after that, as the Washington Inn. In 1913, the government bought up all the buildings on either side of North Capital Street in preparation for creating the Capitol Plaza that would stretch between the Capitol and Union Station, and the buildings were all demolished. The government paid a contractor $7,300 to clear the two blocks, which included buildings worth $1 million at the time, according to the Post. Construction of the plaza was not completed until 1931, however. In 1932, on the occasion of the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth, the District of Columbia donated an historical marker that was set in place in the plaza at the location of the townhouses that originally had been built by our first president.

The marker (Photo by the author).

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This is a reprint of an article that first appeared on Streets of Washington in 2010.

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An Historic Synagogue in an Historic Neighborhood

noreply@blogger.com (Streets of Washington) — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 03:58:00 +0000

The original Adas Israel synagogue building, a fairly modest brick structure, is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the District and certainly the most well-traveled. Initially constructed at 6th and G Streets NW in 1876, it was moved once to 3rd and G, and then moved again—today—to 3rd and F. Steeped in the city's history, the building will form the core of the new Capital Jewish Museum, set to open in 2021. It's a lasting memorial as much to patience and perseverance as it is to the rich culture of Judaism in Washington.

Awaiting a new life, January 9, 2019 (photo by the author).

Very few Jews lived in Washington in the early part of the 19th century, not enough to form a congregation, until the Washington Hebrew Congregation was founded in 1852. As in many American cities, Washington's Jews were predominantly immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe. Many came to Washington to make a living running small businesses, and after the Civil War they often made their homes near the Seventh Street commercial corridor, in what is now called Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Triangle.

As was typical of mid-19th century immigrant congregations, Washington Hebrew's members were sympathetic to the growing Reformed movement in Judaism. They viewed progressive reforms as a way of adapting to their new homeland and were eager to demonstrate how well they could fit into a society dominated by Anglo-Protestant culture. However, not all members agreed that non-traditional worship practices, such as holding services in English and German, should be adopted. For a while, the more conservative congregants tolerated the changes, but the installation of an organ in 1869 was a turning point. Traditional services did not include musical accompaniment. Some 38 worshipers broke from Washington Hebrew and established Adas Israel as an independent, Conservative congregation—Washington's second Jewish congregation.

The fledgling group faced many obstacles. Though it soon purchased a small cemetery in Anacostia, it could not afford to buy a synagogue building. Instead, congregants used various rented spaces, including a room over a carriage factory on Pennsylvania Avenue that was plagued by leaks. Everyone understood that a proper synagogue would be essential to keep the congregation together for the long term. At one point, the possibility of acquiring General Ulysses Grant's former residence on Douglas Row was considered but could not be arranged. Finally, after years of effort, the group was able to raise the $4,800 needed to build a modest, new synagogue on the southeast corner of 6th and G Streets NW. Hope was high that the building could be completed in time for the July 4, 1876, centennial of the United States.

This drawing of the synagogue appeared in the August 8, 1908, edition of The Washington Post.

A brief notice in the Washington Critic-Record in March 1876 observed that construction was progressing quickly and further commented that “The plans furnished by Messrs. Lynch and Kleinman are a model of convenience and comfort, and when carried out will be an ornament to the northern part of the city.” (Max Kleinman, who is listed in city registers of that era as a draughtsman, is known to have prepared the drawings for the building. No records have survived to determine whether Millard F. Lynch, listed in city directories an architect, was also involved in the project.) When it was completed a few months later, the new house of worship—the first such building in Washington constructed specifically as a synagogue—was summed up as “a neat brick edifice, built after the manner of most synagogues, with two floors, the auditorium being in the second story.”

The plain, vernacular style of the building bears similarities with synagogues in Germany. To save money, its chief decorative elements—tall, slender windows capped with fan-shaped lunettes and brick archivolts—appear only on the two street-facing sides of the building. The low-ceilinged first floor, really a basement, served both as a schoolhouse and for religious services on weekdays. Sabbath services were held upstairs in the sanctuary, which could accommodate 150 men on the main floor and 135 women in an upper gallery along the sides and rear of the hall. The opposite wall featured a tall, curved wooden bay, which originally housed the Holy Ark. A small cupola on top of the gabled roof served primarily for ventilation.

Despite its modest appearance, the new synagogue was the subject of an elaborate dedication ceremony in June 1876. The sanctuary was decked out with flowers, garlands, and U.S. flags demonstrating the congregation’s patriotism. President Ulysses S. Grant, Senate President Pro Tempore Thomas W. Ferry, and Grant’s son Ulysses all attended, sitting on a special sofa that was brought in for the purpose. The little synagogue was packed, and anyone without a reserved seat was turned away from the three-hour event.

