Streets of Washington

The Prolific Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth and her Georgetown Cottage

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:49:00 +0000

Georgetown has had its share of unique residents over its 260 years of existence, and perhaps none was more distinctive than Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth (1819-1899), a prolific novelist who lived in a picturesque cottage perched up on Prospect Street overlooking the Potomac. Her cottage, a well-known landmark in its day, has been gone since 1940. It would have been as out-of-place in modern Georgetown as the potboiler novels that once made her wildly popular among 19th-century women readers across the nation.

Prospect Cottage (Source: D.C. Public Library via Flickr).

Southworth was a consummate Washingtonian, having been born in the one of the twin townhouses that George Washington built as a speculative development on North Capitol Street. (The site is now part of the vast open space known as Union Square between the Capitol and Union Station.) Her father, Captain Charles LeCompte Nevitte, had been a successful Alexandria merchant until his ships were lost during the cold war with France in the early years of the 19th century. The dashing Captain Nevitte led a company of troops during the War of 1812 and was wounded in the chest for his troubles, an ailment that led to his death in 1824, when little Emma was only five years old. Supposedly it was on his deathbed that Captain Nevitte persuaded a local priest to rechristen little Emma with two additional names so that here initials would spell out E.D.E.N., a melodramatic gesture particularly well-suited to the novelist-to-be.

Emma would later recall that after her father's death, her early life was filled with suffering and privation. "At the age of six, I was a little, thin, dark, wild-eyed elf," she wrote, "shy, awkward and unattractive, and in consequence was very much—let alone. I spent much time in solitude, reverie, or mischief..." Her widowed mother remarried, and Emma's new stepfather, a schoolmaster, was apparently harsh and unsympathetic. Upon graduating from his school at age 16, Emma became a teacher in the nascent D.C. public school system. Five years later she married Frederick Southworth, an inventor from New York, and moved with him to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, then a western frontier town. The delicate city girl endured numerous privations, living part of the time in a log cabin. She gave birth to a son, Richmond, who like his mother proved delicate and sickly, as well as a daughter, Charlotte. Then in 1844 Emma returned to Washington, D.C., sans Mr. Southworth, who had absconded for reasons unknown. "I found myself broken in spirit, health, and purse—a widow in fate but not in fact—with my babes looking up to me for a support I could not give them. It was in these darkest days of my woman's life, that my author's life commenced," she explained.

Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth (Source: Woman's Record, 1855).

Southworth's formative experiences gave her sensibilities that would resonate for vast numbers of her female contemporaries who yearned for the freedom to lead independent lives. In All The Happy Endings, a study of 19th-century women novelists, Helen Waite Papashvily noted that "the authors of the domestic novel shared curiously similar backgrounds. Almost all were women of upper-middle-class origin who began very early in life to write, frequently under pressure of sudden poverty.... Most important for many of these women, somewhere, sometime, someplace in her past some man—a father, brother, a husband, a guardian—had proved unworthy of the trust and confidence she placed in him. This traumatic experience, never resolved, grew into a chronic grievance."

Upon returning to Washington, Southworth had resumed teaching in the DC public schools, specifically at Primary School #10 at 13th and C Streets SW, where she lived at the time. Her annual salary of $250 represented a very meager family income. Galvanized by her distress, Southworth began writing to distract herself from her woes. She turned in a short story at a local book store she frequented, asking that it be submitted somewhere for publication. "The Irish Refugee" was accepted by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor and published in 1846. Although it provided no income to its needy author, Southworth's first story earned attention from other publications, including The National Era, which would then publish her first novel, Retribution, in serial form in 1849. That work appeared in book form later that year. Southworth rapidly became a very popular writer.

She wrote steadily, for a set amount of time each day, five days a week, for years on end. She would write in segments that initially would be serialized in newspapers and magazines but later were often reprinted in books, some authorized and some not, many times with different titles. In fact, Southworth's publishing history is so complex that it's hard to tell how many books she wrote altogether. There were at least sixty, with titles like The Deserted Wife, The Discarded Daughter, The Missing Bride, and The Broken Engagement. As you might imagine, they all had a recurring theme: a poor and innocent woman is wronged, inviting the pity and sympathy of the reader, but she turns out to be plucky enough to prevail in the end. While some of her villains were female, most were men—arrogant and selfish individuals who all eventually got their comeuppance.

A copy of Southworth's The Hidden Hand in the collection of the Peabody Room, Georgetown Public Library. Photo by Jerry A. McCoy

Southworth's best-known novel today is The Hidden Hand, first published in 1859. It's the story of the winsome and high-spirited (but awkwardly named) Capitola Le Noir, who was kidnapped as a child and grew up in a New York City slum. She's found and brought back to her ancestral Virginia home by a grumpy old uncle who intends to civilize her, but the buoyant imp will not be suppressed. Early in the novel she is overwhelmed by her plush new surroundings and questions whether it's all really happening:

Can this be I, Capitola, the little outcast of the city, changed into Miss Black, the young lady, perhaps the heiress to a fine old country seat! calling a fine old military officer, uncle! having a handsome income of pocket-money settled upon me! having carriages, and horses, and servants to attend me! No! it can't be! it's just impossible! No, I see how it is! I'm crazy! that's what I am! crazy!...
I wonder how long they'll keep me here? For ever I hope! Until I get cured I'm sure! I hope they won't cure me! I vow I won't be cured! It's a great deal too pleasant to be mad, and I'll stay so! I'll keep calling myself Miss Black, and this mad-house my country seat, and the head doctor my uncle, and the keepers servants until the end of time—so I will! Catch me coming to my senses when it's so delightful to be mad! I'm too sharp for that! I didn't grow up in Rag Alley, New York, for nothing!

Plucky Cap Black proceeds to have many adventures, at every turn flouting Victorian mores concerning the role of women and enjoying every minute of it. In one particularly outrageous incident, she fights a duel with a man who has slandered her and shoots the unfortunate gentleman full of dried peas. She gleefully foils the evil Black Donald, who is on a mission to kidnap her, all the while managing to consume a prodigious quantity of tarts. She secretly takes the place of an unwilling bride at a wedding ceremony and at the critical Do-you-take-this-man-to-be-your-lawful-wedded-husband moment gleefully raises her veil and cries out "No—not if he were the last man and I the last woman on earth and the human race were to become extinct—and not if the Angel Gabriel came down and asked me to do this—most certainly—No!" Readers ate it up.

Southworth wasn't shy about inserting her views on politics as well. At one point, the arch-villain, Black Donald, explains his motives for wanting to be paid a large sum to do away with Capitola:

...[T]he truth is...that I am tired of this sort of life, and wish to retire from active business. Besides, every man has his ambition, and I have mine. I wish to emigrate to the glorious West, settle, marry, turn my attention to politics, be elected to Congress, then to the Senate, then to the Cabinet, then to the White House; for success in which career, I flatter myself nature and education have especially fitted me. Ten thousand dollars will give me a fair start! Many a successful politician, your honour knows, has started on less character and less capital!

All of Southworth's novels were widely read, but The Hidden Hand was a particular blockbuster, both in the U.S. and abroad. It was reprinted numerous times, both in periodicals and in book form. Everyone loved Cap Black. When Southworth arrived in London at the invitation of her British publisher, she found "Capitola as popular there as in America. There were Capitola boats, Capitola race horses, Capitol hats for ladies and other Capitola fads," she later recounted. The book was turned into a play that ran in several productions simultaneously on the London stage, including one version starring John Wilkes Booth. The novel remains in print to this day.

Prospect Cottage in 1909. The building to its rear, with the Coca Cola sign, still stands today and now houses the 1789 Restaurant. (Photo by Willard R. Ross from a postcard in the collection of the Peabody Room, Georgetown Public Library).

It's not entirely clear when Prospect Cottage was built or even exactly when Mrs. Southworth moved into it. John Clagget Proctor, a well-known commentator on D.C. history for The Evening Star, wrote in 1942 that the cottage was "said to have been built for and occupied by a former French Minister" and that Southworth moved in "as early as 1860." Other sources (Sarah M. Huddleson) put her there even earlier, in 1853. It seems likely that she was able to afford to make the move after entering into a long-term contract with Robert Bonner (1824-1899) of The New York Ledger in 1856 that paid her a generous annual salary in exchange for exclusive rights to her works.

The cottage, like its long owner, was a paradigm of its age, designed in the Carpenter Gothic style that was highly fashionable before the Civil War. Characteristically, its gabled, deeply-overhanging roof was lined with decorative barge-boards sporting icicle-like ornaments. In its later years, it was covered with roses and honeysuckle, adding to its romantic allure. Its long veranda, wrapping around the southern end of the house, offered many vantage points for appreciating the country-like surroundings or for gazing across at Virginia, where many of Southworth's novels were set.

Carpenter Gothic houses look to the Gothic Revival for inspiration but often include their own vernacular eccentricities. They were built in an era of romantic sensibilities and were carefully set into picturesque landscapes. An exceptional example that survives to this day is the famous Lincoln Cottage on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home. That house, built in 1842 by banker George W. Riggs, was exquisitely situated on a picturesque hilltop with a view of Washington City in the distance. Prospect Cottage was equally impressive on its hilltop perch. Charles Warren Stoddard, writing in The National Magazine in 1905, offered this appropriately romantic description:

...[T]he cottage was half hidden among the branches of the trees that embowered it and looked as cosy as a dove-cote in its airy grove. It hung upon the very brink of the hill; its lower story is below the street in the rear of it, but jutting out into a terraced garden, from whose ultimate hedges one might have cast oneself headlong into the canal that borders the edge of the northern shore of the Potomac. Its western windows were bathed in the sunset glow and the river, far below it, was a river of life and light; its eastern windows opened on breezy heights where the goats skipped nimbly in a tree-filled, vacant lot; the south verandah, up among the treetops, hung like a fairy gallery before the Virginia slopes, and in the deep valley between them flowed the noble Potomac, famed in song and story....

In those days 36th Street, running alongside the cottage, continued down the hill from Prospect Street to M Street in a very steep drop. At the bottom was the foot of the Aqueduct Bridge, leading across the river to Virginia. (Later the street was closed off and a great stone wall erected to allow flat land to be reclaimed along M Street below. The former route of 36th Street in this block is now traversed by the famous "Exorcist" stairs.) If nothing else, the cottage must have offered an unsurpassed lookout point for guarding the Aqueduct Bridge during the Civil War, though I have not found anything to show that it was actually used as such. [See Update below for more information about Southworth during the war years.]

Postcard view of Prospect Cottage in the 1910s, after it had been converted to commercial use.

Southworth stayed in England from 1859 to 1862 but returned to Georgetown feeling "so homesick I think my heart will break" (as quoted in Papashvily). Aside from an extended visit with her daughter in the Hudson Valley, she spent the rest of her life living and writing in Prospect Cottage, where she died in 1899. Her son inherited the house but died the following year, leaving it to his sister. Charlotte, who lived in New York, seems to have not had much interest in the house. Within years, it became something of a tourist trap. A Washington Post article from 1905 observed that "Now the sitting-room that Mrs. Southworth planned is an ice cream parlor, and the handsome, old drawing-room serves as a cafe. On the verandas visitors sit and chat as they wait for the [street]cars. Their talk is of Mrs. Southworth, and it is claimed that they cut great splinters out of the porch and side of the house, and even capture the bugs and grasshoppers in the yard for souvenirs...." There is talk of people seeing the ghost of Mrs. Southworth walking up and down on the veranda, wringing her hands.

Site of Prospect Cottage today (Photo by the author).

In 1928, the National League of American Pen Women purchased the house, raising hopes that it would be restored in part as a memorial to Southworth. Mrs. Clarence Busch, president of the League, was quoted in the Post as saying, "we are likely to make some changes, but these will come slowly. Whatever we do we shall always keep intact the room that was the library of the old Southworth home, in which she did most of her writing for many years." It was not to be, however. The league did not stay in the house very long; it was sold and torn down in 1942. Brick townhouses were built on the property in 1950. Today there is virtually no trace of either the house or its once-picturesque setting, and one suspects there are also very few sightings of the ghost of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth.

UPDATE: Carlton Fletcher has kindly provided additional information about Mrs. Southworth during the Civil War. As mentioned in Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington, Southworth attended Lincoln’s second inaugural ball at the Patent Office in 1865. According to Mr. Fletcher, she was also a manager at the National Colored Home in 1863 and a volunteer at Seminary Hospital in Georgetown. Officers of the Signal Camp of Instruction later recounted that they had been entertained by the famous author at Prospect Cottage. Further, Southworth was said to have offered her cottage as a reserve hospital for convalescing soldiers, perhaps as many as 27 at one point.

* * * * *

Jerry McCoy, Special Collections Librarian of the D.C. Public Library provided invaluable assistance in researching Mrs. Southworth and her home in Georgetown. Jerry is in charge of the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Public Library, which has copies of 26 of Mrs. Southworth's novels in its collection and would like to acquire more. (For a complete list of current holdings, consult the catalog of the D.C. Public Library.) If anyone has a copy of an E.D.E.N. Southworth novel that they would like to donate to the Peabody Room, Jerry would be very happy to receive it.

Additional sources included James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2nd ed., 2003); Sarah J. Hale, Woman's Record or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, (1855); John S. Hart, The Female Prose Writers of America (1857); Sarah M. Huddleson, "Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth and Her Cottage" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 23 (1920); Frances Carpenter Huntington, "Ladies of 'The Literary'" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 66/68 (1968); Josephine Davis Leary, Backward Glances at Georgetown (1947); Helen Waite Papashvily, All The Happy Endings (1956); E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand (1859); Charles Warren Stoddard, "Mrs. Emma D.E.N. Southworth at Prospect Cottage" in National Magazine (May 1905); and numerous newspaper articles.

The Once-Ubiquitous Peoples Drug Stores

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:15:00 +0000

They used to be everywhere. Peoples Drug Stores were for much of the twentieth century one of those staples of everyday life in Washington, squatting on street corners in almost every neighborhood. The name seemed to have special resonance in the nation's capital, as if it were a commercial incarnation of democracy itself (or perhaps an arm of the Communist Party, depending on your perspective). It grew to be one of the largest drugstore chains on the east coast, with over 500 stores at one point ranging from Georgia to Ohio. And it all began here in the District.

A typical Peoples store in Arlington, Virginia in the 1960s (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Peoples was founded in 1905 by Malcolm G. Gibbs (1877-1944), a native of Union City, Tennessee. Impatient with the limited opportunities in his small home town near the Mississippi river, Mac Gibbs decided in 1898 to join his brother, Campbell Gibbs, in Washington, D.C. As told by John V. Horner in a 1955 Evening Star article, Gibbs was a rather naive young man. He needed a porter to show him how to use his sleeper berth on the train to D.C., and when he arrived his first experience of the big city was to literally be taken for a ride. He gave a cab driver the address of his brother's rooming house and was driven around for a long time before finally arriving and being charged a full dollar. The next morning he discovered he was less than two blocks from the train station.

Malcolm G. Gibbs (Source: DC Public Library, Washingtoniana Collection, People's Drug Store Collection).

Of course, Gibbs soon gained his bearings. In Union City he had worked for the local newspaper, run by his father, so when he came to Washington he first sought employment at the Star. He was turned down. By one account he then got a job driving a laundry truck but wasn't happy with it. Eventually he responded to a help-wanted ad for a stockroom boy at Mertz's Modern Pharmacy at 11th and F Streets NW. Owner Edward P. Mertz (1861-1941) "noted the young man's frailty and also that he was lame. He doubted that Malcolm would be equal to the demands of the stockroom," according to Horner. But when Gibbs offered to prove his abilities by working for nothing at the start, he got the job and soon won over his boss. Like all those other success stories from 100 years ago, Gibbs worked hard, saved his money, and went to school at night, in time becoming a registered pharmacist. With $800 in 1905, he finally went into business for himself with a broker named Howard W. Silsby (who put in $8,000). They opened the first Peoples Drug Store at 824 7th Street, NW, just north of King's Palace.

It was a fortuitous time to be entering the retail pharmacy business. Small-time apothecaries focusing almost exclusively on prescriptions would soon become an endangered species. Energetic young entrepreneurs like Gibbs were transforming the business, offering a wider and wider variety of merchandise, advertising heavily, and offering discounted prices to lure in large numbers of customers. The formula had worked for the Woodward & Lothrop department store, and it would work for Peoples Drug as well.

From an advertisement in The Washington Herald, August 13, 1911. (Source: Library of Congress).

After four years, Peoples had outgrown its small storefront and moved to a spacious multi-storied building at the busy intersection of 7th and K Streets, NW, on the southeast corner of Mount Vernon Square. As described in The Washington Post, the new store was a marvel of retail innovation, a “department drug store, in which the stock ranges from the simplest drug compounds to teas, coffees, and rarest of perfumes.” Finished in gold and white with many mirrored surfaces, the first floor featured drugs and “drug sundries,” including the prescription counter, as well as an elaborate soda fountain and cigar counter. Upstairs were “rubber goods, surgical instruments, and miscellaneous stock.” As opening souvenirs, the store gave away “a handsome leather cigar case to male customers and a combination mirror, powder puff, and puff box, containing a high grade of face powder, to customers of the feminine sex”—baubles that would probably sell very well on eBay if they were still around 100 years later.

As noted in The Bulletin of Pharmacy in 1922, Gibbs had gone to great pains to design his 7th and K Street store as a giant advertisement for his goods. The plate glass windows at street level extended almost to the ground and were packed with enticing displays. “You can't miss the display from the sidewalk and can even see it from an automobile or passing street-car,” marveled the Bulletin. “It is just like a page in a paper,” Gibbs is quoted as observing.

The 7th and K Streets NW store, circa 1919, day and night views (Source: Library of Congress).

With the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, profound changes had been underway in the drug business. The so-called “patent” medicines (which generally were not patented at all) could no longer contain dangerous ingredients such as alcohol, cocaine, and morphine unless clearly labeled. Sales of items that contained such substances began to decline. However, there was still plenty of room to market all sorts of dubious concoctions, and People's seems to have carried them all. One of my favorites is the perplexingly-titled "Earle's Tasteless Hypo-Cod with Wild Cherry Malt and Iron," billed as a "palatable strength-creating reconstructive tonic" to be taken when recovering from a "long wasting illness," such as the flu. Another item heavily promoted was Buchu Buttons, pills to cure kidney problems. Using a People's coupon, you could get a 50-cent box of Buchu Buttons for just 14 cents in 1911. And while in the store, you could pick up Kornox for your corns, a little Walnutta hair stain, some Graham's blood purifier, and of course Sanitol tooth powder. While these might seem less than appealing to the modern shopper, there were other more toxic choices as well. The May 7, 1911, edition of The Washington Herald advertised “Iron, Quinine, and Strychnine” potion at 47 cents a pint, “Chloroform liniment” at 25 cents for 4 ounces, and “Belladonna plaster” at just 10 cents a packet. Caveat emptor!

From a Peoples advertisement in The Washington Herald, December 31, 1911 (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1912, Peoples opened at its second location, 7th and E Streets NW. Two more stores were added four years later, at 7th and M and at 14th and U. Peoples had gained its reputation as a scrappy discount store on the eastern side of downtown. A turning point came in 1919, when Peoples took over the W. S. Thompson drugstore at 15th and G Streets NW, across the street from the Treasury Department. Thompson’s was a much more sophisticated establishment than Peoples; it advertised itself as the "pharmacy of the Presidents," having served the White House continually since 1857. To some it was almost sacrilegious for an upstart like Peoples to absorb the venerable Thompson's, and in fact it took several years for the marriage of the two institutions to work out. In the process, the Peoples staff learned a lot about the importance of providing scrupulously dependable prescription services.

From here Peoples began opening stores in the city's wealthier neighborhoods, such as Mount Pleasant in 1922. More stores would be added at a steady rate for decades to come. Like other retailers, Gibbs kept pushing his stores to be live, hyper-kinetic advertisements for themselves. When the new Peoples store at 13th and F Streets opened in 1927, the Post noted admiringly that it was "fully electrified" with over 2 miles of wiring. The signs outside, with raised opal letters and flashing amber borders composed of 225 individual light bulbs, proved difficult to ignore. By the time of its 50th anniversary in 1955, the chain had 155 stores in 7 states.

Interior of Peoples' Mount Pleasant branch (located at 14th Street and Park Road), showing the soda fountain and perfume counter (Source: Library of Congress).

Peoples wasn't the first drug store to have a soda fountain, but it was certainly one of its biggest promoters. Across the country, the heyday of the drug store soda fountain was from the 1920s to the 1950s, and it made going to the drug store on the corner as much fun as dropping in to the neighborhood bar. Soda fountains originally dispensed just cool carbonated drinks and ice cream, but beginning in the 1920s, Peoples' soda fountains also offered sandwiches, cakes, and pies, offering stiff competition to lunchroom chains like Childs' and Thompson's. And they continued to grow. In September 1943, amidst wartime staff constraints, People's store #38 on Connecticut Avenue was the first to convert its three soda fountains into the equivalent of a full-blown cafeteria. By 1965, the soda fountain at the 15th and G Street store, the heir to the old Thompson's store, was big enough to accommodate 84 diners.

In 1977, the Washington Star's Pat Lewis chronicled a day in the life of the soda fountain at Peoples store #11 on Capitol Hill, "the last of the old-fashioned Peoples soda fountains," complete with amiable down-and-outers such as the "67-year-old man, unshaven and in tattered clothes" who ordered a coffee and doughnut and then told the waitress to "put it on my bill." "My check comes next week," he explained. Others at the counter were sitting next to each other as they had done every day for years, and Lewis discovered that they didn't even know each other's names. A Catholic University professor came in and sat at the counter, and his breakfast was silently put in front of him, without his having to order anything. The waitress knew what he wanted.

Detail from a 1970s matchcover (Author's collection).

After decades of success, everything was changing at Peoples in the 1970s. Founder Malcolm Gibbs had died back in 1944, and, while continuing to expand, the chain had lost its dynamism. In 1974, an Ohio-based drug store chain, Lane Drug Corporation, gained a controlling share of Peoples' stock, and within a year Ohio-native Sheldon W. (Bud) Fantle (1923-1996) moved to Washington to become chairman and chief executive of Peoples, which the Washington Star-News called a "big but ailing chain."

Fantle set about reinvigorating Peoples with the same kind of zest that Mac Gibbs had embodied in the early days. He overhauled the stock at each store, tailoring it to local area's best-selling items, and began a campaign of aggressively purchasing other drug chains. Old stores were overhauled with the latest 1970s decorations. At a special ceremony in July 1975, Fantle was joined by Mayor Walter Washington at the grand reopening of the flagship store at 15th and G, freshly decked out with bright, headache-inducing wallpaper (see the photo below). It's not known how long that wallpaper lasted.

Interior of the renovated Peoples at 15th and G Streets NW in 1975. (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Soon Peoples was once again an industry leader, and Fantle was seen as masterful turn-around artist. But the changes were not all easy or appreciated. One by one, the beloved soda fountains, for example, were being closed. Fantle said they could no longer compete with the fast-food restaurants that were sprouting up everywhere. In 1988, a Georgetown resident upset about the closing of the local soda fountain, suggested in the Post that the name of the company be changed from "People's" to "Corporate's."

By the 1980s, all three of DC's drug store chains—Peoples (by far the largest), Dart Drug (founded by Herbert Haft in 1954), and Drug Fair (owned at the time by Sherwin-Williams)—were experiencing hard times. The big grocery chains, Giant and Safeway, had discovered that by opening their own pharmacies they could steal much of the drug stores' business, and the competition was withering. The Canadian firm Imasco, Ltd., acquired Peoples in 1984, only to see its profitability plummet over the next three years. In 1987, Fantle left the company and soon took over its ailing competitor, Dart Drug. Dart had developed a bad reputation, and Fantle worked to give it a new image, renaming it Fantle's. It didn't work; the Fantle's chain closed in 1990, after just two years.

That same year, New York-based Melville Corporation acquired Peoples. Melville was a large retail holding company that also owned the 811-store CVS drugstore chain. The new owners kept the Peoples name for several years, but in 1994, after a survey showed that most people wouldn't object to a change, the 89-year-old brand was abandoned, and the former Peoples stores all got CVS signage. Another homegrown retail icon of 20th-century Washington had become extinct.

Special thanks to Faye Haskins and Derek Gray of the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library for their invaluable assistance.

The Evening Star Building, Home to a Great Afternoon Newspaper

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:05:00 +0000

It was a sad day in Washington in August 1981 when The Washington Star ceased publication after more than 128 years of service. The Star's tenure had stretched back before the Civil War, an amazing run that witnessed the historic sweep of the city's development from small town to sophisticated metropolis. "The Rock of Gibraltar in Washington journalism is The Washington Star, one of the world's really great newspapers," historian Fred A. Emery wrote in 1935. The rise and fall of this bygone institution has its own grand sweep, with its greatest achievements occurring when it was quartered in the majestic marble building at 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, that still bears its name today.

The Star began inauspiciously enough in December 1852, one of dozens of newspapers that sprang up for limited runs in 19th century Washington City. In fact, two other D.C. newspapers had already used the Star name, the Columbian Star from 1822 to 1827, and the first Washington Star in 1841. The third Star, the one that would matter, began as a four-page broadsheet with a run of 250 copies, printed on a hand press in a small office at 8th and D Streets, NW. The paper's first owner, Captain Joseph Borrows Tate, sought to distinguish the Star from all the other rags published throughout the city by striking a tone of impartiality: "The Star is to be free from party trammels or sectarian influences...devoted in an especial manner to the local interests of the beautiful city which bears the honored name of Washington." The paper's neutral stance and focus on local news became its trademark and, in time, gave it broad appeal and commercial success. It also led at times to overly innocuous reportage, as in this oft-quoted remark by reporter William Tucker that appeared in the paper's first edition: "Our courts are sitting, but the business with which they are engaged is not of a very interesting character."

Tate sold the paper within a year to William Wallac h (1812-1871), an aggressive Texan who worked hard to build up the business, moving its office to the southwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania in 1854. Wallach hired a promising young reporter, Crosby S. Noyes (1825-1908), in 1853, and Noyes quickly became the Star's star. One of his many assignments was to report on the hanging of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, WV, in 1859, which he did in flowery, dramatic prose. The Star maintained an anti-slavery stance in those days and, once the Civil War began, was decidedly pro-Union, despite the strong Southern sentiments then common in Washington.

Crosby S. Noyes (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The paper grew in prestige during the war years, aided by its exclusive connections with an early incarnation of the Associated Press. Through the AP, the Star's vivid coverage of the war's impact on Washington was relayed across the country. The New York Times often reprinted war reports from the pages of the Star, and the paper's prestige increased. Supposedly, as soon as Abraham Lincoln finished delivering his second inaugural address, he handed the text to Crosby Noyes so that it could be printed in the Star.

In 1867, Wallach retired and the paper was bought by Noyes and four other investors: Samuel H. Kauffmann (1829-1906), Alexander "Boss" Shepherd (1835-1902), Clarence D. Baker, and George W. Adams. Shepherd, who would become governor of D.C. in 1873, sold his share of the enterprise within a few years, as did Baker, and Adams remained a behind-the-scenes investor. That left Noyes and Kauffmann to establish a family dynasty that would preside over the Star for another 100 years. Noyes exercised editorial control, while Kauffmann served as publisher and handled the business side.

The Star's new home in 1881 (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1881, the Star was forced to move from its quarters on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue to make way for construction of the grand Post Office Department building, so well-known now for its iconic clock tower. Kauffmann and Noyes decided to move directly across the street to a narrow, four-story building on the northwest corner of 11th and Pennsylvania. The paper was steadily growing during these years, and the new building was almost immediately too small. The company gradually acquired adjacent properties on Pennsylvania and 11th until it had a large enough plot to build a monumental skyscraper of a building.

The project began in 1897 with many of the leading architects of the day participating in a competition to design the Star's new home. James G. Hill, architect of such prominent buildings as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and the Stoneleigh Court Apartments, submitted a proposal, as did the firm of Hornblower & Marshall, designers of the Smithsonian's Natural History Building, and Glenn Brown (1854-1932), an influential secretary of the American Institute of Architects and author of the landmark History of the United States Capitol. The winner, however, was William J. Marsh (1864-1926). Marsh had just started an independent practice with Walter G. Peter (1868-1945), whom he had met while they were both working at Hornblower & Marshall. Marsh may have had the inside track on this competition since he had previously designed homes for Crosby Noyes and two of his sons.

The Evening Star Building prior to 1918. The tall building to the left is the Raleigh Hotel. (Source: DC Public Library Commons)

Marsh designed an ostentatious, marble-faced office tower in the then-fashionable Beaux-Arts style. The shining white structure was a powerful statement of the Star's position of power and pre-eminence. In comparison, the Washington Post's smaller grey-granite building up the street, done in the Romanesque-Revival style, looked out-of-date. A postcard of the new building unabashedly proclaims, "The Evening Star Building of white marble is the most beautiful newspaper building in the world."

The Star's business office, circa 1921 (Source: Library of Congress).

The building was completed and opened for business in June 1900. As described in great detail in the rival Washington Times, its interior held many wonders. Inside the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance, one passed through a marble-clad lobby to the richly-decorated business office. The walls were clad in exquisite white Paonazzo marble from the famous Carrara quarries of Italy and carved into elegant Renaissance Revival arches and pilasters. Frederick Dielman (1847-1935), a celebrated painter who had recently produced murals for the new Library of Congress building, was commissioned to prepare seven great allegorical paintings of the newspaper industry for the lunettes in the upper portions of the walls. The effect was of being in a Renaissance church or grand library rather than the business office of a newspaper.

Postcard of Dielman's "News Gathering" (Author's collection).

Postcard of Dielman's "The Diffusion of Intelligence" (Author's collection).

Editorial offices were on the seventh floor, with a commanding view of the city from the windows to the west and south. Editors (the news editor, city editor, telegraph editor) had their desks along the windows, all equipped with telephones, electric bells, and pneumatic tubes for sending messages around the building. The open space in the middle of the room was filled with roll-top reporters' desks, a typewriter on each. On the other side, a row of telephones stood at the ready, providing instant communications with the Senate, House of Representatives, City Hall, and District Building. It was the height of modern journalistic efficiency.

On the eighth floor was the composing room, in a double space that extended through the ninth floor to provide a cavernous, skylit working space. It was outfitted with 18 of the latest Morgenthaler linotype machines, sophisticated devices that set lines of type in cast bars of lead for use on the two enormous printing presses down in the basement. The equally large basement printing plant included not just the presses but also electric generating equipment capable of independently supporting all of the building's needs.

Management of the paper passed to a new generation with the deaths of Samuel Kauffmann in 1906 and Crosby Noyes in 1908. Two of Noyes' sons took over, Frank taking Kauffmann's place as president in 1906 and his brother Theodore becoming editor in 1908. Under the Noyes brothers, the Star's greatest period of expansion took place, and it became one of the most profitable newspapers in the business. It continued to focus on local news and printed only the safest of opinions on its editorial pages, thus ensuring that none of its many advertisers were offended. Meanwhile, its competitors languished. The Post had sullied its reputation by seeming to incite the race riots of 1919. According to Constance McLaughlin Green, "Newspapermen despised the Washington Post, a 'poison sheet' without moral integrity." Of the other two major papers, the Times had "swung far to the right," according to Green, thus marginalizing itself, while the Herald "offered a bland diet only occasionally spiced with biting, politically loaded comments." With such anemic competition, the Star could afford to be arrogant.

The Star Building circa 1921, after construction of the 1918 annex (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1918, the company built a large annex next to the original building along 11th Street, and it became the industrial heart of the expanded business. The new space was equipped with no less than 34 Morgenthaler linotype machines and four presses in the basement. On an average day, 890 4-pound ingots of lead were melted down to make the day's press plates. (The metal was melted down and re-used each day.) A typical print run in 1927 was 100,000 copies of a 32-page paper, requiring 38 massive rolls of newsprint, or 596 miles of paper. The finished papers were loaded on to 17 trucks for distribution across the city each weekday afternoon and Sunday morning.

Everyone seems to agree that the real turning point for the newspaper—from rising star to falling star, as it were—came in 1954, when the Post absorbed the Times-Herald. (The Times and the Herald had merged in 1939.) The Times-Herald had had a slightly higher circulation than the Star, although the Star's advertising volume far outpaced any of its competitors. But the acquisition of the Times-Herald put the Post well ahead of the Star in circulation for the first time—over 380,000 by 1955 compared to the Star's 250,000. By 1959, the Post pulled ahead in advertising volume as well, and the Star never caught up. While the Post had taken over the spot as the city's newspaper of record, having come a long way from its "poison sheet" days of the 1920s, top management of the Star seemed oblivious to the sea-changes. Insular and used to longstanding success, they thought their paper was invulnerable. Instead, it was doomed.

As if to symbolically punctuate the Star's decline, the company decided in the late 1950s to abandon its venerable home on Pennsylvania Avenue and construct a new building at 225 Virginia Avenue, SE. The move gained key logistical advantages for the paper's printing operations; the soon-to-be-constructed I-395 freeway would provide direct access for speedy afternoon distribution, and a railroad spur offered equally direct access to newsprint and other raw materials. In addition, the new building boasted roughly three times the floor space of the old one. Nevertheless, the company had traded an elegant structure at a prestigious address for a hulking, utilitarian box in an out-of-the-way, run-down area.

Postcard rendering of the new building (Author's collection).

The demise of the Star was a long and drawn-out affair. Circulation actually continued to increase throughout the 1960s, although advertising revenue steadily dropped off. The afternoon format became more and more of a liability, no longer fitting the daily routines of a changing culture and also posing distribution challenges. "Realistically, it was probably hopeless by '65 or '66," a former executive was quoted as saying in the Star's final edition. As the paper relentlessly lost money, the Kauffmann and Noyes families began to look for an outside buyer. In 1974, a wealthy Texas banker, Joe L. Allbritton, took control of the paper, eventually buying out the shares owned by the Kauffmann and Noyes families.

Allbritton wanted to turn the paper around, but he faced insurmountable odds. A key part of his strategy was to leverage the income from the company's profitable WMAL broadcasting stations to cover the paper's losses while fixes were being planned. However, the Federal Communications Commission balked at Allbritton holding on to two different mass media outlets in the same market. Tense times at the paper ensued, with staff accepting pay cuts and a reduced work week to keep the business alive. In 1978, four years after taking over, Allbritton sold the Star to Time Inc. The media giant made more changes, bringing in new editorial leadership, changing the physical design of the paper, and switching to morning delivery. It didn't help. After just three more years, Time closed the Star for good in 1981.

Meanwhile, the old Evening Star Building endured quietly on Pennsylvania Avenue. Initial plans, after its namesake had moved out, were to convert it to a 330-room hotel. Instead, it was converted to generic office space, and much of it was rented to the federal government. As various "modernizations" were undertaken, nothing of the original interior decoration was preserved—the Carrara marble, the mahogany trim, the Dielman murals—all vanished. In 1981, the owners proposed a massive renovation and enlargement of the building, a project that was finally carried out 9 years later. The 1918 addition on 11th Street was torn down in 1987, as were smaller structures abutting the building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a large new addition, designed in a style sympathetic with the original, was put up in their place. The Evening Star Building is now one of the most valuable properties in downtown Washington.

The 1959 building in Southeast was sold to the Post, which used it as a printing plant for many years. The D.C. government leased the building in 2007 with the intention of using it as a new police headquarters but subsequently determined that that option would be too expensive. The city bought the building outright in 2009, and it is currently being extensively renovated to house several other D.C. government agencies.

* * *

Thanks to Kim Williams, D.C. Historic Preservation Office, for her assistance with this article. Sources included Fred A. Emery, "Washington Newspapers" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society (Vol. 37-38, 1937); Merrill E. Gates, Men of Mark in America (1906); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (1962); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); Pamela Scott and Antoinette Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Washington Board of Trade, The Book of Washington (1927); a draft National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Evening Star building from 1990; and, of course, numerous newspaper articles from the Star as well as its chief rivals.

The Ontario Theatre's Many Past Lives

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:16:00 +0000

Located at 1700 Columbia Road, NW, in Adams Morgan, the former Ontario Theatre doesn’t look like much these days. It’s been a couple decades since it was a functioning theater. Most recently, there was a discount store in its old lobby, offering clothing, luggage, toys, you name it. The store went out of business in 2008. Just a few years earlier, the theater’s sleek original stainless-steel letters, spelling O-N-T-A-R-I-O across the roofline, were taken down, making it all the harder to recognize the building for what it used to be—one of the city’s classiest movie theaters.

The empty theater building today. Photo by the author.

The theater’s history spans elegant premieres of acclaimed motion pictures, concerts by notable bands of the Rock ’n Roll era, and groundbreaking screenings of Spanish-language films for a community that previously had little access to such entertainment. While the theater “reinvented” itself several times over, often struggling to find its identity, it managed in the process to serve as a vital and exceptional community resource, an entertainment venue that had few rivals in this part of town.

Completed in 1951 for the K-B theater chain, the Ontario was designed by accomplished theater architect John J. Zink (1886-1952) and his associate, Frederick L.W. Moehle (1903-1959). Zink was one of the most important theater architects in Washington, a man who developed a deep appreciation for the unique requirements of these highly specialized buildings. A native of Baltimore, Zink studied in New York with Thomas W. Lamb (1871–1942), one of the foremost theater and cinema architects of the 20th century and the designer-to-be of the nearby Tivoli Theater (1924). His first DC project was the Rialto on 9th Street downtown. Completed in 1918, it was one of the largest movie palaces of its day and had an extraordinarily ornate interior. Zink would go on to design some 14 movie theaters in the District, ranging from the neoclassical Takoma Theatre (1923) to the ultra-modern Ontario. Zink is probably best known for his exquisite art deco designs, including the much-loved Uptown (1936) as well as the Newton (1937) and the Apex (1940), a wonderful neighborhood theater in Spring Valley that was destroyed in 1977.

World War II marked a turning point in theater design as in almost everything else. Perhaps the exuberance of art deco started to seem naïve; in any event, it was out-of-date. There had also been a hiatus in theater construction due to wartime constraints that persisted through the 1940s. When it came time at the end of the decade to design the Ontario, Zink and his associate Moehle came up with an entirely new mid-century modern look that captured the spirit of the age—the age of automation—with its bold geometric shapes and bright colors. Most striking is the prominent stainless-steel-rimmed marquee that juts out towards the sharply-angled intersection of 17th Street and Columbia Road. Its clean, rounded lines reflect the new aesthetic, as does the exposed support pole with glassed frames for movie posters. Then there is that glazed orange terracotta tile work; whether you love it or hate it, its boldness is undeniable. The Ontario’s sleek, futuristic glamor is unparalleled in other surviving Washington, D.C. theaters.

The Ontario in 1994. Photo by Scott Seymour via Flickr. Used with permission.

At the time of the Ontario’s construction, this dense residential section of the city was thought to be overdue for an additional movie theater. There were already two large movie houses in the area—the Tivoli at 14th Street and Park Road and the Ambassador (1917/23, now demolished) at 18th Street and Columbia Road. As early as 1945, the Roth’s Theater chain had planned a theater a block away at Columbia Road and Mozart Place, NW, but it was never built. It was the K-B chain, at one point the largest in the D.C. area, that constructed the Ontario. The company was founded by Fred S. Kogod (1900-1956) and Max Burka (1891-1966), two immigrants from Eastern Europe who had gotten their start in the grocery business in the early 1920s. They stumbled into movie theaters in 1926 after purchasing a building on H Street, NE, that had a theater (the Princess) on the first floor. When the theater’s manager quit, they found themselves running it on their own. It turned out to be quite successful. They went on to build the beautiful Apex in 1938 and within a few years were planning a new venue for the site on Columbia Road but had to wait for wartime restrictions and a pre-existing lease to run out. The Ontario was one of just two theaters constructed in the District of Columbia during the 1950s.

When finally completed in 1951, the Ontario was stylish and up-to-date, with all the latest amenities. The auditorium featured Bodyform Pushback seats built by the American Seating Company, allowing patrons to “simply slide back” to allow others to pass rather than having to get up from their seats. Generous spacing was provided between the rows, and the seating arrangement was staggered to ensure maximum visibility in all parts of the house. The auditorium also had two enclosed balcony rooms, one a nursery for children and the other a private party room seating 47 people. The lobby was designed by prominent Philadelphia decorator David E. Brodsky (1903-1995) in a stylish gold-gray scheme intended to convey a distinctly modernistic vision of the high life. Recessed lighting hid behind a wonderfully fluid amoeba-like design on the ceiling, while large marble piers accented the theme of luxury. With 1,400 seats, the Ontario was an exceptionally large neighborhood theater and one of the largest overall in the city. It was said to have cost a pricey $500,000 to build.

Contemporary view of the Ontario's arcade. Photo by the author.

The theater’s first feature when it opened on November 1, 1951, was a comedy called Rhubarb, starring Ray Milland and Jan Sterling. According to Robert K. Headley’s Motion Picture Exhibition in Washington, D.C., the Ontario was the first neighborhood theater in Washington to break the monopoly of downtown theaters on showing first-fun features. Theater critic Richard L. Coe marveled in January 1952 that the Ontario was splurging on first-run films, effectively outbidding the “downtown palazzos.”

The Ontario reflected the social tensions of its times as well as the cosmopolitan tastes of upper Northwest Washington, D.C. residents. It hosted the Washington premiere of Death of a Salesman in March 1952, and members of the local American Legion, reflecting the Cold War hysteria of the day, picketed outside the theater, calling the film “un-American” because of Arthur Miller’s left-leaning sympathies. Surprisingly, only eight years later, the theater showed a Soviet production of Eugene Onegin, based on the Tchaikovsky opera and Pushkin novel, which seemed to cause no stir at all and was praised by The Washington Post’s theater critic, Paul Hume. The Lenfilm production, filmed in “Sovcolor,” was a beautiful production, he wrote in 1960.

Several premieres at the Ontario were significant cultural events. More than 200 diplomats, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and other high government officials were invited to the February 1963 premiere of Lawrence of Arabia, for example, and many prominent Washington hostesses hosted commemorative dinners before the gala showing. As the VIPs disembarked from their limousines in front of the streamlined arcade of the Ontario, commentator Hazel Markel announced each arrival to a wide radio audience “with as much aplomb and confidence as the best receiving line announcer at any large Washington party,” the Post observed.

The theater’s most successful and longest-running production was The Sound of Music, which opened at the Ontario in 1965 and ran for two years. In March 1966, a lavish celebration was held to mark the first year of the film’s run, with cast members and Swiss folk music groups in attendance. However, the success of The Sound of Music was soon followed by major cultural shifts in the Washington landscape.

The riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, included looting and burning just a few blocks east of the Ontario, and the theater’s traditional patrons quickly grew uneasy about the neighborhood. The hit movie Funny Girl did poorly when it opened at the Ontario in late 1968 but brought in many more customers when the K-B chain moved it across the park to its Wisconsin Avenue theater in early 1969.

The lobby of the Ontario in 2009. Photo by Scott Seymour via Flickr. Used with permission.

In August 1969, responding to the significant demographic changes affecting the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, the theater converted to showing Spanish-language films, beginning with a double bill of El Yaqui and Así Es Mi Mexico, all without English subtitles. Marvin Goldman, co-owner of the K-B chain at the time, explained to The Evening Star why he had undertaken this “audacious” experiment: “In general, in the past and still today…pictures in the Spanish language have been shown, in this country, in inferior theaters—what we call junk houses—in New York City, Los Angeles, and especially in the border states—Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. We decided on a new wrinkle—to invite Washington’s Spanish-speaking community to see pictures in their language in the setting of a beautiful house with one of the most luxurious decors in the nation. The response has been gratifying. Latin audiences flock to the Ontario…” According to the Star, many of the theater’s new patrons were Cuban exiles.

Films starring the Mexican comedian Cantinflas were the biggest draw, and crowds were always largest on Sunday afternoons, unlike theaters showing “traditional” fare, which did their most business on Friday and Saturday evenings. “We come on Sunday because it is one of the few days we have free from work,” a Bolivian immigrant told Post reporter Bill Bancroft in November 1971. “The audience appeared to be more like a family gathering at a church social than an American movie audience,” Bancroft observed. “Father and mothers trooped in with their small children, including infants. Grandparents were included in some groups. Many talked while the movie was in progress.”

After almost a decade of success, the revived Teatro Ontario Internacional was threatened in 1977, after the K-B chain sold it to Paul S. Tauber and Herbert White for $400,000, slightly less than it had cost to build 26 years earlier. Tauber and White decided they would discontinue the Spanish-language format and instead offer a mix of repertory and first-run features to cater to the affluent whites who seemed to be returning in significant numbers to the culturally-diverse Adams-Morgan neighborhood. However, Tauber and White misread the extent to which the Adams-Morgan community had changed. Tauber was quoted in the Post as saying that “There is no Spanish Community here anymore,” which naturally angered the Latino community and led to a temporary boycott of the theater. One evening a group of some 200 protesters blocked the entrance to the theater. “Who says we don’t exist?” read the statement they issued. In response, Tauber quickly backed off of the new policy, blaming the media for misquoting him. Carlos Rosario, a community leader who was instrumental in the formation of the D.C. Office of Latino Affairs, stepped in and arranged to rent out the Ontario on Sundays so it could continue to show Spanish language films once a week.

The Columbia Road facade, looking pretty rundown. Photo by the author.

The Ontario was sold again in 1979, when its “outrageous” years began, a time when it would run anything that would bring in patrons. Carlos Rosario bought the theater in 1980 and struck an arrangement with local disc jockey Seth Hurwitz to do weekday programming while Rosario focused on the profitable Spanish language films on the weekend. In March 1979, the Ontario showed the Bruce Lee film Enter The Dragon, which was a big hit. Horror films like the sadistic I Spit On Your Grave became staples at the theater, although the audience could be fickle. An exasperated Hurwitz told Post reporter Michael Kernan in 1981, “I tried 'Elephant Man,' and that didn't go. I tried 'Straw Dogs,' which has plenty of violence, but it didn't go.... But they loved 'Gloria,' which is a classy movie but violent.” Kernan wrapped up his article about the Ontario’s quirky repertoire by observing: “The other night they had a ridiculous picture called 'Dracula's Dog.' A guy came up to the box office and said, 'I dint know Dracula had no dawg.' But he paid his $3 and went in anyway.”

In these years, under Hurwitz’ guidance, the Ontario also became known as Washington’s premiere venue for live New Wave, punk, and Rock ’n Roll shows. Among the shows that appeared were nationally–recognized artists such as Blondie, U2, the Police, R.E.M., and the Clash. The concerts could get rowdy sometimes, as noted by nearby resident Leslie Kuter in a letter to the Post in October 1980: “As I lay in bed after midnight [on a recent night], some crazed rocker would periodically open the back doors of the Ontario Theatre and the music of Todd Rundgren and Ian Hunter (the rock stars) would fill the back alley and my bedroom.... Last year at about this time, we had riots. Some of my neighbors were robbed. Fortunately, on the night of Oct. 9, damage didn't go beyond shouting, roaring cars and drunk stares from real toughies made brave by raunchy rock...” Whatever its merits, the rock era would only last a few more years at the Ontario. Seth Hurwitz would move on by the mid 1980s to acquire and manage the acclaimed 9:30 Club on F Street downtown.

In 1983, the Circle Theaters chain purchased the Ontario. Despite the proven popularity of the Spanish-language fare, the new owners opted to once again try “art films and movies for a sophisticated market.” In 1985, extensive interior renovations were undertaken to allow the theater to once again show first-run features, which hadn’t been shown there since Funny Girl in 1969. While the renovations and new programming had some initial success, the theater was permanently closed just two years later, in May 1987. The owners claimed that the large, single-screen theater was not economically feasible as a neighborhood venue.

Subsequently, the building was used for a variety of retail purposes. A People’s Drug Store (later CVS) filled the former auditorium space beginning in the late 1980s. A Domino’s Pizza outlet operated from space on 17th Street. Then the discount store moved into the former lobby space. All are gone now, as the building’s owners reportedly contemplate replacing it with a new condominium development. At one point an historic landmark nomination was filed to protect the theater, but the nomination was withdrawn after the owners agreed to preserve several symbolic architectural elements from the old building, including its iconic marquee, to be incorporated into the planned new building.

Much of the research for this article was done originally for the Ontario’s historic landmark nomination. Robert K. Headley and D. Peter Sefton provided invaluable assistance. Headley is the author of the authoritative reference book on DC movie theaters, Motion Picture Exhibition in Washington, D.C. (1999). Additional information came from an assortment of newspaper and magazine articles. Adam Rubin, a graduate student at George Washington University, has recently written about the Ontario (“Our Own Outrageous Ontario: A History of Adams Morgan's Ontario Theatre”) and will be presenting his paper at the 38th Annual Conference on D.C. Historical Studies in November.

Rock Creek Park's Historic Peirce Mill Recalled to Life

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:30:00 +0000

Two hundred years ago, long before it was urbanized, much of the District was either forest or farmland, and much of the farmland produced grain—commonly wheat, rye, and corn. Farmers needed mills to turn that grain into flour, both for their own use and to sell at market. To serve these farmers a string of mills once lined the shores of Rock Creek, using the age-old clean power source of the creek's water to turn their lumbering grindstones.

Peirce Mill viewed from creek side, before installation of the new water wheel and chase (photo by the author).

These "custom" mills each served their local farm communities. There were the twin mills—Argyle and Blagden—on either side of the creek just north of where Broad Branch Road intersects with Beach Drive. The Adams Mill, on land now part of the National Zoo, was acquired by John Quincy Adams in 1823; it was originally called the Columbia Mill. Further south, just above Georgetown, was Lyon's Mill, an impressive structure that had two waterwheels, one on each end of the building, to increase production. The National Park Service has erected rarely-noticed historical markers at the sites of each of these industrial dynamos, and there were at least half a dozen more along the creek as well. They're all gone now save for one, Peirce Mill, which has lain dormant since 1993. But that is about to change.

Peirce Mill, on Tilden Street close to Beach Drive, was built by Isaac Peirce (1756-1841), a Quaker farmer from Pennsylvania who had moved to the Washington area in the mid 1780s and in 1794 acquired a vast 160-acre tract of property along Rock Creek. The property, which originally stretched to the Maryland border, included an earlier mill that Peirce replaced with the current one in about 1820. Working with his stonemason son, Abner (1785-1851), Peirce constructed a simple but very sturdy building out of blue granite quarried from the nearby hills. The mill structure was just one of several buildings in the Peirce farm complex that survive to this day, including an adjacent carriage house, a distillery across the road (now a private residence), and a small spring house just up the hill to the west, the oldest of these structures.

Postcard view of the mill from around 1910.

Peirce (yes, that's the way he spelled it) was a millwright—he built and owned his mill—but he didn't operate it. He hired millers to do the hard work of actually milling grain. And hard work it was. Traditionally, grist mills used their waterwheels solely to turn the millstones, also known as buhrs. Everything else was done by hand, including loading the hoppers that served grain to the buhrs, carrying the ground meal to the top floor of the mill to dry, scooping up the dried meal and filtering it into sifters, and finally filling barrels with the finished flour. In 1795, an inventor from Delaware, Oliver Evans (1755-1819), published The Young Mill-Wright & Miller's Guide, in which he described a complete system he had perfected for automating the functions of a flour mill. He turned the interior of the mill into an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption of wooden cogs, chutes, elevators, hoppers, and bins, all powered by the mill's waterwheel. His patented system, producing superior flour with dramatically less labor, was first used on a large scale at the Patapsco Mills in nearby Ellicott City, Maryland. Isaac Peirce likely also used Evans' system to outfit his own mill.

Peirce Mill now is being restored with an historically accurate Evans-type automated system, which is a wonder to behold when all the machinery clatters to life. Powerful wooden gears connect the main horizontal shaft from the waterwheel at the basement level to a vertical shaft that extends up four stories to the attic level, driving all the other mechanisms. The millstones grind grain on the first floor, after which an elevator (a vertical conveyor belt of little wooden buckets) carries the flour up to the third-floor grain cleaner and hopper boy, where it begins the drying, cleaning, and sifting process that takes it through the bolter on the second-floor and finally down to storage bins on the first.

Oliver Evans (Source: Smithsonian Institution).

While some resisted Evans' inventions, others soon adopted them, often infringing Evans' patents. Despite the revolutionary implications of his inventions, Evans was not widely celebrated. As Steve Dryden points out in his indispensable Peirce Mill: Two Hundred Years in the Nation's Capital, Evans was not well-liked and was called a "pompous blockhead" among other things. After he successfully lobbied Congress to reinstate his expired patents, he incurred the wrath of none other than Thomas Jefferson, who had built an Evans-type mill at Monticello and who wrote to Congress that Evans' devices "are too valuable for anyone to be permitted to control them." Another letter Jefferson wrote in 1813 about his vexation with Evans' reinstated patents has become a classic text on the limits of intellectual property rights.

Diagram of the mill's operations (drawing by Ted Hazen, courtesy of the National Park Service).

Meanwhile, Isaac Peirce's mill prospered through nearly the entire 19th century. After Peirce's death in 1841, the mill was taken over by his son Abner, who died ten years later. Abner left the mill to his nephew, Pierce Shoemaker (1816-1891), who owned it until his death, after which it was bought by the government to be part of the new national park known as Rock Creek Park. Peirce and his successors seem to have been well attuned to advances in technology, investing in high quality millstones and changing the type of waterwheel the mill used at least twice. And business was good. Shoemaker's son Louis recalled that in the 1870s "[i]t was a daily occurrence to see from ten to twelve teams and a number of boys on horseback from the surrounding country with grist," waiting at Peirce Mill to have their grain turned into flour.

But technological advances—cheaper, more efficient steam power—quickly made water-powered mills obsolete in the mid 19th century, and by the 1880s, the mills along Rock Creek all were closing down. The end of the road came without warning for Peirce Mill one day in 1897, when the mill's main shaft broke in the middle of grinding a load of rye for a local farmer. Miller Alcibiades P. White remarked that "the neighbor had to haul his unground rye away, and I guess he never got it ground. That was the last time the mill operated."

From that point forward, Peirce Mill was destined to take on a new life as an icon of the rustic past. Even before it ceased operations, Peirce Mill and its grounds were used as a getaway from city life. In 1903 an "elderly dame who resides in the northern part of the city" reminisced in The Washington Times about the romance of an outing to Peirce Mill:

I remember well the first picnic I ever attended escorted by a young gentleman. It was given at old Pierce Mill. Many of the young people rode out in one of Naylor's omnibuses and others had the good fortune to be invited by some young man who had a buggy. It was as pretty a September day as ever dawned, and we all knew each other and had a lovely time. I recollect we danced on the second floor of the mill, and I felt as if I was the belle of the ball. When the great big full moon came up that night all the boys and all the girls fell in love, and many tender words were said and vows pledged only to be broken that beautiful September night. I remember I rode out with one young man and came home escorted by another, and made all the girls jealous, and that was glory enough for me.

Postcard view of the Pierce Mill dam, constructed in 1903 (author's collection).

While there was talk as early as 1907 of acquiring a new waterwheel and getting the mill running again, nothing was ever done about it. The water to power the mill had been supplied through a millrace—a small channel dug parallel to the creek from a point upstream where a rocky dam diverted water into it. The millrace had been filled in some time after the mill ceased operating, making it difficult for an observer to figure out how the mill had gotten water to power its wheel. Another wholly inappropriate touch was the construction in 1903 of a decorative dam adjacent to the mill. The dam, which is still there, is certainly very attractive, but it added to visitors' confusion in trying to understand how the mill wheel worked.

Scene at the mill, circa 1918 (Library of Congress).

Not that there was any mill wheel left at that point. In 1906, a large enclosed porch was built alongside the mill where the wheel had been, and the Peirce Mill Tea House made its debut. Visitors to the picturesque old mill could purchase "ices and soft drinks, tea and sandwiches and cake from 2 o'clock onward each day" to enjoy on the new porch. The tea house became very popular. In 1912, the Aberdeen American noted that the mill "is a favorite resort where President Taft and members of Washington's smart set often stop and sip tea. It is a fashionable rendezvous for horseback and motor parties and many elaborate social functions are held at the old mill."

Peirce Mill in 1934, showing the tea room built on the side of the mill where the waterwheel should be (Historic American Buildings Survey).

Over its 30-year existence, the tea house had a number of proprietors, including Hattie L. Sewell, an African-American, who took over in 1920 and reportedly offered good service and increased business. She unfortunately ran afoul of an influential neighbor, E.S. Newman, who complained that with Sewell there the mill would become "a rendezvous for colored people, soon developing into a nuisance." It was certainly a very low point in the mill's history when Sewell was forced out after only one year in business.