An undated, early 20th century view of the synagogue (bottom center) with the Pension Building (National Building Museum) to the rear. (Photo courtesy of the Capital Jewish Museum).

Once anchored in its permanent home, the congregation prospered, as its members had foreseen. By the beginning of the 20th century, a much larger building was needed. While some thought was given to building a larger structure on the same site, Adas Israel eventually purchased a new site two blocks away, at 6th and I Streets NW, where they dedicated their new synagogue in 1908. That building is now the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue.

Sixth and I Historic Synagogue (photo by the author).

The same year, the congregation sold the old synagogue to Stephen Gatti (1840-1919), a Genoese immigrant who lived nearby. Gatti had started out as a fruit merchant and began investing in real estate after he retired. He rented out the former synagogue at 6th and G Streets to a variety of tenants, including several religious groups. The St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Church held services in the sanctuary from 1910 to 1920. They were followed by the Bible Hall, Good Samaritan Chapel, and Mission of Life Church. Meanwhile commercial tenants opened shops on the lower, street level of the building, extensively altering the space over time. In the late 1960s, a barber shop and corner carry-out were run on the first floor, with the sanctuary above being used as a cavernous storeroom.

The synagogue building as it appeared in July 1969 (Source: Library of Congress).

By that time, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had acquired the whole block where the synagogue stood with plans to clear all 18 existing buildings from the site and use the space as a staging area to build the Metro subway system. A new Metro headquarters building—the Jackson Graham Building—would later cover the block. In the meantime, the synagogue was slated for demolition. The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, working with members of Adas Israel, lobbied to save the neglected building from the wrecker’s ball. They negotiated a complex deal whereby the salvageable upper portion of the synagogue would be moved several blocks east to a disused plot of land at 3rd and G Streets NW, where it would be placed on a new foundation and restored by the historical society as a museum.

The synagogue (facing to the rear) is pulled along G Street past the General Accounting Office in December 1969 (photo courtesy of the Capital Jewish Museum).

Supported by federal grants and private donations, the move took place in December 1969. A special 28-wheeled dolly, pulled by a surplus Army tractor, slowly rolled the 270-ton building three blocks down G Street to its new home. Once it was off its original base, masons were able to use salvaged bricks from the old site in reconstructing the synagogue's foundation at 3rd and G. The interior of the sanctuary, which still included original moldings and other features, was also restored. Renamed the Lillian and Albert Small Jewish Museum after its major benefactors, the building reopened in 1975.

The synagogue at 3rd and G Streets NW, just prior to its second move (photo by the author).

The move, however, would not be the only one for the synagogue. When developers planned construction of the massive Capital Crossing project over the Interstate 395 expressway, they realized the synagogue would need to move again, this time one block to the south, at 3rd and F Streets NW. The developers struck a deal with the historical society to pay for the second move and also contributed a substantial amount toward a new museum to be built alongside the repositioned synagogue.

The synagogue on the move on 3rd Street, January 9, 2019 (photo by the author).

After arriving at its final destination, 3rd and F Streets (photo by the author).

The move was actually a two-stage process. In November 2016, the synagogue was moved off of its site to a "parking" spot on 3rd Street while construction of Capital Crossing took place on its old site and its new location was readied. Then in January 2019, the building was rolled a block south on 3rd Street to what is expected to be its final location. Unlike the arduous move 50 years earlier, this time a computerized platform mounted on 60 huge wheels seemed to effortlessly glide the building along, at one mile per hour, on its one-block route. Construction of the new museum complex around the synagogue building is expected to start soon. The museum will include three permanent and special exhibition galleries, a multipurpose auditorium/classroom, an interactive community lab, a collections archive room and office space. If all goes well, it will open in 2021.

Rendering of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum (courtesy of the Capital Jewish Museum).

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Special thanks to Wendy Turman of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum for her gracious assistance. Other sources included Laura Cohen Apelbaum and Wendy Turman, eds., Jewish Washington: Scrapbook of an American Community (2007); Lillian and Albert Small Jewish Museum Historic Structures Report (2001); Stanley Rabinowitz, The Assembly: A Century in the Life of the Adas Israel Hebrew Congregation of Washington, D.C. (1993); Eleni Silverman, Historic American Buildings Survey: Adas Israel Synagogue (1984); Nancy C. Taylor, National Register of Historic Places: Adas Israel Synagogue (1969); and numerous newspaper articles.

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