The tea house closed in 1934 when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (1874-1952) endorsed a Works Progress Administration project to restore the mill to working order after almost 40 years of dormancy. Architect Thomas T. Waterman (1900-1951), who would later lead the restoration of Decatur House, supervised the work, which aimed to preserve a sense of the mill's long history and evolution, rather than attempting to recreate a specific moment in time. The Fitz Water Wheel Company of Hanover, Pennsylvania, was entrusted with reconstructing the Oliver Evans-type milling mechanisms. Since no records existed of the mill's original machinery, the reconstruction was of a typical system that would have been installed in a mill of this type.

The reconstructed waterwheel in 1936 (Historic American Buildings Survey).

On a rainy day in January 1937, some 2,600 curious visitors lined up under umbrellas for their turn to catch a glimpse of the old mill in action on the day it re-opened. White-haired miller Robert Little, who had grown up working in a flour mill, was busy keeping the mill running, poking at the little elevator buckets that carried meal to the top floor, keeping them from getting stuck. Little estimated that he could produce ten barrels of flour a day if the mill ran for eight hours. You could buy a five-pound sack of meal from him for 25 cents—a good deal, considering it was stone-ground. Flour was also sold to government-operated cafeterias, with the idea that the sales would support the mill's operations.

It turned out to be harder than the Park Service had imagined to keep the mill running, however. The mill operated only during the colder months because there was no means for preserving flour in the heat, but the mill wheel would dry out during the off season, and eventually it warped and cracked. Other problems with machinery and an unreliable water supply led the Park Service to shut the mill down in 1958. As Steve Dryden explains, it took until 1970 to get the mill running again, and several modifications were made in the name of expediency that were ill-advised. For example, the old millrace that drew water from the creek was abandoned altogether, and instead water was pumped in from the city's chlorinated municipal supply. At least the mill was running again.

Despite the starting and stopping of operations, Peirce Mill was a popular destination in Rock Creek Park, especially for groups of schoolchildren. In 1971, the Peirce carriage house, located next to the mill, was rehabilitated by the Park Service and rechristened the Art Barn, a showcase for local artists. Popular with local art aficionados as well as schoolchildren, who were offered free art classes, the Art Barn continued for some 21 years, until budget cuts shut it down. In 1992, The Washington Post reported that the Art Barn had also been serving a secret mission. Unbeknownst to almost everybody, government agents had installed electronic surveillance gear in the attic of the Art Barn to spy on the nearby Eastern Bloc embassies of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Art Barn's director, Ann Rushforth, was quoted as saying, "We always knew which guys were the CIA guys because they always wore sunglasses indoors, had real sharp creases in their pants, short haircuts and shiny shoes." The agents, who were more likely from the FBI, ended their spy games as the Cold War drew to a close.

The carriage house, formerly the Art Barn (photo by the author).

Meanwhile, mill operations had stopped again in 1981 for more "make-do" repairs and then resumed several years later. Finally in 1993 the main shaft from the waterwheel broke as a result of decay, and it was clear that the mill could not operate again without a comprehensive restoration effort. Richard Abbott, an engineer who had volunteered at the mill when it was still working, organized a group, called the Friends of Peirce Mill, to get the mill operating again. This time, a careful assessment was made of the condition of the structure and its equipment, and an extensive multi-phased effort was begun to repair the mill. First, much work had to be done to the building itself to repair decayed structural elements. The milling machinery also needed extensive repairs and replacements, and finally a better water supply system had to be devised. A lot of work was accomplished over many years through private contributions, and then this summer extensive renovations and re-landscaping of the property around the mill was completed using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A grand re-opening of the beautifully restored mill is scheduled for October 15, 2011.

To learn more about the mill's history, read Steve Dryden's excellent Peirce Mill: Two Hundred Years in the Nation's Capital (2009). In addition to that, other sources for this article included William Bushong and Piera M. Weiss, "Rock Creek Park: Emerald of the Capital City" in Washington History, Vol. 2, No. 2; Allen C. Clark, "The Old Mills" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 31-32; Barry Mackintosh, Rock Creek Park: An Administrative History (1985); Herman Steen, Flour Milling in America (1963); listings for Peirce Mill in the National Register of Historic Places and the Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service brochures about Peirce Mill, and numerous newspaper articles.

Dumbarton House, A Georgetown Gem

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:13:00 +0000

The Heights of Georgetown, along Q Street and above, are filled with the elegant homes of well-to-do Washingtonians. Most are still in private hands, but several beautiful public museums stand out. Dumbarton Oaks, owned by Harvard University and famous for its gardens and art collections, is a sprawling research and museum complex with a Federal-style house embedded in its core. Tudor Place, a grand residence designed by Dr. William Thornton (1759-1828), today illustrates the history of Georgetown and Washington through the lives of its many residents. Dumbarton House, at 2715 Q Street, NW (and not connected with Dumbarton Oaks in any way) is perhaps least well-known of the three but probably the best at showing what life was like around 1800, when all three were originally constructed.

In those days, Washington City was largely a field of dreams. The Capitol and President’s Mansion were under construction, and a scattering of other buildings, none very remarkable, demonstrated the desire that a town grow here. Georgetown, at the time a separate entity in the District of Columbia, was better established. It had been established in 1747 as a tobacco inspection site, being located at the highest navigable spot on the Potomac River. Maryland farmers, who grew highly-prized “sweet-scented” tobacco, rolled great hogsheads of it down to the wharf at Georgetown to be exported to Scotland.

The Georgetown waterfront, circa 1795 (Library of Congress).

By the beginning of the 19th century, the high ridge above the port of Georgetown became the site for a number of “great houses,” removed as it was from the hurly-burly waterfront and offering commanding views of the river and the new city emerging just to the east. The land had originally been part of a 795-acre patent obtained in 1703 by Col. Ninian Beall (1625-1717). Beall called his property “Rock of Dumbarton” after a famous site in his homeland of Scotland, and the Dumbarton name survives today in many area place names.

Dumbarton House was constructed on this ridge in about 1799 by Samuel Jackson (1755-1836), a Philadelphia merchant and land speculator who lived in the new mansion with his family for about two years. One of his daughters may have been born in the house. It’s not clear why he built such an elegant house and then left it as soon as he did, but, as David White points out, Jackson was a creature of his times. He was involved in complex business deals involving extensive land holdings in Tennessee, where he eventually settled his family. Jackson would gain passing notoriety in 1807 when he was wounded by President-to-be Andrew Jackson (no relation), who stabbed him with a sword-cane, perhaps over a dispute about a horse race.

The house Jackson built is one of the best examples of the emerging Federal style in architecture in the District. The Federal style often brings to mind plain brick townhouses, two or three stories tall, with gabled roofs; Washington once had blocks and blocks of them. This is one of a much smaller number of Federal great-houses, laid out in careful Palladian symmetry with wings on each side of a stately central block. At first glance, the building might seem little different from the brick Georgian mansions of the 18th century, but it was actually markedly new and stylish in 1800. The Flemish-bond brick walls no longer seem as heavy and squat as on many Georgian mansions (the James River plantations in Virginia come to mind), and the interior is no longer dim. When you enter Dumbarton House you are welcomed with bright light from a large Palladian window gracing the stairway landing at the rear of the central passage. Upstairs, the south-facing front windows rise dramatically from the floor, flooding the front rooms with light. No longer content with boxy spaces, Dumbarton House’s designer added a pair of great rounded bow walls to the rear of the house, extending the back rooms with gracious, curved spaces.

The rear of Dumbarton House, circa 1998 (Historic American Buildings Survey).

The first residents after the Jacksons left were Joseph Nourse (1754-1841) and his wife Maria (1765-1850), who moved in in 1804 and purchased the house shortly thereafter for $7,500. The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA), which owns Dumbarton House, has chosen to focus on the Nourse residency for the historic museum portion of the structure and has a long-term project underway to restore the first floor of the house as closely as possible to its appearance when the Nourses lived there. The son of a successful merchant, Joseph Nourse was a skilled bookkeeper. When serving as a military secretary for General Charles Lee during the Revolution, he was noticed by George Washington. After independence, he was chosen the first Register of the Treasury and kept that position until the Jackson administration. Much of the early Continental currency issued by the new government bears Nourse’s signature.

Nourse was an unassuming individual, a family man with a curious intellect. His Georgetown property eventually included 8 acres of land, enough for a modest subsistence farm where wheat, rye, and hay were grown. Outbuildings included a carriage house, stables, barn, icehouse, and dairy. To keep all this running, the Nourses kept about 10 servants at any given time, some free and some enslaved. The wheat and rye produced on the estate could be easily carried a short distance down the hill to Rock Creek, where it could be ground into flour at Lyons' Mill. Joseph likely spent little time overseeing these activities, however. In addition to being “America’s first civil servant,” as he was dubbed in an exhibition in the 1990s, Nourse could just as aptly be considered Washington’s first suburban commuter, traveling daily from his house on Cedar Hill, as it was then called, to his Treasury Department office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington City.

Joseph Nourse as a young man (courtesy of Dumbarton House).

In 1813, the Nourses sold the house, and within a few years they moved to the current site of the National Cathedral on upper Wisconsin Avenue. (The Nourses’ son, Charles, built his mansion, The Highlands, just north of that, and it now serves as the administration building of the Sidwell Friends School.) The Georgetown house was sold to Charles Carroll (1767-1823), a prominent landowner from the powerful Carroll family of Maryland, which included one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Carroll, who was one of the owners of a paper mill on Rock Creek and also had extensive real estate investments in New York, called the property Belle Vue.

Being friends with President James Madison (1751-1836) and Dolley Madison (1768-1849), Carroll played a key role in aiding the Madisons when the British attacked and burned Washington in 1814. After the Battle of Bladensburg went badly for the Americans on the morning of August 24, President Madison knew the British were going to occupy the city, and he asked Carroll to assist Dolley in escaping. As to what happened next, Dolley later gave biographers the following description, which she said was from a letter she wrote to her sister that day:

Three O’clock. Will you believe it, my Sister? We have had a battle or skirmish near Bladensburg, and I am still here within sound of the cannon! Mr. Madison comes not; may God protect him! Two messengers covered with dust, come to bid me fly; but I wait for him…. Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. …It is done... And now, dear sister, I must leave this house, or the retreating army will make me a prisoner in it, by filling up the road I am directed to take. When I shall again write you, or where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell!!

The burnt-out White House in 1814 (Library of Congress).

Carroll safely spirited Dolley to Belle Vue, where she stopped briefly on her way to sanctuary in Virginia. If she were still at Belle Vue that evening, she could have seen the fires in the distance from the Capitol, White House, and Navy Yard burning. Carroll lived at Belle Vue only a few years before moving to New York, after which he rented the house out. One of his first tenants, beginning in 1815, was Commodore John Rodgers (1773-1838) a naval hero who had been honored by the citizens of Baltimore for helping defend their city from the British in 1814. His daughter Elizabeth was likely the second child born at the Georgetown house. Rodgers eventually built his own mansion on Lafayette Square, the same house where Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801-1872) was attacked in April 1865 as part of the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Seward.

The property was leased for many years to Samuel Whitall, a New Jersey Quaker, and his family. Whitall’s son bought the house from Carroll’s heirs, passing it to his sister Sarah (1824-1892), who married banker Charles E. Rittenhouse (1814-1880) in 1855.

In the Civil War years and afterwards, the house was known as Rittenhouse Place. Though the house itself seems to have changed very little, Georgetown changed all around it. The war brought many unruly (and largely unwelcome) Union soldiers who seemed to have little respect for local residents, many of whom sympathized with the South. Troops camped at the Lyons Mill complex on Rock Creek, for example, would occasionally take potshots at the stained glass windows of the chapel in Oak Hill Cemetery, just to the north of Rittenhouse Place. To the south was an encampment of former slaves who had fled across the Potomac from the plantations of Virginia.

Postcard view of Dumbarton House, circa 1940s (Author's collection).

Meanwhile, lower Georgetown, along the waterfront, had become a rather seedy industrial zone. Massive amounts of silt had filled the harbor, making it nearly useless as a shipping port. Once seafaring trade had diminished, business activity shifted to the assorted mills and factories lining the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. It was a place for gentlefolk to avoid.

After Sarah Rittenhouse died, the old house on the ridge was sold to Howard Hinckley, who around 1900 made a number of renovations, such as adding decorative Georgian-style “quoins” on the exterior corners of the house and removing an interior wall on the first floor to create a large entertainment room.

Hinckley sold the property in 1912 to John L. Newbold (1871-1931), a prominent local businessman and founder of the Merchants Transfer & Storage Company. Newbold made the purchase knowing that he was acquiring a house with a serious problem; it stood directly in the path of a planned extension of Q Street.

Dumbarton House in 1913, before it was moved. Note there are steps up to the front entrance (Author's collection).

The Q Street extension was part of a scheme to link the Heights of Georgetown with the well-to-do Sheridan Circle neighborhood via an elegant new bridge (which would become known as the Dumbarton Bridge) spanning the valley of Rock Creek. Wealthy Washingtonians had been building extravagant mansions along Massachusetts Avenue for several decades, turning the neighborhood into a posh enclave. Isolated on the other side of Rock Creek were the homes of the wealthy Georgetowners, who didn’t have a convenient option for crossing over to the main city.

Excerpt form a 1903 Baist insurance map, showing Dumbarton House blocking the route of Q Street across the center of the view.

To extend Q Street, the District planned to tear down Newbold’s mansion, but he got a court order holding them off until he could get it moved. Newbold hired Washington architect Thomas J.D. Fuller (1870-1946) to plan the move and “restoration” of the house, which included dismantling the two wings and then reconstructing them at the house’s new location. The move of the main house was undertaken by Caleb L. Saers, a Civil War veteran who had run a business of raising and moving houses in the Washington area since at least the 1880s. He found the Newbold mansion particularly challenging. It took three weeks and 200 jacks to raise the old house a half-inch off the ground and probably several months after that to drag it into its new resting place, a spot that had been dug out of the hillside some 60 feet to the north. Regretfully, no pictures have been located that show how this complicated engineering feat was accomplished.

Dumbarton House as it appeared before being restored (courtesy of Dumbarton House).

The mansion’s modern-day history began in 1928, when the NSCDA bought it to serve as their National Headquarters and gave it the name “Dumbarton House.” This time, a thorough and historically-sensitive restoration was undertaken under the leadership of two distinguished architects, Fiske Kimball (1888-1955) of Philadelphia, who had spearheaded the restoration of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and local architect Horace Peaslee (1884-1959), the primary designer of Meridian Hill Park. Various alterations, mostly done by Hinckley, were reversed, bringing the house back to something close to its original appearance. Many fine details, such as the decorative plaster cornice in the main parlor and dining room, were restored to their original beauty. Decorated with exceptional early American furnishings, many of them donated by state societies associated with the NSCDA, the restored Dumbarton House was opened as a museum in 1932.

The dining room, as it appeared circa 1998 (Historic American Buildings Survey).

Renovations were undertaken again in 1991, modernizing the building’s systems, adding an elevator to enhance accessibility, and increasing office and meeting space apart from the historic core. This unique museum is now open to the public Tuesdays through Sundays, 11 am to 3 pm.

The staff and volunteers at Dumbarton House have done much extensive research into the house’s history, which was very helpful in preparing this article. Frances White and Scott Scholz were particularly helpful in providing advice and correcting factual errors. Additional sources included Deering Davis, Stephen Dorsey, and Ralph Hall, Georgetown Houses of the Federal Period (1944); Harold Eberlein and Cortlandt Hubbard, Historic Houses of George-town & Washington City (1958); Oscar P. Fitzgerald, In Search of Joseph Nourse 1754-1841 (The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America, 1994); Mary Mitchell, Divided Town (1968); Kathryn Schneider Smith, Port Town to Urban Neighborhood: The Georgetown Waterfront of Washington, D.C. 1880-1920 (1989); David D. White, Samuel Jackson: The First Occupant of Dumbarton House (unpublished, 2010); The National Register of Historic Places nomination for Dumbarton House (Dec. 14, 1990); as well as numerous newspaper articles.

The Sherman Building at Soldiers' Home, Damaged in the Recent Earthquake

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 22:26:00 +0000

The Armed Forces Retirement Home, known for many years as the Soldiers' Home, is tucked away on a beautiful campus near North Capitol Street in upper northwest Washington. For 150 years, it has offered veterans a restful retreat amidst a cluster of striking historical buildings. Most well-known nowadays among Soldiers' Home buildings is the once-endangered Lincoln Cottage, a Gothic Revival country house built by banker George W. Riggs (1813-1881) in 1842 and used by President Abraham Lincoln as a summer retreat. It has been named a national monument, restored, and made into a fascinating museum by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. But the attention given to the Lincoln Cottage seems to have pushed the rest of the Soldiers' Home buildings into undeserved obscurity. This past week's earthquake did substantial damage—millions of dollars worth—to one of the most distinctive and iconic buildings on the entire campus, Scott Hall (now known as the Sherman Building), originally opened in 1857. Little attention has been given to this saddening loss.

A damaged pinnacle on the roof of the Sherman Building. Photo by Carrie Barton, EHT Traceries, Inc.

To appreciate the Sherman Building, one has to start at the beginning of the story, with the founding of the Soldiers' Home. As Matthew Pinsker has explained, the institution was a long time coming. There had been talk in Congress as early as the 1820s of establishing a facility to care for disabled veterans who were unable to support themselves, but little came of it. In the 1840s, Maj. Robert Anderson (1805-1871)—best known as the commander of the besieged Union forces at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in the opening days of the Civil War—mounted a determined effort to establish a soldiers' retreat. At his urging a bill to create a military asylum to aid such unfortunates was introduced in 1841, and much debate was held on the subject in the early 1840s, but again no asylum was actually established.

Early 1900s view of Scott Hall. Source: Library of Congress.

The turning point came as a result of the invasion of Mexico City in 1847 by American forces led by Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). True to historical form, the conquering army extracted a tribute ($150,000) from the good people of Mexico City to spare their fine city from being looted and destroyed. Rather than turning the money over to the War Department, Scott then took the extraordinary step of putting $100,000 of it into a bank account to be reserved for establishing an Army asylum, "subject to the order of Congress." The War Department tried to get the money back but was blocked by Senator Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) of Mississippi—later to become president of the Confederacy—who shepherded a bill through Congress that finally established the asylum in 1851.

The law establishing the military asylum designated two other locations, in Mississippi and Louisiana, but the one in Washington was the only one that lasted. Using the Mexican tribute money, Congress bought the 200-acre country estate of banker Riggs, including his Gothic Revival cottage, and later purchased additional properties, including the adjoining Harewood estate of Riggs' partner, William W. Corcoran (1798-1888), ultimately creating a 500-acre bucolic, wooded reservation. As originally established, the Soldiers' Home welcomed veterans of the regular army with 20 or more years of service as well as disabled veterans with any amount or type of service.

The first inmates of the military asylum lived in the old Riggs cottage beginning in 1852, but clearly more room was needed. The asylum's board authorized construction of a new main hall to accommodate up to 250 residents as well as two other large cottages, all to be clustered around the Riggs cottage near the northwest corner of the huge property. Lt. Barton S. Alexander (1819-1878), an experienced Army engineer who would later have a key role in the Civil War defenses of Washington, was chosen to oversee the construction.

Scott Hall as it originally appeared, from 1857 to 1869. Source: Harper's Weekly, Jan. 5, 1867, via the Library of Congress.

The new main hall would later be named Scott Hall, after Gen. Winfield Scott, and it has remained the centerpiece of the Soldiers' Home until this day. Construction began in 1852 and continued for five years. For its design, Lt. Alexander imitated James Renwick's Smithsonian Institution building, now known as the Smithsonian Castle, a triumph of the "picturesque" mode of architecture promoted by Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852). Picturesque buildings aimed to use eclectic designs based on historical architectural styles to blend in with their natural settings. The picturesque precedent fit the new Soldiers' Home building perfectly, situated as it was on top of an idyllic wooded hilltop with sublime views of the capital city. Its Romanesque-arched windows, wistfully reminiscent of a medieval abbey nestled in the remote countryside, gave dignity and architectural flair to what could have been a drab government dormitory.

While the Castle was made of red sandstone, Scott Hall used white New York marble. Its construction was overseen by Gilbert Cameron, a master builder and stonemason from New York whom Renwick had brought to Washington in 1847 to work on the Smithsonian project. As completed in 1857, the building was two stories tall with cast-iron balconies, a large clock tower rising up at its center, and a stately, arched front porch.

Once Scott Hall and the other two new cottages were complete, Soldiers' Home found itself—temporarily—with more than enough room. The commissioners decided to build goodwill by offering to provide accommodations to President Buchanan in the summertime as a retreat from the stifling heat and humidity of downtown Washington. Buchanan stayed in one of the new cottages rather than the original Riggs house, where the Home's superintendent lived. When the Lincolns arrived, they wanted the Riggs house. One suspects that Mary Todd Lincoln was behind this decision. Abraham Lincoln enjoyed staying at the cottage and was said to have drafted the Emancipation Proclamation there. Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur summered there as well. James and Lucretia Garfield had been planning to spend the summer of 1881 at Soldiers Home, but they never got the chance; Garfield was felled by an assassin's bullet at the Baltimore & Potomac train station on the Mall in July 1881.

Stereoview photos of Scott Hall as it appeared from 1869 to 1887 (Author's collection).

As originally built, Scott Hall quickly proved to be too small, and the building was remodeled in 1869 by adding a third floor under a fashionable, Second-Empire style mansard roof. The building was then remodeled again in 1887 after a large annex had been constructed behind it. The renovations were designed by D.C. architect William F. Poindexter. The resulting structure, completed in 1890, is even more castle-like than before, with crenellated parapets and a truly monumental Richardson-Romanesque clock tower.

Scott Hall after its final 1890 renovation (Author's collection).

At 320 feet, Scott Hall boasts the third highest elevation in Washington, D.C. The vast grounds of the Soldiers' Home surrounding it were kept open to the public after it was built, and a network of scenic roads was constructed that made the property a great destination for a Sunday outing, especially before the roads and amenities of Rock Creek Park were developed. As described in Joseph West Moore's Picturesque Washington (1887):

A short distance from Washington, on the Rock Creek road, is the Soldiers' Home, a most beautiful sylvan retreat where the aged and invalid soldiers of the regular army can pass their days in peace and comfort. There are few finer rural estates in the land, and it is often called "the Central Park of Washington," as it is constantly open to the public, and over its five hundred acres of beautifully diversified hill and dale, every one can wander at will, enjoying the charming views and attractive surroundings. Within the grounds there are seven miles of drives on broad, well-made roads, shaded in summer by gigantic oaks with luxuriant leafage; and there are lakes with swans, long stretches of meadow-lands, handsome arbors perched on hills, whence can be obtained delightful prospects of the country for several miles; ornate villas, statuary, and various adornments. It is, indeed, a pleasant spot, with plentiful means for peaceful enjoyment, and, doubtless, many a "weary pilgrim on life's devious course," as he strolls through these grounds almost envies the superannuated warriors their privilege of residing here.

Soldiers' Home has undergone many changes in the intervening years. Many buildings have been added; much land has been lost. When large new buildings, a dormitory and hospital, were completed in 1954, the Scott Hall name was transferred to the new dormitory, and the historic Scott Hall became the Sherman Building. Safety concerns then led to the closing of the grounds to the public in 1968. The complex used to include a large and productive dairy farm, worked, in part, by some of the residents. The dairy farm and other land located to the south of the property—40 percent of the Home's acreage—was lost in the 1960s when it was appropriated for development of a large hospital complex that now includes the Washington Hospital Center, Children's National Medical Center, the National Rehabilitation Hospital, and the local Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The land grab also included acreage for the extension of North Capitol Street and Irving Street.

Renamed the Armed Forces Retirement Home in 2001, the now-venerable institution receives no taxpayer money to fund its operations, relying instead on a 50-cent weekly payroll deduction contributed by all active enlisted military personnel. To earn more income, the home developed a master plan, approved in 2008, that calls for development of some of its underutilized property. An early version of the plan was scaled back in response to concerns about density and historic preservation.

A stone from the parapet crashed through the ceiling of this room in the Sherman Building. No one was injured. Photo by Carrie Barton, EHT Traceries, Inc.

Last Tuesday's earthquake only added to the Home's financial challenges. According to Carrie Barton, an historic preservation specialist with EHT Traceries, Inc., a number of carved stone pieces from the Sherman Building's pinnacles and crenellated parapets fell off, either inward through ceilings or outward to the ground. Stone masons were marking and cataloging the pieces for eventual repair. More seriously, the building's iconic tower was severely compromised. It sustained major cracks and was leaning toward one side. An emergency effort was undertaken on Saturday to stabilize it as Hurricane Irene approached, but engineers were uncertain whether it could be repaired or would need to be entirely rebuilt. This coming week engineers expect to develop a plan for how to proceed with the building's restoration. Additional photos of the earthquake damage can be found on the D.C. Preservation League's Facebook page.

Sherman Building parapet damage. Photo by Carrie Barton, EHT Traceries, Inc.

Sources for this article included Kent C. Boese, Park View (2011); H. Paul Caemmerer, A Manual on the Origin and Development of Washington (1939); EHT Traceries, Inc., The AFRH Historic Preservation Plan (Vol. II, 2006); James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Joseph West Moore, Picturesque Washington (1887); Matthew Pinsker, "The Soldiers' Home: A Long Road to Sanctuary" in Washington History (Vol. 18, 2006); Pamela Scott and Antoinette Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); and the National Register of Historic Places listing for the Soldiers Home.

Once Upon a Time, Everybody Went to Hammel's

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Restaurants come and go by the dozens in Washington; only a few survive through the years as bona fide local institutions. One of them was Hammel's, a German restaurant that stood for decades on 10th Street downtown, across from where the FBI Building now menacingly looms. It was hidden within a drab, not-particularly-inviting storefront, but perhaps the nondescript façade added to its character. And character it certainly had.

Hammel's Restaurant, photographed in 1981 for the Historic American Buildings Survey.

The restaurant was founded by Carl Hammel (1870-1952), a native of Baden, Germany, who emigrated to America in 1894 and settled in Washington a few years later. Hammel started out as a department store clerk and saved up to open his first tavern in 1904 at 25th and G Streets, NW in Foggy Bottom. It was a fairly grim, semi-industrial neighborhood; across the street was the Abner and Drury brewery, and giant gas tanks loomed to the north. Hammel's originally wasn't much more than a lunch counter, offering German beer and deviled crabs to local workers. In 1912, Hammel moved his lunchroom to 922 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, occupying the same space that had previously hosted Henry King's millinery store. Hammel's Buffet kept its casual atmosphere but started offering a fuller menu, including the planked rock bass which would become the restaurant's signature dish for years to come. Like Bassin's Restaurant, Hammel's was quietly successful in its early lunchroom years. Carl Hammel became a fixture of the local community, active in German-American affairs and a member of the Board of Trade.

Carl and his wife, Emma, from his 1922 passport application in the National Archives, via Ancestry.

-Not that it was easy running a German restaurant in Washington in those days. The onset of World War I brought anti-German sentiment, and, more importantly, the temperance movement increasingly gained traction. The noose began to tighten with passage of a law in 1913 restricting the number of restaurants that could sell alcohol (Hammel's was lucky to get its permit renewed annually). Prohibition came early in D.C. when the Sheppard Act banned the sale of alcohol as of November 1, 1917.

As Garrett Peck engagingly describes in his new book, Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren't, Washington never stopped drinking alcohol, and lots of people never stopped buying it at restaurants and speakeasys. Enforcing the ban became an overwhelming task. Hammel's was just one of many D.C. establishments that were raided by authorities trying to stem the illicit trade. According to The Evening Star, prohibition enforcement officers found 1,200 gallons of beer and red wine in the cellar of Hammel's on April 25, 1923. Hammel and his clerk were arrested.

Officers raiding Hammel's on April 25, 1923. The headquarters of the Department of Justice is now located on this site (Source: Library of Congress).

Carl Hammel retired from the business in 1929, leaving the restaurant to his son, Louis J. Hammel (1899-1990), and his son-in-law, Harry G. Kopel (1887-1964), a native of Austria who had previously served as the headwaiter at the Willard Hotel. In 1931, after their old building was acquired by the government for the Federal Triangle project, Hammel and Kopel moved the restaurant a short distance to its final location on 10th Street. It was here that Hammel's enjoyed its greatest success. Phyllis Richman, writing her first review as restaurant critic for The Washington Post in early 1977, had this to say about the Hammel's of that era:

...in the Thirties and Forties, if you were downtown at night, which was the fashionable place to be—social Washington took evening strolls around the Ellipse—you dined at Hammel's.
This was a restaurant the national guidebooks touted as one of Washington's finest. It was noted for its German food, its deviled crabs and especially its beef. But eventually its fame rested on Hammel's invention born of Depression thrift: Roast Beef Bones Diablo. It was a hangout of tax court judges and bureaucrats, a lively restaurant with waiters in white aprons....

However good the Roast Beef Bones Diablo was—or the planked rock bass, for that matter—it was probably not the only reason to visit Hammel's during the Depression. There was also the "near beer," which was supposed to not have the alcohol content of real beer. In August 1932—less than 2 years before Prohibition was repealed—the police conducted a major raid on Hammel's. This time they meant business. As reported in the Post, they brought a chemist along to test the alcohol content of the 70 gallons of "alleged beer" that were found on the premises. They then proceeded to remove not only the restaurant's beverages but also virtually all of its fixtures, from the massive bar to the collection of autographed photos of celebrities that had adorned the walls. Hammel, Kopel, and two other staff were arrested. Hammel's was out of business.

1930s/1940s-era postcard from Hammel's (courtesy of Jerry A. McCoy).

About a month later, a trial was held in police court, and the restaurant men were all acquitted. It seems that an undercover prohibition agent had drunk a near-beer at Hammel's and reported that it gave him a "glow"; the raid was then conducted on his word. They jury found that the agent had no sound basis to conclude that the beverage exceeded the allowable amount of alcohol (despite the fact that the chemist's onsite tests indicated an alcoholic content varying from 2.5 to 9 percent). Further, the jury also concluded that the police exceeded their authority in confiscating the restaurant's fixtures. Hammel and Kopel won their case by lining up a number of "civic leaders" to testify that they had eaten at the restaurant and had never known it to serve anything but near-beer. However, despite their legal victory, the two were still stuck with paying the storage company that held their fixtures, both for storing them and for transporting them to and from the restaurant. All told, they estimated their expenses at $1,200. But at least they got the autographed photos back.

The end of prohibition in March 1934 didn't mean the end of legal hassles for Hammel's. The war years brought strict rationing for both businesses and individuals, and many D.C. restaurants, including Hammel's, ran afoul of the strict rules. More problematic was a 1949 campaign by U.S. Attorney George Morris Fay against illegal gambling. In March Fay's agents (pointedly without any involvement of local police) raided 8 sites around the city and arrested 40 men. While some of the sites had equipment and furnishings that clearly suggested they were involved in the rackets, it was surprising that Hammel's restaurant, a popular and respected establishment, was also hit. Harry Kopel and a young waiter named Danny Plummer were arrested. It was alleged that Plummer had accepted bets on horse races from Wilfred Barrett and "pretty" Edith Wildrick when serving them at Hammel's. Barrett was a law student moonlighting as an undercover agent, and Wildrick was a stenographer in the U.S. Attorney's office. When the raid came, Kopel was found with a numbers slip in his possession.

Like the earlier alcohol case, this one also fell apart in the courts. As reported in the Post, Kopel argued that he didn't know anything about gambling and had no idea what the slip of paper was all about. He couldn't tell you what an Armstrong scratch sheet was. And those numbers printed on a card in his wallet—those were the serial numbers of his two Army sons. He was soon acquitted. Young Danny Plummer, on the other hand, admitted taking bets from the undercover agents but argued he was just passing them on to bookies as a favor and that he had been entrapped. He was initially convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.

1960s-era postcard view of Hammel's interior. Photo credited to J. Waring Stinchcomb.

Meanwhile, Hammel's continued its thriving business. The restaurant settled in for several more decades without harassment by government agents, at least as far as I can tell. A Post review in 1968 called it a "handsome, comfortable restaurant with an air of graceful middle age." By then, Hammel's carried an extensive menu of mostly seafood and steaks, offering large portions with filling sides, such as potato pancakes and dumplings. Donald Dresden reviewed the restaurant in 1970, finding the waiters gracious but the food rather poor, except for several outstanding desserts.

The site of Hammel's as it appears today (Photo by the author).

By the time Phyllis Richman arrived, Hammel's was clearly in decline. "A little of the old world is left in Washington at Hammel's," she wrote in a summary review, noting the "enormous array of German dishes, seafoods, organ meats, stews, grills, and international dishes" at lunch time "in a club-like room crowded with gilt-framed paintings and beer steins, even an electric organ." Still highly recommended were the desserts, especially the authentic German pastries. —Be sure to try the apple strudel!

Hammel's downtown neighborhood had gone into serious decline, of course. Around the end of the decade, the restaurant moved from 10th Street to a new location in Georgetown. But the change didn't help. Within a few years, the venerable eatery closed for good.

Mary Foote Henderson, The Iron-Willed Empress of Meridian Hill

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:47:00 +0000

The Gilded Age, from the 1870s until the 1910s, was a unique period in Washington’s history. The city attracted many nouveaux riches who were drawn by the fact that upper-class Washington society in those days was wide open to anyone with lots of money, a circumstance not found in other major Eastern cities. Of all the wealthy people who moved to Washington to exert power and influence in the Gilded Age, one of the most powerful and influential was a woman, Mary Foote Henderson (1846-1931), who turned her City Beautiful dreams into reality along upper 16th Street.

Mary Foote Henderson, from The Washington Times, Dec. 23, 1904.

Born to a prominent New York family, Mary learned the social graces at several exclusive finishing schools, became fluent in French, and developed an abiding taste for the arts at a very young age. Her father, Elisha Foote (1809-1883), was a prominent judge who later became Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. Mary came to Washington at the invitation of her uncle, a Connecticut senator, who introduced her to Washington's important single men, including the distinguished Senator John Brooks Henderson (1826-1913) of Missouri, who was 20 years her senior. Henderson was famous for having co-sponsored the 13th Amendment to the Constitution banning slavery. In the spring of 1868, he and six other Republican senators defied their party as well as public sentiment by voting against conviction of Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial. Mary Foote was in the gallery looking on as he cast his momentous vote, which effectively doomed him to a single term in the Senate. Once the drama of the impeachment was over, in June 1868 John and Mary were married. It was said that the whole Senate attended the wedding.

John Brooks Henderson (Source: Library of Congress)

When Henderson's Senate term expired the following year, the couple moved back to Missouri, where Henderson made much of his fortune from local Missouri bonds which he bought cheaply and then redeemed at full value, benefiting from a favorable court ruling. Meanwhile Mary built up her social credentials, founding the St. Louis School of Design and becoming known as an excellent hostess. She was the author of Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving in 1877 and Diet for the Sick, A Treatise on the Values of Foods in 1885.

Boundary Castle. Source: D.C. Public Library Commons on Flickr.

A turning point came when the Hendersons decided to move back to Washington in 1887. They purchased several house lots along 16th Street on a steep hill just north of Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue), an area just beyond the original limits of Washington City that was still semi-rural in those days. The Hendersons began constructing a massive mansion of Seneca sandstone on top of their hill. The house, designed by Massachusetts architect Eugene C. Gardner (1836-1915), was in the fashionable Romanesque Revival style and was supposedly modeled after a castle Mrs. Henderson had seen in the Rhine country. Boundary Castle, as they called it, was a sprawling brownstone pile very much in keeping with the wistful, Romantic aesthetics of the late Victorian age. Completed in 1888, the castle's sprawl was extended to the west with a huge service wing, designed by Washington architect T. Franklin Schneider, in 1892. The new wing featured crenelated battlements that made it look very castle-like. The main house didn't originally have such battlements, but in 1902 it was remodeled to add them in, completing the structure's medieval-fantasy appearance.

The Hendersons' first formal dinner, held in February 1890, drew a rave review from The Washington Post, which marveled at Mrs. Henderson's elegant attire—her Felix gown of old rose velvet trimmed in gold—as well as the lavish furnishings of her castle: the "mellow" Moorish entrance hall, plush-lined picture gallery used as a ballroom, and grand oak-paneled dining room hung with oak-leaf embroidered tapestries. An invitation to dine with the Hendersons immediately became a highly sought-after status symbol.

The dining room (Source: The Washington Times, March 13, 1904).

Ensconced in her intimidating palace, Mary Henderson proceeded to exert her influence on the character of her immediate neighborhood as well as on Washington society at large. There had been talk by 1898 of the need to expand the White House to meet the needs of the contemporary presidency. Late that year, Mary began promoting on Capitol Hill an alternate plan for a grand new Executive Mansion to be built on the crest of Meridian Hill (i.e., directly across the street from her house). Collaborating with architect Paul J. Pelz (1841-1918), one of the designers of the Library of Congress, Henderson envisioned a massive temple-like complex with sprawling terraces and columned arcades that The New York Times called a “pretentious structure.” The proposal was politely tabled. Two years later, Henderson made another attempt, this time based on a proposal by Franklin W. Smith (1826-1911). Smith's Executive Mansion was similar to Pelz's but instead straddled 16th Street, which passed through it under an enormous arch. It too was set aside.

Postcard view of Boundary Castle, circa 1908.

The same view today (Photo by the author).

Undaunted by these defeats, Henderson began re-making the rough-and-ready Meridian Hill neighborhood into a grand European-style enclave of exotic chateaux. The Hendersons bought up properties all along 16th Street and began erecting lavish palaces to be rented or sold to high government officials and diplomats. The first were along the west side of 16th in the blocks north of Boundary Castle, including the Venetian-style "Pink Palace" (1906) at the corner of 16th and Euclid, which was rented to Oscar Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of Commerce and Labor as well as a new Embassy of France (1907), just south of the intersection with Kalorama Road, done in a supremely Parisian-looking Beaux-Arts style. Several additional large residences were constructed over the next few years in the same block as the Pink Palace. These imposing palaces would be occupied by the Danish, Swedish and Polish embassies. In Henderson's eclectic vein, each of these would be designed in a different architectural style and lined up neatly in a row, like postage stamps in an album.

These houses, as well as more to come in the future along 15th Street, were all designed by Mary Henderson's favorite architect, George Oakley Totten, Jr. (1866-1939), who had handled the renovations to Boundary Castle in 1902. Totten was a prolific Washington architect who also designed a number of lavish diplomatic residences in other parts of the city. In 1915, he built his own Arts-and-Crafts-style house on the east side of 16th Street in the block above Euclid Street.

Neighborhood real estate development was not Mrs. Henderson's only interest by any means. She also became an impassioned evangelist of healthy living. Writing in her 1904 book, The Aristocracy of Health, she rhapsodized almost maniacally about her vision of the human body reaching an ideal state “when blood-corpuscles are no longer disintegrated, spiculated, and pale, but round, red, and rich laden;…when the body-machine is no longer oppressed with the clinkers of surplus material; when reserve forces are no longer wasted or dissipated by avoidable devitalizing expenditures...” This bizarre vision stood in contrast to what she saw as the deplorable contemporary state of humankind: “The violation of hygienic laws has been so general and long-prevailing that human degeneracy has come to be accepted as the appointed lot of humanity. Human life is but an apology, a makeshift, a compromise…”

By the time her screed on healthy living was published, Mrs. Henderson was famous for her elegant dinners featuring strictly vegetarian cuisine and no alcohol. A 1905 fete included a fruit soup, mock salmon in hollandaise sauce, broiled slices of pine-nut Protose (Protose was a meat substitute made of peanut butter, wheat gluten, and corn starch, among other things), unfermented Catawba wine, iced fruit, and Kellogg Gelatine for dessert. As reported in the Post, the printed menu cards for this dinner included "figures corresponding to each item on the bill of fare, showing the number, kind, and proportion of the food units, or 'calories,' contained in each dish." Like all meals prepared by Mrs. Henderson's accomplished English chef, it was said that the uninitiated couldn't tell that they weren't eating meat or fish.

Boundary Castle seen from the north, circa 1921 (Source: Library of Congress).

In May 1906, Mary famously decided to dispose of the plentiful and expensive stocks of fine wine that Mr. Henderson had accumulated over the years in the cellar of Boundary Castle. Her butler was a member of the Independent Order of Rechabites, a Christian temperance society, and he had asked for the use of the castle grounds for an assembly of his group. With Mrs. Henderson's acquiescence, members of the butler's "tent" brought armfuls of wine bottles up from the castle's cellars and smashed them on a large rock in the front lawn. There was so much wine that it ran down into the gutters of 16th Street. The newspapers loved the story. With racial insensitivity typical of the day, The New York Times reported:

Along the gutter down the hill Negroes gathered, and with tomato cans and other utensils scooped up what they could of the liquor and drank it. As they enjoyed themselves they sang old-time plantation melodies, while the Rechabites within the courtyard sang stirring temperance hymns....

Soon, however, there would be many fewer African-Americans in the neighborhood to benefit from Mary Henderson's accidental largesse. After many years of persistent lobbying, Mary succeeded in 1910 in getting Congress to authorize the purchase of land for construction of Meridian Hill Park across 16th Street from Boundary Castle where she had previously hoped a new Executive Mansion would be built. She argued that the stunning views from this site as well as the opportunity for elegant terracing and cascades made the spot ideal for a formal park. As Congress and city officials were won over, no one seemed to care that the site was already densely occupied by African-Americans living in mostly single-story frame houses. Since Civil War times, African-Americans had settled in this area, which had been just outside the city limits. The future park site had been subdivided in 1867, and many of its residents owned their own homes. They were all forced to leave. Later Mary Henderson would boast to a reporter that "we bought out the owners of the shacks on our hill and pulled them down." Once the land was cleared, it took many years to construct the park, one of the most beautiful in the city. No trace remains of the previous inhabitants.

Mary Foote Henderson and unidentified children. Source: Library of Congress.

Mary Henderson fought many battles. She wanted the Lincoln Memorial built on Meridian Hill rather than the Mall. She had a house built on 15th Street that she offered to the government as a residence for the Vice President (predictably, it was thought too extravagant). She thought 16th Street should be lined with busts of the Presidents and renamed the Avenue of The Presidents (it was indeed renamed in 1913, but only for a year before it was changed back). More successfully, she pushed for the city's first zoning regulations, adopted in 1920, to help control the erection in her neighborhood of large apartment houses, such as the ones that the brash Englishman, Harry Wardman (1872-1938), was building everywhere. There seemed to be no end to her energy and aspirations.

After she died in 1931, the neighborhood began to change again. Mary Henderson's vision of Meridian Hill as an exclusive residential enclave began to fade. Wealthy people headed further to the west, and the spaces in and around the elegant 16th Street houses began to fill with apartment buildings. Boundary Castle—now known to most people as Henderson's Castle—was rented in 1937 by a Texan named Bert L. Williams, who reopened it as the Castle H Tennis and Swimming Club. The old ballroom was fitted out with a stand-up bar. Mary would have been horrified.

Matchcover from the Castle's club days. Author's collection.

As early as 1935, there had been talk of tearing down the old castle, but it hung on until January 1949, when it was finally razed. Wealthy neighbors Eugene and Agnes Meyer had purchased the mansion in order to get rid of the rowdy club. Being a flight of Victorian fancy, the castle had grown distinctly out of favor by the 1940s. At the time of its destruction, the Post ran an editorial dismissing the castle as a relic of the "brown decades" of the late 1800s, when everyone was gloomy because of the Civil War (hunh?). "It is well that this brownstone ghost is at last laid low by the hammers of the wreckers," the paper intoned. Not everyone agreed, however. A Post reader, Horace Monroe Baxter, fired back an angry letter calling the editorial a "nauseating shock." "I would suggest to you," he continued, "in furtherance of your love of modernistic architecture, that you make arrangements to have the lovely Washington Post Building...torn down and replaced by one of those slab-sided architectural monstrosities of soulless modernity." This, of course, is exactly what did eventually happen to the Post's beautiful Richardson-Romanesque building on E Street downtown, perhaps as punishment for condoning the destruction of Henderson's Castle.

The site of Boundary Castle, seen from Meridian Hill Park (Photo by the author).

Meanwhile, by the early 1970s, Mary Henderson's elegant Meridian Hill Park had become a staging ground for civil rights rallies and was widely known as Malcolm X Park. It was in for hard times. Across the street, a developer bought the empty Henderson tract and in 1976 built an enclave of pricey townhouses called Beekman Place. He wisely left in place the sturdy brownstone retaining wall along 16th Street that was built for the castle, and it remains there to this day.

Kim Prothro Williams has done much valuable research on Mrs. Henderson and her influence on Meridian Hill, and she provided very helpful assistance for this article. In addition, other sources included: James Goode, Capital Losses, 2nd Ed. (2003); Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites (1995); Sue Kohler and Jeffrey R. Carson, Sixteenth Street Architecture Vol. 1 (1978); Kim Prothro Williams, Mrs. Henderson and the Making of 16th Street (2010), and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

Henry King's 7th Street "Palace"

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:52:00 +0000

One of the most elegant storefronts in Chinatown is the broad and richly ornamented terra cotta façade of the R.F.D. Washington restaurant at 810 7th Street, NW. This building was once the pride and joy of Henry King, Jr. (1834-1897), one of Washington's most prominent retailers in the late 19th century.

Henry King was born in the spa town of Baden-Baden in western Germany. Because his father intended that he become a rabbi, young Henry received an excellent education, mastering six languages, according to a profile that appeared in The Washington Post in 1925. While a student at the University of Heidelberg, he absorbed the revolutionary spirit of the times and decided in 1850, at just 16 years of age, to join a group of friends that were leaving for America. Landing at Baltimore, he soon found his way to Washington, where he got a job sweeping the floors of Moses Ring's clothing store on Pennsylvania Avenue. When he turned 21 in 1855, he proudly became a U.S. citizen.

Henry King, Jr., in 1885. Source: The Washington Critic, Sept. 30, 1885.

In those days, much of the city's retail commerce took place along Pennsylvania Avenue, and there King learned the ins and outs of the retail clothing business. After a couple of successful years with Moses Ring, he opened his own Pennsylvania Avenue clothing store in 1859. He also met and in 1861 married Caroline Straus King (1842-1909), another young German immigrant. Caroline took a strong hand in helping run Henry’s store and developed a specialty of making fancy hats. The couple would have seven children—six sons and one daughter, the youngest. Presumably Henry planned to leave the store in Caroline's hands when, filled with patriotic fervor, he tried to enlist in the Union Army in 1861. His military career, however, never materialized; he was rejected because of a "muscular affliction" in his right arm.

Advertisement in The Sunday Herald, May 17, 1885.

King's store was very successful in the 1860s and 1870s. Newspaper articles would occasionally mention trips by either Henry or Caroline to acquire stocks of the most fashionable hats from New York or Paris. According to later articles, King sold hats to Mary Todd Lincoln (1818-1882) and Julia Grant (1826-1902) when they were in the White House, both ladies having an eye for fine clothing. President Grant sometimes accompanied his wife when she went shopping, and it was said that he would sit in the back of the store with Henry King smoking large black cigars while Caroline King helped Julia choose a hat.

Source: The Washington Critic, Sept. 30, 1885.

The Henry King clothing store changed locations a number of times in the 1870s and then around 1878 finally settled at 814 7th Street, NW, where it remained for more than half a century. The business was christened "King's Palace," and became a lasting Washington retail fixture. Starting with a simple storefront on 7th Street, King gradually expanded both along 7th and to the rear; by 1882, the store extended all the way through the block to 8th Street. The Post reported that year that King had installed “a row of handsome French mirrors” to assist women trying on hats, and in the evenings “one hundred and twenty-five brilliant gas jets flood the store with light.” For the fall season’s “opening,” King offered everyone who entered the store “an elegant, fine and expensive souvenir, while an additional souvenir will be presented to each purchaser.”

If you want to buy goods, and wish to save your money, and desire to be treated well, and wish to find a choice and largest stock to select from, you are in duty bound to go to the Great Headquarters, the largest Millinery House, KING’S PALACE, 814 Seventh Street.

Logo from an 1891 advertisement.

A full-page advertisement in The Washington Herald in September 1890 advertised the "opening" for that fall, complete with "All the Latest Parisian Hats and Bonnets and all the Novelties in the Millinery Line." The ad went on to boast that, after "extensive improvements," King's Palace had "the largest First-Floor Business House and one of the handsomest show window fronts in this city... You can do all your shopping at KING'S PALACE without risking your life in elevators and without climbing any stairs, which makes shopping in out Mammoth Establishment a pleasure."

Source: The Washington Post, Sept. 10, 1898.

Across the street from the rear of King’s Palace, on 8th Street, stood a church building that had been taken over by the Washington Hebrew Congregation in 1863. The Kings were members of this congregation, and Henry King became its president in the 1880s. At Caroline’s prodding, King began a campaign in the 1890s to raise money for a new and much-larger temple building. By 1897, funds had been secured and a competition was held to design the new building. The winning architects were Louis F. Stutz and Frank W. Pease, a well-known firm in Washington, according to the Post. Stutz and Pease designed a unique, granite and limestone building meant to evoke the Holy Land. Its façade was "somewhat Byzantine in effect," the Post observed, although it also reflected Romanesque Revival styling. It included two commanding 135-foot-tall towers. President William McKinley and his entire cabinet were on hand for the laying of the cornerstone of the new building in September 1897; unfortunately, Henry King was not there. He had died just one month earlier. The structure remained the home of the Washington Hebrew Congregation until 1954, when the congregation moved to a new building at Massachusetts Avenue and Macomb Street, NW. The Greater New Hope Baptist Church then purchased the building and has been using it ever since.

The Greater New Hope Baptist Church as it appears today. The original onion-shaped turrets were removed in the 1970s because they had deteriorated.

Meanwhile King’s sons continued to operate King's Palace on 7th Street, expanding the business from its original emphasis on millinery to become a full-fledged, modern department store. A branch store opposite Center Market on Pennsylvania Avenue had been in operation since the 1880s, but that store was closed in 1907 after expansion of the 7th Street store allowed all merchandise to be consolidated there.

In July 1914 a fire caused significant damage to the building, necessitating extensive rebuilding. The King brothers managed to keep parts of the store open while an entirely new façade—the one that remains there today—was built. Completed in November, the new façade received rave (and identical) reviews in the Post and the Herald:

The front is constructed of glistening white hollow tile. Four massive square columns, surmounted by a towering, deep cornice, give an effect of dignity and strength, which is pleasingly combined with ornate capitals and relief work. The whole result is one of remarkable richness.... A graceful wrought iron balcony extends across the entire front on the second-floor level, and will be utilized for a display of evergreens and perennial vines and flowers.... The show windows are the last word in modern construction, with copper frames and marble bases. Circassian walnut is employed for the window backgrounds in an artistic arrangement of columns and panels, and the hardwood parquet flooring is laid to match....

The alterations to the structure, costing $30,000, were designed by Frederick B. Pyle (1867-1934), an accomplished Washington architect who also designed several other landmark D.C. buildings, including the restrained, neoclassical "modern" half of the Woodward & Lothrop building as well as the 1903 Hecht Company building at 7th and F Streets NW. Like King's Palace, the Hecht Company building makes rich use of decorative terra cotta, which had become a popular materiel for decorating steel-frame commercial buildings since the late 19th century.

King's Palace in the 1920s. Source: Library of Congress.

King's Palace continued to do business until it disappeared in the mid 1930s. One presumes it was a victim of the Great Depression. The ornate storefront was taken over by the G.C. Murphy Company, which specialized in very inexpensive merchandise and did well during the Depression. Murphy's stayed in the building through the 1960s and was followed by a variety of other tenants as the neighborhood went into decline after 1968. In 1977, a blue jeans outlet called The General Store moved in. Then around 1990, the north half of the block, including the old King's Palace store, was redeveloped into a large office building, and the façade of the old store was preserved, with new construction set back behind it. A Brazilian churrascaria called Coco Loco moved into the redeveloped space in 1994, marking one of the earliest indications that this neighborhood would develop into the trendy entertainment district that it is today.

Kim Williams, D.C. Historic Preservation Office, provided valuable assistance for this article.

Victor Evans, Patent Attorney Extraordinaire

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:19:00 +0000

Victor Justice Evans (1865-1931) was one of those wonderful self-made men of the last century who put his nose to the grindstone as a young man, made tons of money, and then fulfilled the American dream by happily indulging his many and diverse eccentricities. While largely forgotten now, Evans left one enduring landmark in downtown Washington: the Victor Building at 9th Street and G Place, NW, as much an icon of turn-of-the-century Washington as Evans himself was.

Evans was born in Delaware, Ohio, a town just north of Columbus, just as the Civil War was ending. He spent time as a child in Minnesota and then moved to Washington, D.C., when he was 15 years old. According to the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, he joined the firm of J. Henry Kiser as a patent draftsman at the age of 18. He continued to work as a draftsman, running his own drafting business for awhile, as he learned the ropes of patent law. He founded Victor J. Evans & Company, Patent Attorneys, in 1898, and soon had a booming business. It seems likely that his success was due at least as much to his business acumen as to his legal skills. His firm offered full refunds to inventors if they were unable to secure their desired patents, a strategy the Cyclopedia article says that Evans originated and that was perceived as a key to his success.

Evans built up an extensive, high-volume business. By the 1920s, his firm had offices in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago and San Francisco and was routinely touted as the "largest patent firm in the world." An ad in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1916 listed the various departments of the Evans firm—Aeronautics, Electricity, Ordnance, Toys & Novelties—and urged readers to send for four inspiring booklets: "How to Obtain a Patent," "What to Invent," "Patents that Pay," and "Foreign Patents."

This postcard from around 1910 shows the Victor Building as originally built, before extensive additions.

In 1907, Evans acquired an old mansion at the corner of 9th Street and Grant Place NW (now G Place), with the aim of building a headquarters for his business on the site. As constructed for $150,000 in 1909, his Victor Building is a handsome, six-story Renaissance Revival structure that projects the stature and success of the Evans company. Evans chose Appleton P. Clark (1865-1955) as his architect, one of the most prolific in Washington. Although he had no formal education as an architect, Clark designed some 20 distinguished downtown buildings, many of which still survive. The Renaissance Revival style he adopted for the Victor Building was particularly in vogue at the time, reflecting the strongly neoclassical influence of the 1902 McMillan Commission. The original building has a rusticated limestone first story, separated from the upper floors by a heavy limestone string-course. The entrance on 9th Street is framed by massive, banded pilasters and surmounted by a heavy, broken pediment, with the words VICTOR BLDG inscribed in the entablature, conveying an air of both dignity and self-importance.

The building was extended along G Place to the rear in 1911, also under the supervision of Clark. In 1925, a large addition was constructed to the north, along 9th Street, in a similar but not identical style, and two floors were added to the top of the original building at the same time. The designer of the 1925 addition was Waddy B. Wood (1869-1944), another prominent Washington architect.

For Evans, the Victor Building was not just a home for his patent business, it was also a real estate investment. His plan from the start was to rent out retail and office space in the building. Evans would go on to invest in a number of other D.C. real estate projects, particularly office buildings for government tenants. He built an office building for the Department of Commerce in 1913 at the northeast corner of 19th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW and a similar-looking building for the Interstate Commerce Commission a block away at 18th and Pennsylvania.

Postcard view of the old Department of Commerce Building, formerly at 19th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.

But real estate was just one of several pursuits that Evans took on beginning in the early 1900s. He dabbled in politics, at least for a while, being one of the organizers of the Washington chapter of the Independence League in 1908. Members of the League, known as Hearstites, supported William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) as an independent candidate for president that year. Evans was one of the D.C. delegates to the Chicago convention of the League, which didn't last long.

The emerging field of aeronautics, ripe as it was for patents, fascinated Evans, so he jumped into that business too. In 1910, he partnered with another patent attorney, Rexford Smith (1862-1923), to establish the Rex Smith Aeroplane Company at the pioneering airfield in College Park, Maryland. The company manufactured biplanes designed by Smith and made a business of flying celebrities around the Washington area.

Also, in 1911, Evans put up $10,000 for star aviator Harry N. Atwood (1884-1967) to fly from Milwaukee to New York, a record distance in those days. In 1910, Atwood had won a prize from The New York Times for flying from Boston to Washington. His 1911 flight to New York took 11 days with 20 stops along the way and was considered a sensational success. Asked if he would next attempt a coast-to-coast trip, Atwood said it would be too risky.

Victor J. Evans, from "How to Obtain A Patent."

Though the Rex Smith company lasted only until 1916, Evans had plenty of other interests to keep him occupied. The Washington Herald reported in June 1913 that Evans was planning to produce his own Independence Day Parade, a procession of 11 colorful floats depicting favorites from the comics sections of the Sunday newspapers. For the first time anywhere, or so it was claimed, Happy Hooligan, Gloomy Gus, the Katzenjammer Kids, Little Nemo, and several others would be represented in a carnival-like parade. There would even be a float with Uncle Sam and his performing animals, the donkey, elephant, and bull-moose. Evans, who had long thought D.C. should have a raucous annual celebration like Mardi Gras, submitted his mini-circus to be included in the official Independence Day celebration. He was told that it was "out of harmony with the spirit and design of the pageant," but he put his show on anyway. It departed from and ended at the Victor Building, of course.

Blackfoot Indian Girl by Joseph Henry Sharp, given to the Smithsonian by Victor J. Evans (Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum).

Evans also developed a taste for Native American artifacts and, beginning in the 1910s, amassed an extensive collection of them, including "beaded clothing, ponderous saddles, fine needlework and basketry, implements of the hunt and war, peace pipes, rugs and blankets, gorgeous feather headdresses," and more, according to The Washington Post. It was considered to be one of the finest in the world, and in 1923 Evans asked for a plot of land from the federal government, preferably at the National Zoo, where he could build a replica Mayan temple to house his collection as a gift to the nation. Evans commissioned distinguished architect George Oakley Totten, Jr. (1866-1939) to prepare a design for this "Temple of the Tigers," which won a medal in Paris but was never actually built. Nevertheless, at his death Evans left all his relics to the Smithsonian, which has been trying ever since to pinpoint exactly where and how they were collected.

The story goes that Evans one day arrived at his office at the Victor Building to discover a group of 40 Native Americans waiting for him. They wanted him to be their attorney. Evans supposedly answered that he knew nothing of Indian affairs, but the visitors insisted; how could he have such a fine collection of relics if he didn't understand Native American life? Whether the story is true or not, Evans did represent Native American tribes in a number of important property claims against the federal government.

Perhaps most eccentric of Evans' many personal indulgences was his collection of exotic animals. Post columnist John Kelly has written about Evans' personal zoo, called Acclimation Park, located on his estate off of Foxhall Road in upper northwest D.C.Evans was convinced that exotic animals kept at his zoo—there were 300 of them—would gradually become acclimated to Washington's weather. He had several monkeys, a zebra, a mountain goat, many parrots, pheasants, and assorted other animals, and was always on the lookout for something new and rare.

Evans regularly donated animals to the National Zoo, so when Zoo Superintendent Ned Hollister learned in 1917 that a trader in Alaska was in possession of a rare Alaskan Blue Bear that he was willing to sell for $400, Hollister immediately telephoned Evans, who just as quickly sent a check to the trader on behalf of the zoo. The blue bear arrived with much fanfare in August to become the only such bear in captivity. According to The Washington Times, Zoo officials planned to name the bear "Victor." While the Alaskan Blue Bear was thought in those days to be a unique and rare species, it is now understood to be just an unusual "phase" of the common Black Bear.

Early in 1931 Evans was at Emergency Hospital recovering from a routine operation for gall stones when he suffered a heart attack and died suddenly. After his death, his animals were turned over to the National Zoo, and the property divided up; part became Battery Kemble Park, while another part was divided into large house lots.

The Victor Building after completion of the 1925 addition (Source: Library of Congress).

Evans' wife continued to run his patent business from the Victor Building into the 1940s. The building had many different tenants after that, including the iconic Central Liquor Store in the 1980s. After it was sold in the late 1980s, preservationists became concerned that much of the building would be destroyed in the process of being "renovated" and enlarged as a new office building. An extensive legal struggle ensued that fortunately ended with the most significant parts of the old building preserved.

The Victor J. Evans Co. Library in the Victor Building, from "How to Obtain a Patent."

The D.C. Preservation League filed an historic landmark nomination in 1990, citing the building's architectural and historical significance. Of the three large Renaissance Revival office buildings that had been built close to the Patent Office (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in the first years of the 20th century, the Victor Building was the only one still standing (the other two were the Ouray Building, on the northwest corner of 8th and G Streets, and the Barrister Building, on the north side of the 600 block of F Street—both torn down in the 1980s). The Victor recalled an important era in the city's history when this busy neighborhood was dominated by lawyers and other professionals, of whom Victor Evans was clearly one of the most prominent and unique.

In 1992, the nomination came before the Historic Preservation Review Board for approval, and the board issued a somewhat ambivalent verdict. Calling it "an unusual and imperfect structure," the board in its report expressed reservations about the 1925 addition designed by Waddy B. Wood, an "impure, even awkward architectural composition" that disrupted the balance of the original design, especially with the two incongruous stories added above the 1909 facade. Nevertheless, the board voted to landmark the entire building, including both the 1911 and 1925 additions.

The owner, Banyan Management Corporation had already submitted a proposal by Hartman-Cox Architects to preserve the 1909 and 1911 portions of the building but raze the 1925 segment and fill the entire site with a large, new structure. The D.C. Preservation League as well as other preservation organizations, including the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, opposed the plan, arguing that to destroy the 1925 building would be to lose the progression of history embodied in the entire structure. A selective preservation of only certain elements would be a distortion of history and a loss for the city.

While the legal process of weighing Banyan's proposal against preservationists' concerns began in a deeply antagonistic vein, as time went by both sides made concessions. By 1994, all parties signed a covenant that allowed Banyan to demolish the interior of the building but preserve the entire historic facade.

The building was purchased by the John Akridge Company in 1997, and Akridge undertook the planned renovations beginning in 1998. Then in 1999, Akridge sold the still-incomplete structure, fittingly, to the Smithsonian Institution, which had earlier been the recipient of Victor Evans' largesse. The Smithsonian moved offices into the building that had previously been in the old Patent Office building, thus freeing up space for exhibition use. Having paid $114 million for it in 1999, the Smithsonian then sold the Victor in 2005, at the height of the real estate boom, for $157 million, turning a tidy profit that was invested in the institution's trust funds. The Smithsonian continues to lease office space in the building to this day.

Invaluable assistance for this article was provided by Kim Williams of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office and Rebecca Miller and Amanda McDonald of the D.C. Preservation League. Both organizations have archived extensive materials relating to the historic designation of the Victor Building and its renovations in the 1990s. Additional information came from period newspaper articles and biographical references.

D.C.'s Progressive Past: The Grace Dodge Hotel for Women

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Magnificent Union Station, opened in 1907, was designed as a ceremonial gateway to Washington, welcoming visitors from far and wide. In the decades after it was built, countless thousands of newcomers got off their trains and wandered out on to the plaza in front of the station in search of a place to stay. Of the many hotels that were built in the immediate vicinity to accommodate these customers, perhaps the most unusual of them all was the Dodge.

The Dodge Hotel in the 1930s.

Grace Hoadley Dodge (1856-1914) was born into a wealthy and venerable New York family, the granddaughter of William Earle Dodge (1805-1883), co-founder of the Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation, noted advocate for Native American rights, and one of the early supporters of the Young Men's Christian Association in the U.S. Grandfather Dodge was known as the "Christian Merchant," and the family had a long association with evangelical Protestant causes. Grace Dodge continued the family tradition of benevolence toward the less fortunate but with a new Progressive-era energy and a special emphasis on women. Though reportedly an astringent and humorless woman, she nevertheless had great organizational skills. In 1906 she became the first president of the National Board of Young Women's Christian Associations, whose budget deficits she would regularly make up with her personal funds. At her death in 1914, she left $500,000 to the board.

Soon thereafter, the onset of the first World War precipitated a housing crisis in Washington and other east coast industrial areas. By 1ate 1917, some 50,000 new workers had come to the city, overwhelming available facilities. The federal government built a complex of 13 dormitories for 2,000 women on the west side of the plaza in front of Union Station to address the problem, but the first of these didn't open until December 1918, after the armistice ending World War I had already been signed, and the whole complex wasn't completed until 1920. Nevertheless, it helped ease the Capital's housing shortage until the structures were torn down a decade later.

Meanwhile, the YWCA had joined with 6 other charitable organizations to form the War Work Council to provide assistance to workers, including housing. Among other projects, the council provided funds to the YWCA for construction of a hotel for women in Washington. A site at North Capitol and E Streets, NW was chosen, and under the leadership of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the new chair of the YWCA Board, the hotel was constructed. Like the Union Plaza dormitories across North Capitol Street, it was too late to help in the war. The 8-story, 376-room hotel was completed and opened in October 1921.

The entrance to the Grace Dodge Hotel, as seen on a 1920s postcard.

Designed by New York architect Duncan Candler (1873-1949), the Grace Dodge was stately and elegant but restrained in décor. It was finished in tan brick with limestone trim and featured an enormous three-story tall entrance-way with a neoclassical pediment broken by third-story windows. In contrast with—or perhaps to complement—its other facilities that aimed to help disadvantaged young women, the Grace Dodge Hotel was conceived from the start as a for-profit enterprise, intended to be managed and operated by an entirely female staff. It offered professional women traveling alone to the Capital a top-notch hotel experience, free from the harassment by men that they would undoubtedly suffer anywhere else. As summarized in The Washington Post,

The Grace Dodge Hotel, as it is to be called in honor of the woman who did so much for her sex, will have all the useful and attractive features that any hotel has, excepting men, and the housing committee of the "Y," of which Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is chairman, guarantees that the staff and working force of women will be every bit as efficient and courteous as the best masculine staff could be. And the hotel has some conveniences that no other public stopping-place has offered to date.

There are special suites for mothers, with heaters for baby's milk, and cribs constructed on sanitary principles. There will be a nurse on call, to be paid for by the hour. There are valeting rooms where the woman who wants her tumbled blouse laundered in a hurry can slip in and do it herself, at the cost of a small sum for the use of the tubs and electric iron. There are shampoo basins, and the guest may wash her own hair. There are vanity parlors for those who care about their complexions, and there is to be an information service where the visitor can find out what debate is on in the House of Representatives and what the Senate is doing about that bill she is interested in....

Each floor had a sitting room for quiet socializing in the blissful absence of men, and, perhaps most conveniently of all, when the overworked bellhop finished hauling all that heavy luggage up to your room, you didn't have to tip her. In fact, tipping of any kind to hotel employees, even in the restaurant and lounge, was strictly prohibited.

Tipping has a surprisingly controversial history in America, considering how pervasive and accepted the practice is now. The practice apparently had started in England when visitors to private estates would pay gratuities to servants to compensate them for extra services performed beyond their regular duties. By the late 19th century, the practice was common in wealthy homes in America, and from there it seems to have spread broadly into business settings where "servants" of one kind or another performed services. Even as it firmly took hold, the practice was widely condemned as degenerate and un-American, because it was seen as a reflection of the class-bound society of the Old World—an attempt by the lower classes to fleece the upper. Ironically, Americans, then as now, had a reputation for tipping more generously than their European peers.

Dodge Hotel sitting room, from a 1950s postcard.

Against this complex social background, the Grace Dodge Hotel was established as a model of business virtues, the only first-class hotel in America to adopt a no-tip policy. Hotel manager Mary A. Lindsley (1876-1949) remarked in an American Magazine article in 1929 that "Fifty years from now tipping in this country will be practically abolished.... This hotel is just pointing the way, it can be done." At that time, the hotel paid wages comparable to the minimum paid by the federal government. Hotel chambermaids earned $65 per month, as did entry-level government clerks, whereas they would earn only $35 a month in hotels where they could accept gratuities. Bellboys (the all-female staff policy does not seem to have lasted long) got $75 at the Grace Dodge, as opposed to the $25 to $35 in other hotels.

Staff of the Union Plaza dormitories in 1919. Mary Lindsley is at the center. (Source: Library of Congress)

An early problem encountered at the hotel was that patrons would stubbornly leave tips despite the prohibition against them. Waitresses in the restaurant would find coins left for them under plates, for example. This was a serious problem. A meeting of all hotel staff was held in January 1922, and everyone agreed that the unsolicited tips would be donated to the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA center for the benefit of its African-American members.

The hotel's tipless policy was widely publicized and undoubtedly contributed to its success. The restaurant and lounge on the first floor were open to men, and manager Lindsley reported within the first year that these facilities were reserved at least as often by organized groups of men as by women. Lindsley, who had previously served as a hospital director with American forces during the war and more recently as head of the dining hall at the Union Plaza dormitories, was the driving force behind the hotel's success in its early days. She had sought out the manager position when she first saw the building going up, and she left an indelible stamp on its efficient, by-the-book, economical operations. When the American Magazine reporter asked her how she could afford to pay her staff so much more than other hotels, she characteristically pointed to the fact that none of the employees got any special privileges. "All employees live outside unless they pay guest-rates for rooms. Nobody gets free meals. I, as manager, pay like everyone else..." The strict implementation of the hotel's business and moral principles was the key to its success, she implied.

The heady idealism of Miss Lindsley and the Grace Dodge Hotel could lead occasionally to sticky situations, as when the hotel's newsstand concessionaire, a Mr. Andrew G. Pollock, filed suit against the establishment in November 1922. He claimed his contract had been terminated because he was selling tobacco products, which he said the contract allowed. He suggested to the press that he was providing an important service to the women smokers in the hotel who wanted to purchase cigarettes discreetly. Lindsley retaliated by asserting firmly that tobacco products never had been nor would ever be sold in her hotel, but she soon found her iron principles conflicting with one another. As quoted in the Post, she asserted:

In the first place there is no demand by the type of women who patronize this hotel for such things. We have no rule against smoking, but I think since the hotel has opened, I have seen women smoking here not more than five times. We would not interfere with the guests, as they are free agents, but we will not have things for them to smoke....

She went on to say that the YWCA board wanted a woman to be the newsstand concessionaire so that more feminine things would be stocked, like "hair nets, needles and thread, candy, writing paper, dainty handkerchiefs and similar articles." Ultimately the judge decided to split the difference, allowing the hotel's ban on the sale of tobacco products but directing that Pollock's contract be reinstated.

More compromises were soon necessary. After just three years, the women-only policy fell by the wayside, although the no-tipping rule continued to attract a steady clientele. In 1936, after 15 years of service, Lindsley resigned to take charge of a new inn being built in historic Williamsburg, VA, and her departure marked the end of the hotel's golden age.

Archival notes for the YWCA suggest that by World War II the national board was troubled by D.C.'s unwritten rule against interracial hotels and didn't want their founder's name on a segregated hotel. At some point the name was changed to just the "Dodge Hotel," and the YWCA sold it by the mid 1940s. In 1949 it was in the hands of a group of private investors, and a former Waldorf Astoria manager had been installed to run it. Apparently all the special rules were gone by this time. In fact, in December of that year, hotel service and food workers voted to strike over poor wages and working conditions, a predicament that surely would never have arisen under Mary Lindsley and the YWCA.

The hotel lounge, from a 1950s postcard.

The hotel continued to operate for another 22 years. In the 1940s and 1950s, its tea garden was a popular and quiet gathering place in what was a busy part of town. Then in 1959 a set of local investors bought and remodeled the hotel as the Dodge House, sandblasting the venerable building's brick and stone facade, paving over the garden as a parking lot, and fitting out a new lounge inside. In 1963 the dimly-lit bar, called The Place On The Hill, featured the Van Perry Trio, a jazz group that tended toward a Latin beat. The times were changing.

The end of the road came for the Dodge Hotel in 1972, when new owners decided to raze it to make room for a more profitable office building. In addition to $1,000 chandeliers, the going-out-of-business sale for the hotel featured a set of hand-carved doors said to have been installed by Robert F. Kennedy when a Kennedy-For-President office was located at the Dodge. The large 400 North Capitol Plaza office complex, still standing today, was subsequently constructed on the sites of the Dodge Hotel and the Hotel Continental, which had occupied the adjacent lot on North Capitol Street and was also torn down in 1972.

444 North Capitol Street NW is now on the site of the Grace Dodge and Continental Hotels.

Sources for this article included James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (1962); A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (2007); Kerry Segrave, Tipping (1998); and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

Bread For The City: Shaw's Historic Bakeries

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:01:00 +0000

The renaissance of the greater Shaw neighborhood in recent years has drawn attention to the rich cultural history of places like the U Street entertainment strip and the elegant residences of LeDroit Park. However, the area also had its thriving industrial side, once hosting factories that produced much of the bread, cakes, and other baked goods bought by Washingtonians in the early decades of the 20th century. Brand names based in Shaw, such as Dorsch's, Corby's, and Holzbeierlein's, all now forgotten, were once staples of Washington households. Even after national corporations—the Continental Baking Company and the General Baking Company—took over much of the D.C. market, their baking operations remained anchored in Shaw.

Dorsch's White Cross Bakery (photo by the author).

One of the most visible reminders of the neighborhood's bakery heritage is the former Dorsch's White Cross Bakery at 641 S Street, NW, now standing vacant and forlorn as it waits for redevelopment. This property is just a half block east of 7th Street NW, Washington's commercial artery a hundred years ago. The oldest section of the building was built in 1913 as an expansion to an existing bakery run by Peter M. Dorsch (1878-1959) at 1811 7th Street NW. Dorsch had previously worked at bakeries with his younger brothers at various locations in D.C., including K Street in Southwest, Virginia Avenue, and Georgetown, before settling on the upper 7th Street site for his own business. Born in D.C., he was the son of a Bavarian immigrant, Michael Dorsch, who had come to Washington in the 1870s and sold imported German foods before opening a restaurant on 7th Street (perhaps where his son later had his bakery). Peter clearly inherited his father's business acumen, and as his White Cross Bakery prospered, he gradually acquired adjacent real estate at the S Street location until his factory became a sprawling complex of retail space, a baking plant, and various stables and garages for delivery wagons.

Prominent today on S Street are the façades of the buildings Dorsch put up in 1915 and 1922. The shorter of the two is from 1915, designed by the firm of Simmons & Cooper, with space for a store in front and baking operations to the rear. The taller 1922 building, of similarly utilitarian form, was designed by A.B. Mullett & Co., specifically Frederick W. Mullett (1869-1924), the son of famous architect Alfred B. Mullett, who committed suicide in 1890.

Photo by the author.

Both buildings have emblematic white crosses prominently displayed on their pediments. It's surely no accident that the crosses have the same proportions as the American Red Cross's famous icon. At the beginning of the twentieth century, food sanitation had become a nationwide obsession, culminating in Upton Sinclair's famous The Jungle, about the horrors of the meatpacking industry. Bread-making was also a topic of concern. 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."

A delivery truck in front of the factory in 1923. Source: Library of Congress.

It seems to have been part of a campaign to get people to buy all their bread from large factories. An 1893 article in the Evening Star observed that "Home-made bread is a back number. 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." At the popular Pure Food Show at the Washington Convention Hall in 1909, D.C. bakeries put on a massive exhibit that filled the K Street end of the hall. Visitors could observe machines doing the work in a modern factory setting; dirty human hands never touched the bread. In that same vein, a 1919 advertisement for Dorsch's in The Washington Times urged consumers to give up their old-fashioned reliance on the corner store: "Why buy bread at the grocer's, fresh for each meal, when it is possible to get good, wholesome, and fresh bread that tastes as good at the last bite as it did when you first cut into the warm loaf?"

Ad from the June 11, 1919 edition of The Washington Times.

Dorsch's advertised "Old Mammy's Rice Bread" and "Old Mammy's Real Raisin Bread" to a customer base that presumably wasn't troubled by the racist overtones. Their biggest competitor was the Corby Baking Company, makers of "Mother's Bread," which had its factory just up the street at 2301 Georgia Avenue NW. Corby's had been founded by Charles I. Corby (1871-1926) and his brother William (1867-1935), who were born in New York and moved to Washington around 1890. Charles started the first small bakeshop on 12th Street NW and was soon joined by his brother. In 1894 they borrowed $500 for a down payment to buy a bakery on Georgia Avenue. After construction of a new building in 1902 and additions in 1912, the complex filled much of the block and soon ranked as Washington's largest bakery.

Photo of Corby's Bakery from the January 28, 1906 edition of The Washington Times

The Corby's building today. Photo by the author.

The Corby brothers focused from the start on automation, patenting a number of processes and machines for producing bread of a uniform quality previously unknown. An article in the October 1915 edition of Baker's Review marveled at the Corby bakery's high-speed mixers with their automatic counters, the dough slides and six-pocket Duchess dough dividers, the Thomson moulders, the Werner & Ffleiderer rounders. At that time, 165 people were on the payroll at Corby's, including 60 bakers. Up to 90,000 loaves of bread and 2 1/2 tons of cakes were produced each day, and these were sent to the far corners of the District via 52 wagon and 8 automobile routes, the on-site stables housing 96 horses. The self-contained factory had its own power plant, well, and refrigerating plant. It even built, painted, and maintained its own wagons.

Laboratory at the Corby Baking Company, circa 1922. Source: Library of Congress.

Charles and William Corby both became fabulously wealthy and acquired lavish mansions in Montgomery County. William's sprawling Tudor-style estate at 9 Chevy Chase Circle was called Ishpiming; Charles purchased the Strathmore Hall estate at Rockville Pike and Tuckerman Lane. Charles, who had a heart ailment, fell dead in the grandstands of the Nautilus polo field in Miami Beach, Florida, in February 1926, only a year after retiring from the baking business. His son, Karl W. Corby (1893-1937), who took over after his father's retirement, likewise had heart trouble and likewise died suddenly in February while in Florida.

Not nearly as big as Corby's, Holzbeierlein was located in the same block as Dorsch's, at 1849 7th Street, NW. It was founded by Michael Holzbeierlein, a German immigrant, in 1893. It sold bread and cakes under the "Famous" label and later featured "Bamby" bread. Like Dorsch, Holzbeierlein had his retail bakery on 7th Street and larger baking and distribution facilities nearby, on Wiltberger Street. A newspaper advertisement from 1908 included this charmingly vapid jingle:

Famous Bread and famous Cake,
Famous everything they make;
That's the motto and the sign
Of the famous HOLZBEIERLEIN.

The Holzbeierlein business remained family-owned throughout its history. It declared bankruptcy in 1953, unable to compete with low-cost national brands. It had 70 employees and 30 delivery trucks at the time it folded.

Ad from the July 26, 1908 edition of The Washington Times.

National brands began taking over the Washington market as early as 1911, when the General Baking Company was formed in New York City by merging prominent bakeries from all over the east coast and the Midwest. In Washington, the Boston Baking Company joined the new conglomerate and began producing Bond Bread in its bakery at the foot of Capitol Hill. By 1928, government plans to relocate the U.S. Botanical Gardens to its site forced General Baking to find a new location, and company officials chose Shaw.

The site chosen was on Georgia Avenue about a block and a half south of the Corby bakery complex and on the west side of the street. Opposite on the east side was Griffith Stadium. For years to come, attendees at ball games would be treated to the sweet smells of the Bond Bread factory wafting over them as they sat in the stadium's bleachers. Excavation work at the bakery site began in 1929 for the $650,000 state-of-the-art building, designed by C.B. Comstock of New York, an experienced bakery architect. It was completed in 1930.

The Bond Bread factory. Photo by the author.

Of all the historic Shaw bakery buildings that remain standing, the Bond Bread Building is the most distinctive. At a time when many new factory buildings were nondescript, the General Baking Company clearly sought a distinguished look for its Georgia Avenue plant. The brick-and-concrete building's stepped, three-level façade is in keeping with art deco design practices, which favored ziggurat-like shapes. Its sleek vertical piers with their pointed stone caps at the roof-line signal a touch of the soaring optimism of the art deco age, though the building is not actually very tall. The design adheres to the "stripped classical" or "traditionalized Moderne" style typical of federal Washington—the verve of art deco checked by the constraints of neoclassicism. The main entrance, for example, is purely neoclassical and could work as well on a bank as a bread factory. The overall message, though restrained, is of pride and permanence.

By moving to this location, General Baking was squaring off directly with its biggest rival, the Continental Baking Company, which had taken over the Corby bakery in 1925. Continental replaced Corby's Mother's Bread with its new Wonder Bread product, which was rapidly gaining in popularity. In October 1925, the company, still using the Corby's name, advertised "a delicious new Cake Dedicated to the women of the nation's Capital! In homage to them named Hostess Cake!" It's not clear where the Hostess name actually originated, but it soon became the brand for all of Continental Baking's cake products. The company further expanded by buying Dorsch's White Cross Bakery in 1936, giving it a combined capacity at its two locations of 200,000 loaves of bread each day. It seems likely that by the 1940s, the company made Wonder Bread primarily at the former Corby's bakery and Hostess Cake products at the White Cross site.

The 1930s saw bread marketing begin to shift away from sanitation fears and focus more on nutritional benefits. General Baking upped the ante in 1931 when it licensed patents for fortifying its Bond Bread with vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. Continental responded by adding even more nutrients to Wonder Bread, eventually culminating in the famous "Builds Strong Bodies 12 Ways" slogan. In 1973 the Federal Trade Commission barred ITT Continental Baking from running ads that implied that Wonder Bread was more nutritious than other bread or could spur growth in children.

Wonder Bread continues to be produced, of course, now by Hostess Brands, Inc., which bought Continental Baking in the mid 1990s. The former Corby complex was shut down in 1988 when Continental Baking decided to consolidate regional operations in a larger, newer facility in Philadelphia. The company used the Corby complex for a couple more years as a distribution facility, then sold it to developer Douglas Jemal, who converted the old bakery buildings for retail and office use. Howard University then purchased the Wonder Plaza complex in 1993 for $18.3 million.

Jemal also purchased the former Dorsch's White Cross Bakery, complete with bright "Wonder Bread" and "Hostess Cake" lettering on its historic façade. The property has come to be known as the Wonder Bread Factory, and Douglas Development Corporation currently plans on developing it into an apartment building with about 80 small units. The building is also to be the site of the D.C. Preservation League's 40th anniversary celebration on April 21, 2011.

Bond Bread factory entrance. Photo by the author.

Meanwhile, the fate of the Bond Bread Building hangs in the balance. In the 1960s, General Baking Company's profit margins slimmed to the point where bread-making was no longer profitable. The company renamed itself General Host in 1967 and gradually shuttered its bakeries to concentrate on other forms of retail. By 1971, the Georgia Avenue plant had shut down and was purchased by the D.C. government for use as a community services center.

The 1971 arrangement provided the District with federal funds to renovate the old bakery and run the community services center in it jointly with the People's Involvement Corporation, a federally-financed anti-poverty group that was given a 30-year tenancy. Mayor Walter Washington verbally promised PIC that it could take ownership of the building at the end of that period, but by 2001 the District had other plans. Specifically, the D.C. government proposed giving the property to Howard University, which planned a development there called Howard Town Center, a mix of housing and retail. In exchange, the university would give the District a parcel at Florida and Sherman Avenues, where a separate project of offices, retail and housing would be developed. PIC sued to gain ownership of the building based on the Mayor's original promise, but it lost in court. Meanwhile the deal with Howard was ratified by the city council in 2006 and completed in 2008. Howard has secured a developer that reportedly plans to demolish the handsome old Bond Bread building as soon as an anchor grocery tenant can be found for its new Howard Town Center complex. The building currently is not historically protected.

Kim Williams of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office provided valuable assistance for this article.

Chinatown's Friendship Archway

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 02:19:00 +0000

Much of DC's Chinatown is about symbols. The neighborhood is small and fragile, seemingly forever on the brink of extinction. Its identity as a destination hinges on a smattering of things Chinese: the restaurants (of course), the red and green lampposts, the Chinese characters on street signs. But without a doubt the most striking and enduring symbol of all is the great Friendship Archway, constructed in 1986 just east of 7th and H Streets NW, and said to be the largest in the world when it was constructed. Boldly symbolic of Chinese identity, this project ironically was once plagued by controversy over what sort of China it truly symbolized.

Photo by the author.

Chinatown originally developed in the late 19th century around Pennsylvania Avenue NW at 4 1/2 Street (now John Marshall Place). Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in those days faced discrimination and downright hostility; the creation of Chinatowns in Washington and elsewhere in the country was as much a defense mechanism as anything else—a way to create safe havens where new immigrants could find shelter, sustenance, and employment. Washington's original Chinatown was forcibly disbanded in 1931 when the land was taken over by the government for the Federal Triangle and other municipal projects. A new Chinatown was soon established (against the wishes of local businesses and landowners) along H Street NW between 5th and 7th.

By 1981, however, Chinatown seemed on the verge of extinction. Successful Chinese Americans, like many others, had dispersed to safer and more prosperous parts of the city and its suburbs. Chinatown still had a cluster of restaurants and grocery stores, but the decline of the old downtown area made many wonder whether commercial establishments such as these would remain viable in the future. Two Chinatown leaders, Dr. Dwan L. Tai and Alfred H. Liu, wrote a paper entitled "The Future of Washington's Chinatown: Extinction or Distinction," in which they argued in favor of creating a visible attraction, such as an archway, to serve as a magnet for visitors. The idea began to gain traction.

In May 1984, Mayor Marion Barry and other top city officials took a trip to Beijing, and the dreamed-of archway project finally got its start. Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong had visited Washington the previous fall, and Barry was returning the favor to promote Washington as an international business and finance center. After surviving a welcoming banquet that included fish stomach and beef tendon soup, Barry went on to participate in a ceremony establishing Washington and Beijing as sister cities. As part of the agreement, the two cities would work together on a project to build a traditional archway in Washington's Chinatown. The principal designer would be Alfred Liu, a well-established architect and chairman of the Chinatown Development Corporation who had emigrated form Taiwan as a teenager and who had designed Chinatown's Wah Luck House, a distinctive apartment building for low-income and elderly residents.

Original rendering of the Friendship Archway. To the right is the planned Far East Trade Center, which was never built. (Photo courtesy of AEPA Architects Engineers P.C.)

Immediately a contingent of prominent Chinatown businessmen began to cry foul. They objected to the participation of the communist People's Republic of China in the archway project, many of them having strong ties with mainland China's rival, Taiwan. The Washington Post quoted Lawrence Locke, chairman of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of D.C., as saying that the archway "might misidentify the local Chinese community with the Chinese communists." Locke reportedly had collected more than 50 signatures from Chinatown residents and businessmen on a petition opposing the project. Locke also reportedly claimed to have assembled $250,000 in pledges for a separate project to construct an arch without any involvement of the mainland Chinese government. The arch's opponents had enough clout to get their city council representative, John Wilson, to introduce a resolution opposing the arch's construction.

In July 1985, a resolution of sorts was reached: there would be two arches in Chinatown, both on H Street, two blocks apart. The Friendship Arch to be built in cooperation with the People's Republic of China would be located, as originally planned, just east of 7th Street. A rival Chinatown Community Arch would be constructed two blocks away, just west of 5th Street. The Chinatown group promoting the second arch wanted to put it at the other end of Chinatown—9th and H Streets, near the old convention center. In fact, they might even build two arches to serve as gateways at either end of Chinatown. In the end, however, specific plans never came together; doubts were raised about the wisdom of investing scarce funds in "rival" arches, and none were built.

The finished archway, or paifang in Chinese, is an impressive engineering achievement, standing 47 feet tall at the top of its highest roof, spanning 75 feet of roadway, and weighing over 128 tons. The roofing alone weighs 63 tons, supported by 27 tons of steel and 38 tons of concrete. Over 7,000 glazed tiles cover its five roofs, and 35,000 separate wooden pieces are decorated with 23-karat gold. A riot of dragons, 12 carved and 272 painted, glare and grin from every angle. The style is evocative of the classic Qing dynasty (1649-1911), a period when China showcased its imperial splendor. Indeed, paifangs were traditionally erected across alleys and roads throughout China, with the more elaborate ones, like Washington's, often to celebrate the emperor on the occasion of one of his military victories. The golden color of the tile roofs on the Washington archway is symbolic of wealth and honor, as were the yellow mandarin jackets bestowed as a supreme honor on Qing officials.

Construction began in June 1986. The District first built the reinforced concrete frame and supporting pillars, according to Liu's design. Major decorative elements, including the 7 pagoda-like roofs, were fabricated in China and installed on the arch by 16 skilled Chinese craftsmen brought to Washington by the D.C. government under the supervision of Liu. The Beijing Ancient Architectural Construction Corporation was in charge of work in China, including fabrication of the 59 intricate dou gong supports—complex, cantilevered contraptions of carved wooden brackets, balanced and interlocked with tenons and mortises rather than nails or screws and providing a sturdy and resilient support for the gracefully curved roofs. The dou gongs have a very festive appearance, almost like frilly Victorian bloomers peeking out from beneath the golden skirts of the roofs.

Nighttime installation of the central roof structure. Photo courtesy of AEPA Architects Engineers P.C.)

In ancient China, these elaborate structures were painted to protect the wood from the elements. By the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the painting had become an opportunity for magnificent polychrome displays. One of the chief tasks of the 16 artisans brought to Washington was to apply red, blue, and green paint; gold leaf; and other finishing touches by hand. The arch was constructed over a 7-month period, much of the work needing to be done at night so as not to block traffic on busy H Street. The finished monument was officially dedicated in November 1986.

Once completed, the archway was widely celebrated, and the political squabbles about how it should be built soon died down. The giant monument seemed almost shockingly bright and festive. Linda Wheeler, writing in The Washington Post, called it "a brilliant multicolored flower transported into a drab landscape." Benjamin Forgey, the Post's architecture critic, observed that "Simply put, before the gateway there was not much to remember Washington's dwindling Chinatown by, and now there is.... It is a fitting, striking, and quite beautiful object." Forgey saw the archway as a signpost for the major tourist attraction that Chinatown could become. But that was still an unrealized dream in 1986. The arch's magnificence contrasted starkly with the drab landscape then surrounding it.

Both the archway and its neighborhood have had ups and downs in the years since its construction. In 1989, after the crackdown by Chinese authorities in Tiananmen Square, the city council enacted a resolution suspending relationships with sister-city Beijing. Council chairman David A. Clarke personally climbed a ladder to drape black mourning cloth on the Friendship Archway to commemorate the students killed in China.

Soon, the archway unexpectedly began to deteriorate. It turns out much of the mortar used to set the tiles in the roofs did not bond correctly. According to Liu, this was due to the fact that the Chinese artisans' visas were delayed, forcing construction to continue into October, when cold weather compromised the mortar. In any event, tiles began to fall off within several years of the archway's completion.

In June 1990 one of the 100-pound carved dragons fell off, striking the roof of a soda truck. It was an ominous event. Since such a gateway traditionally is, among other things, a manifestation of imperial splendor, some Chinese would say the fall of one of its dragons portends the emperor's own immanent fall. Sure enough, on that same evening Mayor Marion Barry took to the airwaves to announce that he would be stepping down when his term ended and not running again in the fall elections, as he had been planning. Barry had been arrested at the Vista Hotel in a sting operation in January; he would be found guilty of one charge of possession of cocaine and sentenced to a 6-month prison term.

Meanwhile, D.C. workers removed the rest of the tiles as a safety measure until permanent repairs could be made. In 1993 a major renovation project was undertaken, funded by both the D.C. and Chinese governments. Artisans from the same Chinese company that had worked on building the arch again traveled to Washington to perform extensive repairs, including re-laying tiles with improved mortar, repainting decorations, and reapplying gold leaf. Since that time, there have been no more problems with falling tiles or dragons, which should come as a relief to the city's subsequent mayors.

The archway in 2008, before restoration. Photo by the author.

The paint applied in 1993 held up well but after many years became quite faded. In 2009 a second repainting and modernization project was undertaken with funding from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The entire archway was sanded and repainted, and several pieces of tile and wood were replaced. In addition, a new lighting system was installed, using advanced, energy-efficient LED lights. The brilliant, vivid archway is now at the center of one of downtown's liveliest neighborhoods, and its bright colors now compete with gaudy shops, restaurants, and outdoor video displays. It's as if the neighborhood, inspired by Alfred Liu's creation, has finally caught up. But however commercialized and un-Chinese the various nearby storefronts become, the Friendship Archway remains an enduring and unforgettable symbol of the neighborhood's heritage and the city's rich multicultural fabric.

Invaluable assistance for this article was provided by Mr. Alfred H. Liu, A.I.A., President of AEPA Architects Engineers, P.C. Other sources included Asian Voice, Friendship Archway Inauguration Edition (Nov. 1986); Francine Curro Cary, ed., Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, D.C. (1996); James M. Goode, Washington Sculpture (2008); and numerous newspaper articles.

Showtime on 9th Street: The Gayety Theater

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:58:00 +0000

Ninth Street NW, the blocks just north of Pennsylvania Avenue: today they're lined with rows of the same nondescript office buildings you see everywhere else downtown. And then there's that hulking FBI building on the west side. But it wasn't always like this. A hundred years ago this was where the action was. "Ninth Street was the Broadway of Washington," a former fight promoter named Goldie Ahearn recalled years later in The Washington Post: "Everything that ever happened in this city happened there. When you came to town you had to strut up and down Ninth Street or you hadn't lived." And in the heart of this mini Times Square was the fabulous Gayety Theater, where the girls were always kicking their legs up and the comedians gunning for endless, easy laughs.

The Gayety Theatre, from a postcard in the author's collection.

The Gayety, located at 513 9th Street, NW, was designed by noted theater architect William H. McElfatrick (1854-1922) and completed in 1907 at a cost of about $130,000. Although the building's frontage on 9th Street was only the size of a typical storefront, it masked a sprawling complex that extended back to 8th Street, where a large auditorium was located. The stage was 65 feet wide and 34 feet deep.

It was a completely over-the-top extravaganza of decorative flourishes, both inside and out. The façade, made of brick and galvanized iron, embodied a lively and eccentric mix of styles. Beaux-Arts rusticated piers surmounted by pairs of Corinthian columns held up a massive hooded arch topped by a crowded assemblage of gaudy classical figures. A deeply-recessed entry drew customers into the building, leading them back to the ornate three-story auditorium, said to be capable of seating 1,500. The original decor was ivory and gold, with "rich Empire red" sidewalls, according to The Washington Times, and featured commodious seats and all-unobstructed views. In arches above the boxes on either side of the stage were beautiful plaster composition figures of the Muses, created by English-born architectural sculptor Ernest C. Bairstow (1876-1962), who also decorated many other important Washington DC buildings, including the Lincoln Memorial. Newspaper accounts made much of the fact that the building was designed using state-of-the-art fireproof techniques. The stage, for example, could be rapidly isolated from the rest of the auditorium with massive sheet-iron doors and an asbestos curtain. All in all, this was a very impressive theater in 1907.

Interior of the Gayety Theater. Source: Library of Congress.

The theater was a member of the Columbia Circuit (Eastern "wheel") of Burlesque theater owners. There was also a Western wheel. The wheels were affiliations of theater venues that provided a full season's bookings for traveling shows. According to Robert C. Allen, by 1912 approximately 70 touring burlesque companies played at one hundred theaters across the country and employed some 5,000 performers.

The early years of the Gayety's existence—the 1910s and 1920s—were undoubtedly its heyday, a time when burlesque was still a going theatrical concern. By the end of the 19th century, the theater-going experience in America had become rigidly stratified. Legitimate theater, as was performed at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, for example, was for the upper classes, kept safely out of reach of those with insufficient means or taste. Vaudeville—often called "polite" or "high-class" vaudeville—was marketed squarely to the middle classes and kept carefully clean and wholesome. The major D.C. vaudeville house in those days was Chase's Polite Vaudeville, located first on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House and later in the Riggs Building on 15th Street, NW, a safe and respectable neighborhood. Burlesque filled out the bottom rung of theater's social ladder and found its home in the city's tenderloin district, the hurly-burly world of the 9th Street strip. It was everything vaudeville wasn't: irreverent, iconoclastic, raucous, and licentious. Burlesque catered largely to young urban males of the working class with its deliberate skewering of social mores—although, then as now, they weren't the only ones who found such unbridled entertainment alluring.

Advertisement from the August 15, 1915 edition of The Washington Times. Source: Library of Congress .

When the Gayety opened in 1907, there weren't any stripteases, although voluptuous women were always spotlighted. The shows generally consisted of often lavishly-decorated skits involving a troupe of "soubrettes"—saucy, sexy, young coquettes—interacting with a few male comics and straight men in raunchy satires of upper-class lifestyles. Mollie Williams was an example of a popular soubrette known for her racy, wisecracking manner. She was reportedly the only woman with her own traveling burlesque company in the Columbia Circuit in the late 1910s and early 1920s. She produced "The Unknown Law" at the Gayety in September 1920.

Mollie Williams, from a postcard in the author's collection.

The Columbia Circuit tried to walk the fine line between risqué and rude, but ultimately it was a losing game. By the end of the 1920s, the more prosperous and better-financed vaudeville theaters had already taken away viewers wanting cleaner entertainment, and the burgeoning movie business was now taking customers from both vaudeville and burlesque. The burlesque theaters began to give up on theatrical performances and focus just on the girls. The Columbia Circuit of traveling burlesque companies, after consolidating with other "wheels," folded completely in 1931. Instead of its expensive bookings, theaters like the Gayety used "stock" burlesque shows that were much cheaper to produce and mostly consisted of striptease artists.

In January 1929, when it was still primarily a theatrical venue, the Gayety achieved unusual notoriety when it produced a midnight benefit show for the families of four imprisoned gamblers. The four had been thrown in the clink for participating in an illegal blackjack game, and they had all refused to implicate any of their cronies. A local boxing promoter conceived of the idea of a lavish show to benefit the families of the four "who did not squeal," and so it came to pass. A long bill of many acts, mostly performing gratis, played on until nearly dawn to a hall that was packed, despite the fact that all advanced notice had been strictly by word of mouth. The newspapers caught wind of the spectacle, and soon the House Committee on the District of Columbia was holding a hearing on the event, seen as proof of how organized the gambling and bootlegging rackets were in Washington. However, much to everyone's frustration, it was clear that no laws had been broken. Besides, a number of off-duty policemen were apparently in attendance. It seems the uproar finally blew over when officials lost their appetite for exploring the extent of corruption in the Metropolitan Police Department.

The Gayety always drew its share of Washington's officialdom, including many members of Congress, government officials, and even a president or two. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) was a Sunday afternoon regular, according to the Post. The Washington Times-Herald reported that Holmes "used to sit and read while the comics were on, and then put away his book when the girls began to peel." "Thank God, I'm a man of low tastes," he was quoted as saying.

Although it was the largest theater on 9th Street and the only one dedicated to burlesque, the Gayety was surrounded by other theaters, restaurants and arcades. Immediately to the left of the Gayety was a Gothic-Revival former church building originally constructed in 1835 and enlarged in 1879. Despite the enlargement, its Methodist congregation had found it too small and moved out in 1888. In the 1910s and 1920s it housed the Port Arthur Chinese Restaurant; later it was a bar and café directly connected to the Gayety. Two doors down on the right was the Leader Theater, built in 1910 with decorative excesses to rival the Gayety's. It was primarily a venue for motion pictures, as was Harry Crandall's Joy Theater and Tom Moore's Garden Theater, both in the 400 block of 9th Street immediately to the south. Crandall's Theater, at the southeast corner of 9th and E, lasted only into the 1920s, while Moore's Garden Theater, rechristened the Central Theater, continued much longer. Another 9th Street playhouse, in the block above F Street, was the Virginia, later called the Little Theater, which featured foreign films in the 1940s.

A crowd of newsboys lined up for a Saturday matinée at the Leader Theater, two doors down from the Gayety. The Port Arthur restaurant is visible on the far left. Source: Library of Congress.

The same location today. Photo by the author.

Interior of the Port Arthur restaurant, located next to the Gayety Theater in an old church building. From a postcard in the author's collection.

As the neighborhood began to decline in the 1940s, the pretense of respectability was abandoned altogether. Peep shows and pornography became the coin of the realm. The 1,500-seat Gayety, designed for full-scale theatrical productions, found it was losing money in this new world and held its last burlesque show in February 1950. However, the timing turned out to be fortuitous, and the theater got an unexpected reprieve.

The Gayety Theater at night, 1942. Photo by John Ferrell. Source: Library of Congress.

Washington at that moment was woefully short on stage facilities. The National Theater, previously the only legitimate theater in the city, had converted to movies in 1948 in response to a boycott by the actors' guild because of its policy banning admittance of African Americans. In February 1950, an agent for a Broadway show called "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" learned that the Gayety had closed and decided to see if he could book it for his production. Thus in March 1950, after a modest bit of renovation, the Gayety proudly re-opened as a legitimate theater with admittance to all races. "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" had a short but successful run, followed by several other productions. It seemed for a time as if the grand old building had successfully entered a second life.

Soon the building was purchased by the Shubert theater chain, which undertook more extensive renovations in 1952, including completely redoing the gaudy façade and replacing it with a more standard theater entrance with a broad, lighted canopy. The new playhouse reopened as the Sam S. Shubert Theater. Stars such as John Gielgud, Tallulah Bankhead, Celeste Holm, and Maurice Chevalier played there, and President Truman was a frequent attendee. Still, this new-found success was fleeting. By the mid 1950s, few theatrical productions were coming to Washington, and the Shubert was dark more often than not.

Then, around 1:00 am on January 29, 1959, not long after a showing of Edward Chodorov's "Listen to the Mocking Bird" had ended, fire broke out backstage at the Shubert and quickly grew out of control, consuming scenery, backdrops, and soon the back of the theater itself, bursting through the roof. Firemen battled the blaze for nearly an hour before it was finally extinguished. While the back of the theater was burned out, the old fireproof asbestos stage curtain had done its job and kept the flames from spreading into the auditorium. Nevertheless, there was extensive smoke and water damage there as well. It was a devastating blow for the old theater, and the owners decided to sell the property rather than undertake repairs.

When word came out in June that the theater would likely be razed and replaced with a parking lot, there were a number of calls to save it. Possibly it could become the new home for the Washington Opera Society, some hoped. A citizens group was formed to buy the theater for use as a civic cultural center, at least until the planned National Cultural Center (which would become the Kennedy Center) could be completed. An anonymous benefactor even offered to pay the $150,000 asking price and turn the theater over to the city for that purpose. Unfortunately, by that time the property had already been sold to an agent for Lansburgh's Department Store, which had its heart set on a new parking lot. Nothing could be done to stop them, and the theater was torn down in November 1959.

Soon, little was left of the old entertainment district. Leroy F. Aarons, writing in the Post, proclaimed in 1964 that "Ninth Street, that once-glorious Dream Street, that Coney Island, Bowery and Times Square rolled into one, has nothing left to remember itself by." His occasion for writing was the announcement that much-loved impresario Jimmy Lake (1880-1967), the unofficial "mayor of 9th Street" who had taken over the Gayety Theater in 1914 and had presided over its glory days, was finally leaving the area. Lake had also run the adjoining café (the former Methodist church), and sued in early 1960 to keep it from being razed too, but he lost. After being evicted from the café and theater, Lake moved his business a block south to the old Central Theater building, which he nostalgically re-christened the Gayety. But Lake soon came to realize that the burlesque business was dying, and thus he was moving out in 1964. His new place became a strip joint before it was shut down for lack of business and demolished in 1973.

In 1976, the Gayety name was moved yet another time, to the former Roosevelt movie theater at 508 9th Street NW, which had been built in 1933. This 500-seat theater, which was across the street from the site of the original Gayety theater, continued with a mix of live girls and X-rated films into the 1980s. In 1987 this building and the others alongside it were torn down for a large office building.

The Roosevelt Theater building is seen in this photo from 1965, when it was called Follies. Note that Central Liquor used to also be in this block of 9th Street. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

Meanwhile the parking lot on the other side of the street remained for more than four decades. Finally in 2007, Boston Properties, Inc. built an office building, designed by the D.C. firm of Hartman-Cox Architects, on the site. Initial plans were for the Washington Stage Guild to occupy performing arts space on the 8th Street side of the building, where the original Gayety Theater's stage used to be, but funding for that project didn't materialize. Perhaps another group will one day perform in that space.

Sources for this article included Robert C. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (1991); Harvey W. Crew et al., Centennial History of the City of Washington, D.C. (1892); James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Robert K. Headley, Motion Picture Exhibition in Washington, D.C.: An Illustrated History of Parlors, Palaces and Multiplexes in the Metropolitan Area, 1894-1997 (1999); and numerous newspaper articles. The Washingtoniana Division of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library provided invaluable assistance.

The Church of the Covenant on Connecticut Avenue

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 03:00:00 +0000

Churches are one of the biggest challenges for historic preservation; they are such unique structures and so poorly suited to be anything but what they are. What happens when a congregation outgrows its building and wants to move on? In some cases old churches downtown have been preserved because they were taken over by other religious groups. Several downtown landmarks have survived that way, including the Washington Hebrew Synagogue, which was built in 1898 near 8th and I Streets NW and became the Greater New Hope Baptist Church in 1955, and the Adas Israel Synagogue, built in 1907 at 6th and I, which was turned over to the Turner Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1951 before being converted back to a synagogue in 2004. However, such reuse doesn't always pan out.

One of the city's greatest losses in historic religious structures was the old National Presbyterian Church, originally called the Church of the Covenant, which used to rise from the southeast corner of Connecticut Avenue and N Street NW. The building, which James M. Goode has called a "dignified masterpiece in gray granite," was completed in 1889 and torn down in 1966, to be replaced by a nondescript office building.

Postcard view from a photo by Jack Rottier. Used with permission.

The church was designed by New York architect J.Cleveland Cady (1837-1919), a devout Presbyterian who is best known for designing part of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. For this building, Cady adopted the Romanesque Revival style popular in the late Victorian era, replete with heavy rounded arches and rough-cut stone facing. H.H. Richardson's celebrated Allegheny County Courthouse had just been completed in Pittsburgh in 1886, and it clearly influenced both this building and W.J. Edbrooke's grand Post Office Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue, another great D.C. landmark in this style.

In the early 1880s, members of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church near the White House had decided they needed to reach out to the far northwest part of the city (i.e., around Dupont Circle) to keep up with the wealthy "top hats" that increasingly were moving out to that wealthy suburb. They founded the Church of the Covenant in 1883 and built a small chapel on N Street in 1884.

Construction of the main church began in 1887 and was nearly complete when the 158-foot Ohio-sandstone tower suddenly collapsed into a heap of rubble early on the morning of August 22, 1888. Cady's Washington representative, Robert I. Fleming, had been on hand the day before to inspect construction progress and realized the tower was in jeopardy when a large crack appeared in one wall. Fleming ordered the site watchman, Thomas Neal, to keep people away for their own safety. Neal told the Washington Critic that he heard cracking sounds coming from the tower at regular intervals beginning around 10 o'clock that night. A policeman making his rounds around 4:30 the next morning noticed the strange noises and was about to go inside to investigate when Neal warned him away just before the whole thing fell to the ground. The Washington Post reported that "The crash and falling stones was like a peal of thunder, and before it ceased a cloud of white dust rose from the ruins, completely enveloping the building and hiding it from the view of the two startled spectators. Long before the air became clear the whole neighborhood was aroused. Windows were thrown open and scantily-clad figures ran from the houses, under the impression that there had been an earthquake."

The collapsed tower. Photo courtesy of the Archives of the National Presbyterian Church.

What caused the collapse? Fingers were pointed in all directions. "It was the fault of the contractor; it was the fault of the architect; it was the fault of the trustees, of the material, of the mortar, of everything and of nothing," the Post reported with exasperation. An official investigation soon concluded that the basic design was sound but that inferior materials and workmanship were to blame for the accident. The mortar, in particular, was found to be "practically worthless." The architect, contractors, and Church congregation agreed to divide the cost of reconstruction equally, and a new and very solid tower was soon standing.

The finished church was an exquisite homage to its Byzantine as well as Romanesque forbears. The squarish interior spaces were defined by sweeping vaults with elaborate plasterwork ceiling decoration. The central nave was crowned by a massive square "lantern" with clerestory windows allowing light to shine in from the heavens. On three sides, stained glass windows made by the New York firm of Tiffany and Booth illustrated the life of Christ. Finally, in the center was a grand, gas-powered brass chandelier, 15 feet wide, that was paid for with monies donated by the children of the church's Sunday school classes. The impressive Byzantine-style chandelier was made in Philadelphia and inspired by a similar fixture in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It contributed to the church's reputation as the "Hagia Sophia of Washington."

Postcard view of the interior from a photo by Jack Rottier. Used with permission.

The new church prospered and grew, especially after it absorbed the congregation of the historic First Presbyterian Church, which was located on John Marshall Place near the old D.C. Courthouse. The city government used eminent domain to seize that property in 1930 to provide space for a municipal complex. The Connecticut Avenue church was renamed the Covenant-First Presbyterian Church to recognize the merger of the two congregations.

Already by that time a sense had been developing among at least some of the church's leaders that the building on Connecticut Avenue was not enough. Other faiths had national churches in Washington, and some Presbyterians wanted a national church as well—something with sufficient accommodations to serve as a national center. But the sentiment was not unanimous; after all, as David R. Bains has pointed out, an essential tenet of Presbyterianism is the equality of ministers, elders, and congregations. The idea of one particular congregation having a special status as the national church went against the grain. Yet the desire for a national church persisted.

In the 1927 a design was prepared for a sprawling Spanish Gothic-style church complex to be built in Woodley Park, on a site acquired from developer Harry Wardman for $100,000. The ensuing stock market crash put an end to that idea, and the property was sold back to Wardman; the Shoreham Hotel stands there today.

Despite this false start, plans for a national church continued to advance. A major step occurred in October 1947 with a ceremony attended by President Harry Truman marking the official establishment of the Connecticut Avenue church as the National Presbyterian Church. After the unveiling of a plaque on the front of the church, Truman and his family were seated inside in the Presidential pew, which had been taken from the old First Presbyterian Church and had previously seated Presidents Jackson, Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, and Cleveland. Later President Eisenhower would attend this church as well, although he chose not to sit in the traditional Presidential pew, according to a 1953 article in The Washington Post, because it had an obstructed view.

Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

Meanwhile, the quest for a larger church complex went on. A proposal was made in 1954 to construct a church building across N Street on a lot then being used by the church for parking, with an underground tunnel to connect the new building to the old church. However, this plan didn't include adequate parking and was ultimately found to be too costly, so the search for a new location continued. A site at Massachusetts and New Mexico Avenues NW—the former estate of banker Charles C. Glover, Sr.—was purchased in 1959, and a preliminary design was developed by architect Edward Durrell Stone (1902-1978) for a grand, $20 million, modernist church complex there. This time church officials cringed at the expensive, cathedral-like pretensions of the Stone design, and it was dropped in favor of a more modest plan by Philadelphia ecclesiastical architect Harold E. Wagoner.

In August 1963, church officials announced that they had signed a contract to sell the old church building on Connecticut Avenue for $2.6 million to a developer who planned to raze it and put up a much-more-profitable 10-story office building in its place. It didn't take long for protests to develop. In October, the chair of the National Capital Planning Commission, Elizabeth Rowe, was reported in the Post as expressing grave concerns about tearing down the church, which she called "a landmark of the highest significance, both historically and architecturally." This prompted the Post's architecture critic, Wolf Von Eckardt, to bemoan the fact that no one seemed willing to do something to stop the loss of the landmark building, which represented for him the only structure of distinction still left on Connecticut Avenue. "No office slab could possibly adorn that multiple intersection as well as that cheerful exclamation mark of a tower, nor give it as much poetry as that well-shaped rough stone heap." In his rambling article, Von Eckardt claimed that other churches had been shut out of bidding on the building for their own use. He quoted the church's pastor as saying "No other denomination may use a Presbyterian building!" (According to J. Theodore Anderson, the church in fact tried to identify other congregations that might want the building but could find none.)

After dismissing the historic preservationists of his day as "mainly a movement of noble and hopeless protest," Von Eckardt presciently summed up the issues at stake, then as now: "Obviously, sentiment is not enough. Not all old buildings are worth preserving. And not all buildings worth preserving can realistically be preserved. But greater efforts must be made. At stake are not only the landmarks themselves, but the city and not only the image and appearance of the city, but urban economics as well."

The fight was on, and it continued for three more years. Robert R. Garvey, Jr., head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, called the planned demolition a "catastrophe," though he recognized that, with no historic preservation laws yet on the books, he had little power to stop it. The Association for the Preservation of the 1700 Block of N Street was organized and staged a number of protests. Feeling the pressure, Presbyterian Church leaders called a press conference in 1964 to explain why they needed to proceed with their plans: they had been working on the move for many years, the old church was inadequate for their needs, and the sale of the old property was essential to help fund the new complex. The preservationists were unmoved. The property had been rezoned to allow for construction of the planned 10-story office building, so the N Street group and others sued to overturn the rezoning. However, the court sided with the church.

The great chandelier downed and ready for removal. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

With no viable options left, in July 1966 the building came down. Workmen first removed the Tiffany stained glass windows, the historic pews that Presidents had sat in, and the great chandelier paid for by the Sunday school children. The Post reported that on one day passersby were sent scurrying by a wall that tumbled down unexpectedly during the demolition. This was a brick wall in an adjoining structure, not the solid granite walls of the church itself. In fact, according to J. Theodore Anderson, the church's iconic tower, which had been so poorly constructed the first time around, proved particularly obstinate when the wreckers attacked it 78 years later.

Demolition underway in 1966. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

Out on Massachusetts Avenue, the ground had been found unsuitable for the planned church complex, and a new site, at 4123 Nebraska Avenue NW—the former Hillcrest Children's Center—was obtained in January 1966. The following year construction began on a modernist limestone church and center, with slim Gothic-inspired arched windows. Buildings formerly used by the children's center were also renovated for use as part of the church complex. The new church had its first services in September 1969.

Before demolition. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

The same view today. Photo by the author.

Meanwhile, back on Connecticut Avenue, a bland 1960's office box was indeed erected on the site of the Church of the Covenant, although it was only 8 stories instead of 10. In 2007, that building was stripped down to its concrete frame and re-sheathed in contemporary tinted glass. Aesthetically, the improvement seems marginal at best. We're still short the commanding presence of that marvelous church tower, the victim of what Wolf Von Eckardt darkly called "criminal urbicide," our collective failure to preserve the city's heritage.

Special thanks to J. Theodore Anderson, Director of the National Presbyterian Church Library and Archives for his invaluable assistance. Other sources included David R. Bains, "A Capital Presence: The Presbyterian Quest for a 'National Church' in Washington, D.C." (2006); James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Albert Joseph McCartney, "The National Presbyterian Church and Its Heritage in Washington" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 60/62 (1962); The National Presbyterian Church, The National Presbyterian Church: The First 200 Years 1795-1995; and numerous newspaper articles.

Triumph and Tragedy at Decatur House

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 22:34:00 +0000

One of the oldest structures in the city, Decatur House is located barely a block from the White House at the northwest corner of Lafayette Square. It became a focal point for Washington society as soon as it was constructed for naval hero Stephen Decatur (1779-1820) in 1819. Designed for entertainment, the house has had a long career as the backdrop for both social triumph and personal tragedy.

Decatur House circa 1920. Source: Library of Congress.

Decatur House in 2006. Photo by the author.

Decatur was a rock star in his day, universally celebrated for his daring naval exploits. He was fortunate to be a great naval commander during the relatively brief period in the early 19th century when military prowess at sea fired the imagination of the public as little else did. After the War of 1812, at the second inaugural ball of President James Madison, Decatur laid the battle flag of a British ship he had vanquished at the feet of Dolley Madison, another idol of the day. Having at last been appointed to Washington as a commissioner of the Navy, Decatur decided it was time to build a show house for himself and his wife Susan with the prize money he had received for his naval conquests. He bought a prominent lot on the west side of what would become Lafayette Park and commissioned architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820) to design an appropriately prominent mansion. He is said to have asked for a house that would be "sturdy as a ship."

The Decatur House, as designed by Latrobe, is an architectural conundrum, both sophisticated and problematic. Latrobe is now universally acclaimed as America's first great architect, a brilliant contributor to the U.S. Capitol and the White House as well as designer of other innovative and influential buildings, including nearby St. John's Church and many private residences. Decatur House is the only residence designed by Latrobe that is still standing in Washington. As W. Brown Morton of the National Park Service has pointed out in the building's National Register listing, the exterior of the house is actually somewhat flawed, particularly on the H Street side, where six "blind" (bricked-up) windows look so awkward that through the years people have felt the need to make up stories about why they are there (more about that later). Nevertheless, the rooms are masterfully laid out and demonstrate Latrobe's extraordinary skill at creating flowing, elegant interior spaces. A striking, lozenge-shaped front entrance vestibule leads to a graceful staircase at the rear of the house that brings guests up to grand parlors on the second floor. As a vehicle for social levees in 1819, this place was second to none.

The entrance vestibule. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

Decatur would have little more than a year to live in this beautiful new house, for he had become entangled in a fatal dispute with a fellow commander, James Barron (1768-1851). Barron had had the bad luck back in 1807 to be captain of the frigate Chesapeake when it was attacked and boarded by the British, who seized four of its American crew who were allegedly British deserters. The incident was deeply humiliating to Americans, and Barron was faulted for being unprepared to respond to it more forcefully. Decatur, no great friend of Barron's to begin with, served as a member of the board of inquiry that suspended Barron from naval service for five years as punishment for mishandling the encounter. Barron then went off to Europe to wait out his exile, which happened to finish in 1813, right in the middle of the War of 1812. At that time he was summoned back urgently to active duty but failed to return to the States until after the war had ended. It was only then that he requested his old job back, much to the irritation of his former colleagues, including Decatur, who had fought so valiantly against the British. Decatur badmouthed Barron, who caught wind of it from a colleague eager to fan the flames of enmity between them, and Barron then confronted Decatur in a series of letters beginning in June 1819. At first Barron didn't directly challenge Decatur to a duel but tried to provoke him more subtly. Decatur resisted, stating in October that "I do not think that fighting duels, under any circumstances, can raise the reputation of any man." Still in January 1820 Decatur accepted a direct challenge from Barron, brushing off pleas from his close friends to decline. Both men appointed seconds to make formal arrangements on their behalf, and the duel was set for the morning of March 22, 1820.

Now, even in those early days, the District of Columbia had a law aimed at curtailing handgun violence: dueling was illegal. People got around it by taking their fights to Maryland or Virginia. One of the few roads out of town led northeast to the small village of Bladensburg, just across the Maryland line, where the British had routed American troops in 1814. A creek-side clearing had become a favorite spot for dueling, and Decatur and Barron met there on a cold, damp March morning. As they were preparing for the showdown, Barron reportedly called out, "Now Decatur, if we meet in another world, let us hope that we will be better friends," to which Decatur replied, "I was never your enemy." The seconds, if they had wanted to avoid the duel, could have taken this as an opening for reconciliation and called off the whole sordid business, but instead the two antagonists were called to take their positions. At a short 8 paces, both fired simultaneously; both hit each other in the hip. Decatur's shot deflected off Barron's femur and left him with a very painful wound. More seriously, Barron's shot deflected inward from Decatur's hip to his abdomen, a fatal injury in those days. Decatur was taken back to a first-floor room in his house on Lafayette Square where he died in great pain the next day.

Stephen Decatur. Source: Library of Congress.

Susan Decatur, a "dainty little woman with large, dark eyes," was deeply committed to her husband and suffered enormously when he died. The daughter of a prominent Norfolk, Virginia, merchant, Mrs. Decatur had been a sophisticated and popular hostess. "To be admitted into her set is a favor granted to comparatively few, and, of course, desired by all," remarked Mrs. Edward Livingston, who would later host soirees at Decatur House as well. Susan had undoubtedly endured much anxiety through the years that Decatur was fighting at sea, and it was a cruel irony that he should lose his life in a duel. Inconsolable after his death, she soon moved out of Decatur House, which she then rented out for many years. She used what powers she had to punish Barron and the two seconds who had facilitated the duel, refusing to attend any social event where there was a chance of encountering any of the three and reiterating her objections whenever she received an invitation. Her campaign was effective; Barron was kept from gaining a position on the naval board of commissioners, and one of the seconds, Jesse Elliott, was court-martialed and kicked out of the Navy. Susan converted to Catholicism in 1828 and in later years lived in a small house near Georgetown University, where she was known as "a venerable and stately lady."

After Susan Decatur left, the house was occupied by a succession of distinguished tenants, many of them members of the diplomatic community, including ministers from France, Russia, and Great Britain. The house was strategically located for a diplomatic role, with both the White House and the State Department being only a block to the south. From 1827 to 1833, the house became the unofficial residence of the Secretary of State, being occupied successively by Henry Clay (1777-1852), Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), and Edward Livingston (1764-1836).

In 1836, Decatur House was purchased for $12,000 by John Gadsby (1766-1844), an entrepreneurial innkeeper said to be the richest man in Washington. In addition to previously running Gadsby's Tavern in Alexandria, Virginia, Gadsby made lots of money in the slave trade and came to Washington when he decided to invest in a new hotel, which he opened on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1827. Gadsby's Hotel would become well-known as the National Hotel. Gadsby represented a shift from the house's previous upper-class tenants with diplomatic connections to a nouveau-riche mercantile man with distinctly less-refined tastes. The French minister commented on a party of Gadsby's held at Decatur House:

Some days ago I went to an evening party at Mr. Gadsby's, proprietor of the hotel where I stayed on my arrival here. He is an old wretch who has made a fortune in the slave trade, which does not prevent Washington society from rushing to his house, and I should make my government very unpopular if I refused to associate with his kind of people. This gentleman's house is the most beautiful in the city, very well furnished, and perfect in the distribution of the rooms, but the society, my God!

Gadsby built a low addition behind the house on H Street. He used the bottom floor for a kitchen, freeing up the previous kitchen space on the first floor of the main house. Above the kitchen were quarters for as many as 20 slaves, possibly including some that worked at the National Hotel. Gadsby also reportedly conducted slave auctions in the courtyard behind the house. Thankfully, this ignominious chapter in the history of the house lasted only a few years.

During the Civil War, the federal government took over Decatur House for offices, as it did many properties on Lafayette Square. The house became rather rundown. Then in 1871, Gen. Edward Fitzgerald Beale (1822-1893) bought the house for $60,000. Beale, famous for exploring and taming the West, had made lots of money from ranching and gold-mining in California. Nevertheless, he had been born and grew up in Washington at his father's estate, Bloomingdale, in the neighborhood that now bears the same name, and he was happy to return to his native city. Beale immediately began making extensive renovations to Decatur House to create once more an elegant social venue. He had the front windows on the first floor lengthened and fashionable Victorian sandstone trim applied over the windows and front entrance. Inside, intricate parquet flooring was laid over the original floorboards, and the second floor was elaborately redecorated, with the state seal of California created out of inlaid exotic woods in the center of the drawing room floor. The house once more became an important social venue, with Beale's good friend Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) often dropping by to visit.

Decatur House in 1937, with first-floor Victorian trim. The office building to the left was built in 1929 and removed in 1964. Source: Historic American Buildings Survey.

Beale's son Truxton (1856-1936) inherited the house from his father. He married Marie Oge in 1903. As its longest inhabitant, Marie Oge Beale (1880-1956) carried on the grand tradition of entertaining at Decatur House. Along with Mildred Bliss of Dumbarton Oaks and Virginia Bacon of the John Marshall House, she was one of the "3 Mrs. B's" who took delight in entertaining high society at their historic houses in the early decades of the 20th century. Also in keeping with Decatur House's tradition, many of Mrs. Beale's receptions catered to the diplomatic corps. Her husband had served in important diplomatic roles, and it became a tradition that after the annual White House reception for the diplomatic corps, the guests went over to Decatur House for a supper party. Even during Prohibition years, when the White House served no alcohol, Decatur House always had champagne on hand, its wine cellar supposedly having been really well stocked before the ban on sales of spirits kicked in.

Perhaps most importantly for us, Marie Beale was an early and ardent advocate of historic preservation. As early as 1902, the Senate Park Commission (the McMillan Commission) proposed "unifying" Lafayette Square by demolishing all the buildings around it, including Decatur House, and replacing them with ponderous, white-marble, neoclassical temples. Mrs. Beale lobbied her government connections to ensure Decatur House would be protected whenever proposals were floated that suggested it be razed. In 1944, she commissioned architect Thomas T. Waterman (1900-1951), an authority on colonial architecture, to restore the building's facade by removing the Victorian sandstone trim and recreating, as closely as possible, the original Latrobe appearance. Upon her death in 1956, Marie Beale bequeathed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which opened it as a museum in the 1960s. Most recently, in 2009, the National Trust inked an agreement to allow the White House Historical Association to use the facility as the National Center for White House History. The Association is currently drafting a master plan and historic structure report to help guide restoration work on the house as it assumes its new role.

The house before and after re-installation of shutters on the H Street side. Photos by the author.

One of the first things the Association did was to reinstall shutters over the blind windows on H Street. Waterman had had these shutters made in 1944, arguing that Latrobe would certainly have wanted them installed. They certainly can keep people from wondering why the blind windows exist on such a stately and historic house inventing explanations. The classic story, as recounted in the Washington Post at Halloween in 1969, goes back to the time of the Decatur-Barron duel:

It is said that the night before the duel, a troubled Decatur stood at the window on the H Street side, looking out, lost in deep thought. After his death, people claimed they could still see him standing there by the window. Finally to stop the stories, the window was walled up. Even then, the spectre of a worried young man could be seen before daybreak, slipping out the Decatur House with a long black box of pistols.

Of course, the windows (at least six of them) were never actually not walled up. Latrobe designed the house with these blind windows on the H Street side because neoclassical sensibilities of the time demanded a symmetrical arrangement of window spaces. Leaving a completely blank wall or a wall with irregularly-spaced windows would have been unacceptable. Yet Latrobe had designed a complex network of fireplaces and chimney flues running through that wall that prevented real windows from being installed. His solution was to put the blind windows in to restore symmetry to a design that could not really accommodate symmetrically arranged windows.

A drawing by Latrobe shows how the chimney flues run up the H Street side of the house. One set of flues is thicker than the other, because it includes a double-flue coming up from the kitchen fireplace on the first floor. Latrobe had taken the unusual step of putting a kitchen in the prominent northeast corner of the first floor instead of tucking it somewhere in the back of the house (apparently to the irritation of Gadsby, who built the addition behind the house so he could move the kitchen back). The drawing includes faint dotted lines showing where blind windows were to be created. Eight blind windows are shown, although the house now has only 6, because two windows planned to be blind were cut through anyway. Certainly none of the actual windows installed on the H Street side have ever been walled up. Perhaps with the shutters newly re-installed tour guides won't be telling that tall tale quite as often.

Watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1818. Click to see details on an enlarged version. Source: Library of Congress.

Sources for this article included: John Alexander, Ghosts: Washington Revisited (1998); Marie Beale, Decatur House and Its Inhabitants (1954); Harold D. Eberlein and Cortlandt V. Hubbard, Historic Houses of George-town & Washington City (1958); Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon, The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (2006); Jeanne Fogle, Proximity To Power: Neighbors to the President near Lafayette Square (1999); Historic American Buildings Survey, Decatur House (1945); Diane Maddex, Historic Buildings of Washington, D.C. (1973); National Register of Historic Places, Decatur House (1971); National Trust for Historic Preservation, Decatur House (1967); John H. Schroeder, Commodore John Rodgers: Paragon of the Early American Navy (2006); Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, Our Neighbors on Lafayette Square (1872, reprinted 1982); and numerous newspaper articles. Additional information was graciously provided by Maria Downs of the White House Historical Association.

The General Post Office, aka Hotel Monaco

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:30:00 +0000

She's a grand old lady, an exquisite neoclassical landmark, and Washington's first all-marble building. But the old General Post Office between 7th, 8th, E, and F Streets NW, nevertheless is not well-known and hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. It is now leased out as a boutique hotel because the government couldn't summon the wherewithal in the 1980s to commit to a more distinguished use.

The General Post Office Building, F Street NW facade, c. 1905 (Source: Library of Congress)

The General Post Office building today (Photo by the author).

Before the General Post Office was here, this site was the location of Blodget's Hotel, the largest privately-owned structure in Washington until the federal government bought it in 1810. Of course, there wasn't much competition in those days. Samuel Blodget, Jr. (1757-1814), a native of Massachusetts, had become a merchant and grown rich in the 1780s through trade with the East India Company. By the 1790s, he was infectiously enthusiastic about prospects for the new capital city and began hatching schemes to make boatloads of money in Washington real estate. Blodget's reputation, as Fergus Bordewich explains, was as "a man of big ideas, a sort of Donald Trump of the 1790s, a man who got things done." Thus he was able to get George Washington and other important people to go along with his hare-brained scheme of running a lottery to finance construction of the capital city. The grand prize in the lottery would be a magnificent hotel, worth $50,000, that he would construct at a prime location. Blodget's Hotel, designed by James Hoban (1758-1831), architect of the White House, was indeed built on this location, but the lottery to finance it was a dismal failure. Blodget lost everything in the process and died impoverished in Baltimore in 1814. Meanwhile, his hotel, begun in 1793, was eventually completed in 1810 and taken over by the government for office space, primarily the Patent Office.

Blodget's Hotel. Source: United States Senate

Four years later, the country was at war with Britain, and Washington came under direct attack. The British occupied the city, burning public buildings, including the Capitol and White House. They had set their sights on Blodget's Hotel as well and were about to set it on fire, when William Thornton (1759-1828), head of the Patent Office, intervened. Thornton's exact words to the officer commanding the British were not recorded, but he apparently argued that the patent records housed in the building were private property and thus not fair targets for the British. One story has it that he claimed that destroying these patent records would be the equivalent of burning down the great Library of Alexandria, a devastating crime against civilization. Whatever his argument, the British apparently were duly convinced that patents are important, and they spared Blodget's Hotel. After they were gone, it was the only substantial public building still standing, so Congress met there for about a year while the Capitol was being reconstructed. Then, in December 1836, a servant accidentally dumped hot fireplace ashes into a wooden refuse box, setting the building on fire. It burned to the ground, destroying thousands of patent models and records. Civilization seems to have survived the devastating setback, although now a new, larger, and—most importantly—fireproof building was desperately needed.

The new, fireproof General Post Office building to arise on this site was part of a mini-boom in government office construction that got underway in the Jackson administration. In addition to this one, two other major building projects were initiated: the Treasury Department building on 15th Street NW near the White House and the new Patent Office building in the block just north of this site. Robert Mills (1781-1855) designed two of them (the Treasury and Post Office buildings) and supervised construction of all three. The General Post Office, begun in 1839, was the last of the three to get underway.

The General Post Office, original E Street facade, c. 1850 (Source: Library of Congress).

The E Street facade c. 1870, before street grading (collection of the author).

An 1870s view of the F Street side (collection of the author).

The original E Street facade today (Photo by the author).

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Mills was one of America's first professional architects, learning his trade from James Hoban and Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820). He designed many public buildings but is probably best known as the architect of the Washington Monument. While his works were admired by some, he also had many detractors, especially among his rivals. After construction of the Treasury and Patent Office was well underway, a change for the worse in the economy prompted a Congressional inquiry into the ongoing federal construction projects, which suddenly were portrayed as extravagant and wasteful. Mills came in for all sorts of criticism, most of it unfair. John Quincy Adams, then in the House of Representatives and sympathetic to the criticism, referred to Mills in his journal as a "wretched bungler in architecture." A bill to tear down the half-built Treasury building and start all over with a new design was narrowly defeated. Mills continued with all three projects, but his reputation had been hurt, and he received few federal commissions after these were completed.

The completed Post Office building contrasts strikingly with its neighbor, the Patent Office, despite the fact that they share a neoclassical vocabulary. Finished in sandstone, the central portico of the Patent Office has heavy Doric columns that give it a brawny, imperious look. In contrast, Mills' Post Office, with its white New York marble finish and Italian Renaissance styling, is more delicate and refined. In keeping with Palladian antecedents, engaged Corinthian columns and colonettes elegantly define the upper floors and set them off from the rusticated ground floor. Mills considered this his masterpiece, and many of his contemporaries agreed. An article in the December 1859 Harper's New Monthly Magazine states: "We doubt if there is a building in the world more chaste and architecturally perfect than the General Post-Office as now completed. Without the imposing grandeur of its neighbor the Patent-Office, it is so symmetrical, and the details so faithfully executed, that it carries us back to the palmy days of Italian art." While this must have been one of the last moments in history when architectural chasteness was widely celebrated, the building indeed is as graceful as it is stately.

Mills designed the southern half of the current building. Built between 1839 and 1842, it fills the E Street side of the block and extends part way up 7th and 8th Streets. Inside Mills used fireproof construction techniques he had been perfecting throughout his career, including solid masonry construction with vaulted ceilings and marble-tiled floors, the same durable and utilitarian scheme employed in the Treasury and Patent Office buildings. Noteworthy are two elegant spiral staircases with ornamental cast-iron balustrades set in domed, sky-lit alcoves. The first public telegraph office was opened in this building by Samuel F.B. Morse in 1845.

Photo by the author.

Beginning in 1855, the U-shaped building was extended and connected along F Street to form a complete rectangle filling the block. The extension's architect was Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-1887), a fierce rival of Mills who inexplicably let pass the opportunity to negate or overpower the original design and instead created a very sympathetic and respectful extension. The Walter addition is not noticeably a different building, especially on the outside, where the new, white marble from Cockeysville, Maryland, blends in well with the original marble from Westchester, New York. Walter added more pronounced Corinthian columns, including a full portico with freestanding columns on the north (F Street) facade. Inside Walter used iron bars to support upper stories; ceilings are coffered rather than vaulted, as in the original section. The new section also had steam heating, thus dispensing with the many chimneys so prominent on the roof of the southern part.

Around 1873, the streets in this area were graded down, with the result that the building's ground floor ended up higher than the street. The plain walls of the basement, which had been hidden in light wells, have been exposed ever since, disrupting the symmetry of Robert Mills' original design.

The General Post Office (i.e., the Post Office Department) occupied the building for most of the 19th century, until new quarters in an ostentatious Romanesque Revival building on Pennsylvania Avenue were completed in 1897. The General Land Office then took over until World War I. General John J. Pershing, commander of American Expeditionary Forces in Europe had offices here in 1919, when he was working on his final report.
After Pershing departed in 1921, the building was shared by several government agencies, including the U.S. Tariff Commission, which eventually took over almost the entire building. In 1974, the Tariff Commission became the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).

In this 1920s postcard view of F Street NW, the General Post Office building is on the left and the Patent Office Building on the right.

The same view today (Photo by the author).

After decades of residence in the building, the ITC found by the 1980s that its quarters were getting a tad run-down. As reported by Stuart Auerbach in The Washington Post, the ITC's chairman testified before the Senate Finance Committee in March 1983 that the General Services Administration (GSA) didn't seem to care about restoring the building, instead just waiting to turn it over to the Smithsonian Institution and let them worry about it. Deferred maintenance had resulted in a leaking roof, falling plaster, loose window frames, inadequate plumbing, and—perhaps most vividly—exploding rodents.

GSA was using a poison that makes rats drink so much that their insides burst. It was supposed to drive the animals out of the building, but there was so much standing water from leaks that the hapless little beasts (some reported to be "as big as cats") didn't need to leave. The results were undoubtedly unpleasant for all involved. Dead mice and rats were encountered on a daily basis; even one of the commissioners encountered a dead mouse in her office one day.

GSA countered that it had been trying to find a new home for the ITC for several years, but that the ITC had been uncooperative. GSA then offered the ITC space in the hideous Bicentennial Building, constructed in 1976 at 600 E Street, NW. The ITC refused. GSA insisted. On and on it went.

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian presented its plans for the building, hoping to use it to expand the museums housed across the street in the old Patent Office building. The plans called for devoting the Patent Office space to permanent exhibits while using the Old Post Office for temporary exhibits, plus a sculpture garden in the central courtyard. The Smithsonian wanted GSA to simply hand over the building for this use, but GSA insisted the Smithsonian pay fair market value for the structure, money it didn't have.

The stalemate dragged on for years, while the building itself continued to suffer. At some point wires had been strung on window ledges in a misguided scheme to keep birds away. The wires were clipped to the surface through numerous holes drilled in the marble. The drill holes allowed water to seep into the marble and cause erosion. In 1984, the Post reported the GSA Commissioner of Public Buildings as saying "I acknowledge that the maintenance of this valuable and historic property has not been performed in an acceptable manner. The lack of proper attention to preservation and restoration of this building...is inexcusable."

While the ITC finally left the building for new quarters at 500 E Street SW in 1988, the Smithsonian, despite being given the old building by Congress, was never able to come up with the funds for renovating it. Instead, the building sat empty for another decade, with GSA unable to find a federal tenant interested in a relatively small space that required major repairs and restoration. Finally, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) convinced the Smithsonian that its best option would be to lease the building for commercial use for, say, 40 years, hoping that funds would be more readily available for museum purposes at a later date. According to the Post, Moynihan pushed for this solution after discovering that the boarded-up building was being used as a crack house.

GSA ran a competition, which the Kimpton Hotel and Restaurant Group won. The government spent about $4 million to fix up the exterior of the building, while Kimpton converted the interior into a 184-room boutique hotel through a lengthy and elaborate process of renovation and negotiated restoration. The new Hotel Monaco, with a 60-year lease, opened in 2002. Benjamin Forgey, the Post's longtime architecture critic, commented that "it is unsettling to see one of the city's most distinctive public buildings transferred to the private sector. It remains extremely regrettable that the Smithsonian let slip a long-standing opportunity to turn the building into a public museum." However, he concluded that "The Monaco project is an exemplary, unambiguous reminder of what creative preservation can do for a building, and, potentially, for a city." After 8 years of successful operation, the hotel is now an established fixture in DC's Penn Quarter.

Sources for this article included: Fergus M. Bordewich, Washington: The Making of the American Capital (2008); Gordon S. Brown, Incidental Architect: William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794-1828 (2009); John M. Bryan, Robert Mills: America's First Architect (2001); James M. Goode, Capital Losses (2003); Harper's New Monthly Magazine (December 1859); Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993). Numerous newspaper articles as well as listings in the Historic American Buildings Survey and National Register of Historic Places were also consulted.

Lost Fast Food: Childs Restaurants in Washington

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:34:00 +0000

At 2 Massachusetts Avenue NW, where North Capitol Street intersects close to Union Station, stands a rather striking SunTrust bank building. How did this stately little building with its big windows and rough, pumice-like walls land on this corner, and why is it put to such nondescript use? Well, it's had a number of lives through the years. Designed as a restaurant, cheery and inviting, it ended up, among other things, as the setting for a protest demonstration in the civil rights movement and has had a number of tenants through the years.

Photo by the author.

The building was originally a Childs restaurant. Long before there were McDonald's or Wendy's or Burger King restaurants, there was Childs, a highly successful, early 20th-century chain of lunchrooms that started in New York City and eventually spread nationwide. There were at least three in Washington, including the Massachusetts Avenue restaurant, which was constructed in 1926.

Samuel (1863-1925) and William (1866-1938) Childs, two brothers from New Jersey, had opened their first restaurant in New York City in 1889, at a time when casual consumption of food at lunch counters was just beginning to become popular. As described by Virginia Kurshan in a 2003 landmark application for a New York building, the Childs brothers capitalized on a few simple ideas. They conveyed a sense of cleanliness by using white-tiled walls and floors, white marble table-tops, and waitresses dressed in starched white uniforms. Their restaurants were designed in an "austerely elegant" style, with bentwood furniture, mirrors, and exposed ceiling fans "to complement and also to represent the simplicity and purity of the food," according to Kurshan. Childs' emphasized fast service and made money by turning over tables quickly, in part because the hard surfaces discouraged people from lingering. Another signature feature of early Childs restaurants was a chef in the front window preparing flapjacks to catch the attention of passersby.

From an old matchbook.

Washington Post commentator H.I. Phillips summed up the style of these restaurants with characteristic wit in 1929:

The early Childs restaurants were so glaringly white it didn't seem right to enter them without a bath, shave and haircut. They were architecturally part laboratory, part squash court, part Roman pool, and part goldfish bowl.

Then the owners dressed their managers like hospital internes, put their waitresses into attire partly suggestive of child brides and partly suggestive of dentists' assistants, developed tray-dropping to a high art and prospered.

Speed was the keynote. Buttered toast set new heights in rapid transit, and all previous records held by eggs in flight between kettle and customer were broken....

The first Washington Childs was at 1423 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, just west of the Willard Hotel and close to the Treasury building. It was designed by company architect John Corley Westervelt in 1913 and built for $75,000. Seating 200, it conformed to all the classic Childs parameters, including the white-tiled interior and the flapjack flippers in the front window.

View of Childs Restaurant in 1917. Source: Library of Congress.

Like any good restaurant, it rarely made news. In October 1918, a minor tiff developed between Childs and the DC food commissioner when Childs raised its prices, contrary to the food commission's guidance. Childs eventually agreed to follow the DC wartime guidelines, which specified precise menu options at fixed prices, according to the Washington Times. For breakfast, among other options, one could order prunes, cereal, toast, and coffee for 30 cents. Lunch was cheaper, a sandwich—ham, tongue, cheese, salmon, or egg—ran just 10 cents.

Interior of the Pennsylvania Avenue Childs, c. 1920. Source: Library of Congress.

One fine day in 1925 a couple of young Texans were checking out automobiles along the stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue near Childs, and they caught the eye of D.C. police detective Frank Alligood, who sensed that all was not good with the two out-of-towners. As they got to the front of Childs, Frank Tunnell, 21, left his buddy, Robert Resson Parker, also 21, out front as he stepped inside the restaurant. He approached the cashier, Freda Schwartz, 22, and asked to see the manager about getting a job as a waiter. It just so happened that Miss Schwartz was counting the weekly payroll at the time. As he waited for the manager, young Tunnell reportedly felt an "irresistible impulse" to grab a stack of bills from the cashier's cage and run out the door. Miss Schwartz, being the fine young lady that she was, "reached for the bills, yelled 'Get him!' and fainted," according to the Post. Fortunately, eagle-eyed Detective Alligood had been waiting outside, and he gave chase to Tunnell, capturing him in the men's room of the Willard Hotel. Order having been restored, the young man argued from his jail cell that the influence of narcotics was responsible for the irresistible impulse he had felt. It's unclear whether this argument helped his case.

Meanwhile, planning for the second restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue was underway, and it would be completed in 1926. By then, competition was forcing the Childs chain to evolve. The company had always made sure it constructed distinctive, quality buildings for its restaurants, places that would seem special to the common folk who were expected to dine there. But the white-tiled look was getting to be old-fashioned; it looked too much like what it was, a lunchroom. The New York Times reports that when William Childs was planning a new restaurant on elegant Fifth Avenue, he faced opposition from property owners who didn't want such a lowly enterprise in their neighborhood. Determined to build a distinctive new structure, Childs hired the brilliant modernist architect William Van Alen (1882-1954), who created a tasteful but restrained five-story limestone building with bronze trim inside and no white tiles. It was an immediate hit. Bolstered by this success, Van Alen would go on several years later, in 1929, to design New York City's Chrysler Building, perhaps the ultimate art deco celebration of modernism in American architecture.

But before he worked on the Chrysler Building, Van Alen designed the Massachusetts Avenue Childs restaurant—one of his few works, or maybe his only work, in Washington. It too was clearly meant to be distinctive, and Van Alen knew this is what his clients wanted. Barely legible, Van Alen's name is proudly inscribed in the granite base at the southeast corner of the building. A Post article that appeared at the time of its opening raved that there was "a lofty dignity and an architectural beauty about it seldom seen in restaurants. It is the type of building Washington needs to make it the city of beauty." A much later article stated that the Childs company "leased property as near as possible to Union Station so 'travelers coming to Washington will see the name Childs in lights as soon as they step off the train.'" While that goal may have been overly ambitious, the restaurant surely must have beckoned travelers as they came out on to Massachusetts Avenue, its huge, brightly lit windows sending a message of warmth on cold winter evenings.

"William Van Alen Architect" inscription.

The building's exterior is finished in an exotic, rarely-seen stone. According to the Post article, it was one of only two buildings in the United States made of "Italian Doria limestone, a lava rock from Italy." Christopher Barr has studied this stone in detail and discusses it on his excellent website, Fossils in the Architecture of Washington, D.C. Barr questions what type of stone it is. It is very soft and now highly eroded, with ancient marine fossils very clearly embedded in it, negating the possibility that it is volcanic. Round decorative medallions, now largely worn away, are carved on the upper part of the walls between the great bronze-framed windows, which were made in Rhode Island.

Inside, the walls are clad in expensive Italian travertine. The color scheme, as the Post pointed out, was a radical departure from Childs' white-tiled past. The ceiling was painted a robin's egg blue, contrasting pleasantly with the buff color of the limestone walls. Indirect lighting was provided by fixtures concealed around the edges of the ceiling. Travertine columns along the walls were topped with hand-carved scrolls, while wainscoting was of Hauteville marble. The floor was inlaid with Sienna, Cardiff green, Vermont white, and black Belge marbles. The entire one-story structure served as the dining room, so that one was left wondering where the food was cooked. In fact, a large basement was built underneath, extending out much farther than the walls of the ground floor. In addition to the kitchen, storage rooms, washrooms, employee lockers, etc., there was also room for a cafeteria, although it may never have been used as such. All that imported marble and bronze fittings made the restaurant expensive to build, at $175,000, but it demonstrated the company's determination to create a monumental eatery.

The late 1920s and early 1930s brought more change to the Childs chain. William Childs, who took over after his brother Samuel died in 1925, was an avowed vegetarian and decided to adopt a purely vegetarian menu for the chain, to the dismay of customers and stockholders alike. He also instituted a policy of charging for glasses of water, an equally unpopular move. William was finally forced out in 1929, and the company soon brought back meat and free water.

In June 1932, wealthy heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean (1886-1947), owner of the Hope Diamond, was on Pennsylvania Avenue observing the Bonus Army, a ragtag group of World War I veterans who had descended on Washington seeking promised service bonuses that had never been dispensed. McLean wrote in her autobiography that she took pity on the marchers and decided to drop in to the Pennsylvania Avenue Childs to help them out. She ordered 1,000 sandwiches, to be served as quickly as possible. And 1,000 packs of cigarettes. As usual for her, she got her way. (The anecdote is retold in Douglas Evelyn and Paul Dickson, On This Spot: Pinpointing the Past in Washington, D.C.)

The mid 1930s saw more makeovers to keep the Childs restaurants fresh and interesting. The Post reported in January 1935 that the chain was redecorating its restaurants according to a variety of different themes. The Pennsylvania Avenue eatery went "Mexican, with adobe, irregular walls, iron railings, scenic paintings, Mexican posters and a hostess resplendent in ruffles and roses behind her ear." Also mentioned was the branch located at 1340 New York Avenue, NW, which was taking on a neo-colonial look, "with paneled walls, wide boards in the floors, antique lighting fixtures and a hostess in hoop skirt." The Massachusetts Avenue location is not mentioned and was presumably already classy enough to keep up a strong clientele. A later Post article says it was at one time a fashionable eating place for late theater and movie goers.

In February 1949, a Legislative Assembly and Rally to End Segregation and Discrimination was held in Washington, attracting civil rights leaders from around the country, including W.E.B. DuBois and former vice president Henry A. Wallace. On the afternoon of February 13, a group of about 80 attendees at the rally, "members of New York and other out-of-town delegations," according to the Post, descended on the Massachusetts Avenue Childs and sat at most of its tables, demanding to be served.

This was apparently a very peaceful protest. The participants were not served, and they left after about three hours. But their demonstration was not in vain. Equal access to restaurant facilities became an important demand of the civil rights movement. The following year, Washington activist Mary Church Terrell, along with three other African-American leaders, walked into a Thompson's restaurant, put soup on their trays, and sat down to eat. They were asked to leave. A lawsuit was promptly filed on their behalf, and it finally led to a court ruling in 1953 that segregated eating places in Washington, D.C., were unconstitutional. Thompson's was a Chicago-based chain and the main rival of Childs; its downtown D.C. cafeteria, now long gone, was located on the southeast corner of 14th Street and New York Avenue, NW, only a few doors down from the New York Avenue Childs.

The former location of the Pennsylvania Avenue Childs as it appears today. Photo by the author.

By the mid 1950s, the Childs chain was beginning to run out of steam. Its owners were occupied with developing and operating hotels and allowed the chain to languish. The Pennsylvania Avenue branch shut down around 1950 and was demolished to make way for a parking lot.

Matchbook photo of the building when it housed the R.A. Humphries company.

Childs backed out of its lease on the Massachusetts Avenue location in 1955, closing the restaurant after almost 30 years. The building was bought by the R.A. Humphries and Sons real estate firm for $100,000, only a little more than half what it had cost to build in 1926. Humphries was there until 1969, when the building was sold to the Catholic War Veterans of the United States, which found it quite suitable as a war memorial, adorning the stately travertine walls with long lists of veterans' names. By 1987, they too were gone, to be replaced by a Popeye's restaurant. SunTrust Bank is the latest tenant.

The former Childs restaurant amid modern office buildings. Photo by the author.

The structure remains a unique architectural memento from the past. While not a major historical landmark, it was designed by a talented architect to stand out from the crowd, and it still does. If it played no pivotal role in the course of history, it certainly witnessed first-hand the seeds of social change. Its primary enemy at this point is probably the weather, which slowly but inexorably is eating away at its exotic stone facade.

Susan Decker contributed to this article.

Woodies, the Sentimental Favorite

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:50:00 +0000

For many longtime Washington residents, The Woodward & Lothrop department store, or Woodies as everybody knew it, is a touchstone for memories of easier days and simpler pleasures when Washington was younger. The looming 9-story building at 11th and F Streets, NW, taking up virtually an entire block in the heart of old downtown, served as the stage for many happy moments and a reminder that shopping has long been a key form of entertainment in the nation's capital.

The Woodies building after 1926, viewed from 11th and F Streets, NW (Source: Collection of David White).

The Woodies building today (Photo by the author).

Walter Woodward (1848-1917) and Alvin Lothrop (1847-1912) came from New England; Walter was born in Maine to a family of shipwrights, and Alvin came from a Massachusetts farm. They met and became fast friends while working as clerks in a Boston dry goods store beginning in 1870. By 1873, they had started their own dry goods business in Chelsea, Massachusetts, but there was a limit to how much they could expand there. In 1879 they decided they needed to find a larger market. Woodward traveled to the Midwest—Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri—as well as Baltimore and Washington, to size up prospects. In a famous telegram back to this partner, he declared, "Alvin, Washington, D.C., is the place for us."

Woodward seems to have been the hard-charging entrepreneur of the pair, whereas Lothrop was the personable, detail-oriented manager. They opened their first Washington store, called the "Boston Dry Goods House," at 705 Market Space, opposite the Center Market, in 1880. The following year, they moved a couple of blocks west to 921 Pennsylvania Avenue, where they filled a larger, five-story shop equipped with a steam-powered elevator. The store had a large sign proclaiming "One Price," meaning that everything in the store was marked with a fixed price, a break from the traditional haggling over prices that was standard in dry goods shops. They also adopted the practice of stocking seasonal clothing in advance of the actual season, bringing in summer clothes in the middle of a January snowstorm, for example. I really can't explain why this marketing strategy worked so well, but it did, and eventually it became universal industry practice. Woodward & Lothrop, Inc., began to take business away from older, less progressive stores.

The pair of young commercial Turks also had their eccentricities, particularly Woodward, a consummate Type-A hard-charger with a "hair-trigger temper" and known for his brusqueness. For example, he insisted on conducting grueling interviews of his agents whenever they returned from buying trips, firing pointed questions at this victims and demanding simple yes or no responses. He also developed the habit of angrily flinging pens across his office if they didn't work properly. As many as 6 or 7 might be strewn about after he had worked his way through the morning's mail, and his secretary would have to wait for a quiet moment, after Woodward had "simmered down," to discreetly gather the pens up and replace their nibs. These anecdotes come from a 1955 history entitled From Founders to Grandsons: The Story of Woodward & Lothrop, prepared by Martha C. Guilford of Woodies' public relations division.

This view, from the early 1920s, highlights the original Carlisle building completed in 1887 (Source: Library of Congress).

An important milestone came in 1887, when the store moved from Pennsylvania Avenue to the corner of 11th and F Streets NW, part of an emerging trend of commercial establishments abandoning flood-prone Pennsylvania Avenue for the higher ground of F Street. Calderon Carlisle, a prominent attorney and real-estate investor, offered to construct a new building for the store at a cost of $100,000. This five-story Carlisle Building became Woodies' headquarters for the next forty years. The building was designed by James G. Hill (1841-1913), Washington's leading architect. Hill had designed the original Bureau of Engraving and Printing building and was also at work on the Atlantic Building (930 F Street NW) a block away when he undertook the Woodies project. His Carlisle building was in the emerging Chicago commercial style, with large, arcaded, Romanesque-Revival windows near the top; tall showroom floors; and restrained neoclassical trim. The show windows on the bottom four floors were of "highly polished French plate glass," according to Guilford, and inside were woodwork and furnishings of cherry, poplar, and mahogany, all equally highly-polished. Interior ceilings were painted in "graded shades of light blue and ecru," while the walls were a light terracotta color with a hand-decorated frieze.

The building was on the leading edge of department store design and was meant to serve as a prominent entertainment destination, impressing passersby and drawing them in. Once inside, the finest customer amenities were provided, including an elegant reception room on the mezzanine level, enclosed by an ornamental mahogany balustrade, where ladies could wait for their shopping companions to arrive before embarking on a romp through the aisles. Evidence of the store's technological prowess could be found in the Martin & Hill Electric Cable Cash Railway, a Rube-Goldberg contraption that included a small track running in all directions throughout the building's four shopping floors. It transported cash from station to station in small "German silver box cars" that raced about at 14 feet per second. Mayhem ensued at least once a week when somebody's excitable pet dog, driven crazy by the zippy little boxes, would break loose and go tearing after them, barking madly.

The large, new building allowed for expanded lines of goods. In December 1888, Woodward observed to The Washington Post that "our new bric-a-brac department has led everything, and this trade has been truly phenomenal," although the article frustratingly does not divulge what particular bric-a-brac was so irresistible. In contrast, newspaper coverage of the store's annual "opening" each October, when new fashions were presented to the public, was often substantial and detailed. In 1894, for example, the Post surveyed the fresh stocks in Woodies' aisles and reported that "Everything this season is rough and shaggy.... Zibilines and English tweeds are leading and Bannockburns are also popular.... The ultra-fashion for evening gloves is a dainty lemon shade with broad black back stitching..." Further reverie ensues regarding silks, cloaks, suits, and of course hats—large hats, "much larger than usual; mostly velvet and trimmed with birds and ostrich plumes" and shaded "hunter's green, bluet, and cherry, with rosettes of jet and gold." The well-dressed woman of 1894 was truly a sight to see.

The sale of all that bric-a-brac and ostrich plumes meant a never-ending need for additional space. Since moving into the Carlisle Building in 1887, Woodward & Lothrop steadily expanded out into the rest of the block, gradually buying and taking over small commercial buildings that one by one were attached to the store complex. In the 1890s, the buildings along F Street were added, all but the Rich's shoe store at the opposite end. Mid-block commercial space was also snapped up. Then a big step was taken in 1899 when the company bought the large property spanning the north end of the block, which fronted on G Street and had been home to the St. Vincent Female Orphan Asylum. After a new home for the asylum was completed north of Eckington in 1901, Woodward & Lothrop immediately began work on a large, new state-of-the-art addition, completed in 1902.

View of the 1902 building from an advertisement in the 1913 edition of Rand McNally's Pictorial Guide to Washington. The Carlisle building is to the right.

The 1902 building today (Photo by the author).

The 1902 building on G Street remains a strikingly elaborate Gilded Age gem. Designed by Chicago-based architect Henry Ives Cobb (1859-1931), the 8-story building is articulated into four pleasantly contrasting sections: the richly ornamented first two floors, with their 2-story cast-iron piers proudly made in Jersey City, New Jersey; a narrow, rusticated third story that was the first element of the facade to be hung on the building's steel frame; another four stories above that are decorated in an elegant Beaux-Arts style with Corinthian piers and ornamental spandrels; and finally a large, heavily bracketed cornice.

The south (F Street) end of the Woodies block appears to contain a single, large building that is similar to the 1902 building but more modern in style. This structure was designed by Washington architect Frederick B. Pyle (1867-1934) in the spare, neoclassical style that would become his trademark in the 1920s. The design uses South Dover marble on the facade of the lower two floors instead of cast iron, plain brick for the central five stories, and ornamented terracotta at the top. This building was erected in several complex phases. The first part of the building to go up was a slim, one-bay-wide segment on F Street in 1912. The following year, the F Street facade was expanded by replacing several older structures and creating a large, five-bay-wide building in the middle of the F Street side of the block. In 1925, the building was further filled out in the mid-block area behind it, and then finally in 1926 the original Carlisle Building on the corner of 11th and F was replaced, completing the structure as it remains to this day. In-house architect Linden Kent Ashford (1893-1953) designed the 1920s expansions, which matched the original Frederick Pyle design.

Photo from 1912 of construction of the first segment of the "modern" half of the Woodies building (Source: Library of Congress).

The same view today. Note the original bay is slightly wider than the later additions (Photo by the author).

As its building steadily expanded, so did Woodies' workforce, departments, and services. As reported by Guilford, Woodies' staff grew from 35 in 1880 to 300 when the Carlisle Building opened in 1887. In 1917 there were 1,700 employees, and in 1954, when the book was written, Woodies employed "an average of 4,500 during regular seasons and 6,000 during busy holiday seasons."

The store attempted to provide everything a person could possibly want once they left their home. There was a dining room, beauty parlor, travel agency, messenger service, and tourist information desk. For customers or employees who fell ill, a medical clinic, staffed with a full-time physician and nurses, was on hand. In addition, a variety of non-shopping entertainment was always waiting to delight Woodies' customers. Beginning in 1890, the store showed free art exhibits to a city which had few other opportunities to see fine art. A show in 1900 featured works by Raphael, Titian, Van Dyke, and Rembrandt, on loan from the British National Gallery. A motion-picture theater was installed in 1913, and beginning in 1915 it screened special educational films produced by the Washington Post for children.

Perhaps most memorable for many Woodies customers over the years were the elaborate window displays, particularly the ones done at Christmas time. A large display department was kept at work constantly inventing dramatic new window exhibits, many of them unrelated to Woodies’ merchandise. 1930 saw the popular “Washington of the Future” exhibit. A Post article in 1961 described the Civil War centennial display then in Woodies’ windows and also mentioned an exhibit of live penguins that had been staged in June, with special air conditioning added to give the animals some modicum of comfort. The company's signature Christmas displays were done in friendly rivalry with other downtown department stores, including Kann’s, Hecht’s, and Lansburgh’s, and tended to the warm-and-cuddly. A 1960 roundup of Christmas displays in the Post found a teddy bear village at Hecht’s, Santa’s blacksmith shop at Kann’s, and Kittenville, USA, at Woodies. The display department might easily spend more than a year planning for these annual exhibits.

A Woodies delivery truck circa 1912 (Source: Library of Congress).

Of course, the shopping was always the most important form of entertainment, and since the store’s earliest days free delivery was offered for all purchases. Woodies' delivery trucks were everywhere in the early years of the 20th century. As remembered by a Post reader in 1984, "The [store's] polished horse-drawn delivery vans were a familiar sight on all the residential streets, clop-clopping along. They were a darkish, reddish color (maroon? mulberry?) and the driver, who handled the reins, wore a matching livery, and so did the 'jumper' on the seat beside him" who carried packages to customers' front doors.

In 1946, the company bought out one of its old rivals, the Palais Royal department store, located in the block just to the north of the Woodies building. The Palais Royal became the Woodies North Building, allowing for significant expansion. The firm soon undertook an elaborate reorganization of merchandise, spreading everything out between the two buildings, and in 1951 an underground tunnel was completed connecting them under G Street. In that same year, a 240-car parking garage was constructed just north of the Palais Royal building, marking the furthest extent of Woodies' downtown property (a striking art deco warehouse and service building had also been built near Union Station in 1937). The company floated a scheme in 1965 to tear down the Palais Royal, the adjacent McLachlan building (which it had recently acquired), and the parking garage and replace them all with a large new building connected to the old Woodies complex via a bridge over G Street. However, fortunately, nothing ever came of that idea.

The purchase of the Palais Royal store in 1946 had included conveyance of its leases to three small suburban branches, which Woodies maintained as its own stores. Two were in Arlington (one in the Pentagon concourse) and another was in Bethesda, serving for many years as Woodies Budget Store. But these small stores could not fulfill Woodies’ vision of a grand emporium stocked with a multitude of goods. No, the real action beginning in the late 1940s was in developing large, suburban stores that would pull people in as shopping destinations, just as the downtown store had done for so many years. As chronicled by Richard Longstreth, the rival Hecht Company was out in front on this trend, opening a large store in the boondocks of Silver Spring in 1947. Woodies responded in 1950 by opening its luxurious Chevy Chase store, designed in a dowdy, semi-neocolonial style but with an interior by the preeminently modernist Raymond Loewy firm. Woodies went on to add more than a dozen additional suburban branch stores in the 1950s and 1960s, most of them located in the mammoth shopping malls that were then attracting so much business.

Postcard view of the Chevy Chase store (Source: Collection of David White).

The same location today (Photo by the author).

The company was always known as Woodward & Lothrop (that is, after a third partner, Charles E. Cochrane, was bought out in its first year). While the store itself was initially called the Boston Dry Goods Store, that moniker was dropped at some point before World War I. The "Woodies" nickname came much later, and apparently was an irritant to some. The Washington Post reader who in 1984 remembered the old delivery trucks also testified that it was not until the 1960s "that I first heard [the store] referred to as 'Woodies,' and then by teen-agers who were too lazy to utter five syllables. And it was a long time after that before the store itself succumbed and began using 'Woodies' in its ads. As for me, I still say Woodward & Lothrop's."

So, what went wrong? How did the company go from such dominance of D.C. retailing to bankruptcy in 1994? Woodies may have been innovative in 1880 but by 1980 it was too set in its ways and falling behind. Deep-pocketed outsiders, like Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, and Neiman-Marcus, began moving into the Washington area and aggressively catering to upscale shoppers. Other national retailers also successfully focused on specific types of products rather than offering a bit of everything, as had been Woodies' forté. The company—not unlike other old-time department stores—seemed unable to recast itself for the new age of retailing. Then in 1984, the chain was sold to Detroit real estate investor A. Alfred Taubman for $227 million. In an interview with the Post in 1985, Taubman stressed that he wasn't going to change anything at Woodies, which must have made some people happy but probably wasn't the best strategy for the chain. In looking back on the Taubman purchase in 1995, the Post commented that the "chain's fate was sealed" with the 1984 purchase, because it had been financed with loans backed by mortgages on Woodies' property. The company became so saddled with debt that it could not afford to invest in modernizing itself. It was only a matter of time before the venerable chain folded.

The downtown building underwent a very restrained face lift, overseen by noted post-modernist architect Michael Graves, in 1986. But it was in for hard times. After Woodies declared bankruptcy in 1994, Federated Department Stores bought the chain's assets, converting some of the stores to the Hecht's nameplate but abandoning others, including the original downtown location. In 1996, the building was bought at auction by the Washington Opera for $18 million, using money donated by Betty Brown Casey. The opera company hoped to convert the building for use as a theater, but the cost of doing so proved unaffordable, and the building was sold again, in 1999, to developer Douglas Jemal for $28.2 million. Jemal renovated the structure in 2002 to provide office space on the upper floors and retail at ground level. Current ground-floor tenants include clothing retailers Forever 21, H & M, and Zara.

In addition to Guilford's book, sources for this article included many newspaper articles, as well as Richard Longstreth, "The Mixed Blessings of Success: The Hecht Company and Department Store Branch Development after World War II" in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (1997). Also, an unsubmitted application to add the downtown building to the National Register of Historic Places and a history of the building prepared by Traceries, Inc., in 1997 were graciously made available by the D.C. Historic Preservation Office.

Dolley Madison's House on Lafayette Square

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:53:00 +0000

On the northeast corner of Lafayette Square sits a distinctive yellow house with an ornamental wrought iron porch. Quaint and domestic as it is, it seems transported from a bygone era, a time when Lafayette Square was where the rich and famous lived and this house on the corner was the epicenter of Washington social life. Dolley Madison (1768-1849) owned the house at one time and was by far its most famous resident. Her presence was so large that some believe it still lingers around the house to this day. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Postcard view of Madison Place, circa 1910. The Dolley Madison House is the one on the left

The house was built in 1820 by former Massachusetts congressman Richard Cutts (1771-1845), then serving as Comptroller of the Treasury, and his wife Anna (1779-1832), Dolley Madison's younger sister. At the time there were few buildings on the "President's Square," which would later be called Lafayette Square. In fact, it had been a great open common, stretching from 15th Street to 17th Street, that was used for mustering the local militia, according to Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, an early resident. The Cutts house was one of the first to break up the open space and the first to be built on the east side of the square. Opposite it on the west side was Decatur House, which had been built in 1819. Some time after these two houses were completed, roads were cut north-south from H Street to Pennsylvania Avenue to form the smaller park in the center that is now Lafayette Square. Additional houses then began lining either side.

The Cutts house originally faced Lafayette Park and stood out prominently as a sturdy two-story house with a gabled roof and large gardens in the rear (extending along H Street) and on the south side. Unfortunately, though he was a high official of the U.S. Treasury, Cutts was apparently not very good at balancing his own books and was thrown in debtors' prison in 1828. To clear himself, he agreed to sell his house to former President James Madison (1751-1836), his brother-in law, for its assessed value of $5,750. The Madisons allowed the Cutts family to continue living in the house until Anna Cutts died in 1832.

Dolley moved in five years later, after James Madison had died. She was an extraordinary and immensely popular individual whose house on Lafayette Square was known far and wide. It became a New Year's Day tradition for Washingtonians of any social standing to call first at the President's House and then cross Lafayette Park to pay respects to Dolley. Her impact on Washington society, beginning in the Jefferson administration and continuing through her husband's, had been profound. Despite an austere Quaker upbringing, Dolley had spearheaded something of a social awakening in Washington through her gracious hosting of everything from informal "levees" to formal White House dinners. Through her social connections she gained such political influence that in 1808, James Madison's rival for the presidency, Charles C. Pinckney, complained that he "was beaten by Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I might have had a better chance had I faced Mr. Madison alone."

The Dolley Madison House c. 1908.

Dolley Madison may be best known today for her heroism during the War of 1812, specifically her valiant efforts (as she reported in a letter to Anna Cutts) to save the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from falling into British hands on August 24, 1814, when the British army captured Washington and burned public buildings, including the White House and the Capitol. She also packed important government papers into trunks for safekeeping. More than 30 years later, in May 1848, Dolley similarly saved her husband's important papers, which she kept in an upstairs trunk, from immanent destruction. She was then spending her last years in her house on Lafayette Square, and the house caught fire, perhaps from arson. Dolley refused to be rescued from the top floor unless the trunk of papers was safely removed with her.

Nearly as well known as Dolley's heroism were her personal foibles. She loved to dress well and had a famous predilection for extravagant turbans. When fleeing the White House in 1814, along with the Stuart portrait of Washington, she tellingly saved a set of red velvet drapes from the oval drawing room. Some have argued that her choice of these drapes when so much else had to be abandoned was reasonable given their high cost in those days, but the fact remains that the woman really loved red.

Perhaps most poignant of Dolley's foibles was her unwavering and truly blind devotion to her ever-dissolute son, John Payne Todd (1792-1852), who contributed mightily to her ultimate financial ruination. Payne was Dolley's son by her first marriage to John Todd, who died in a devastating cholera epidemic in 1793. Payne had been coddled by his adoring mother since birth—overly much, it would seem. As described by Richard Côté in his biography of Dolley, Payne was nothing but trouble. At the age of 13, he was sent to Baltimore to attend school and live with Dolley's friend Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, who had married Napoleon's younger brother. The young and attractive Mrs. Bonaparte, who had a habit of scandalizing society with her revealing clothing, taught Payne "French, dancing, etiquette, and self-indulgences," according to Côté. He never looked back. Handsome and adept at society airs, he spent his life gambling and otherwise frittering away the family fortune on women and extravagant entertainment. Plagued by alcoholism, he ultimately dying penniless and shunned by all who knew him.

Throughout her life, Dolley would never see anything but good in her son, despite the calamitous effects of his spending and, after James had died, his destructive meddling in her affairs. The Madisons had owned a beautiful plantation estate in central Virginia, called Montpelier, where they retired at the end of Madison's presidency, but Dolley was forced to sell it and move back to the Cutts house in Washington when she could no longer afford to keep Montpelier. Production problems on the farm contributed to her financial difficulties, but much of the blame must go to her son, whose constant debts she (and James before her) had always reliably paid.

Dolley Madison in 1848 (Source: Library of Congress)

After Dolley's death, Payne sold the Dolley Madison House to Captain (later Admiral) Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), best known for commanding a grand expedition to explore the South Seas from 1838 to 1842. Wilkes was the first to undertake significant alterations to the house, including moving the main entrance to the H Street side, adding a bay window on the south side, cutting the first-floor windows down to the floor, and installing the ornamental wrought-iron porch on the Madison Place side of the house that remains there today.

Wilkes and his heirs owned the house for 35 years and leased it at various times to a number of important persons. One of these was General George B. McClellan (1826-1885), head of the Union Army at the outset of the Civil War. McClellan, or "Little Mac" as he was known, was perhaps the most exasperating of Abraham Lincoln's many commanders-in-chief and reportedly referred to him as "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon." On the evening of November 13, 1861, Lincoln came to call on Little Mac at the Dolley Madison House to discuss the progress of the war. Adding insult to insubordination, McClellan made Lincoln wait for 30 minutes downstairs before being told that the general had gone to bed and could not see him. After that, Lincoln insisted that McClellan visit him at the White House—at least for a few more months until he got completely fed up and fired him altogether.

In the early 1880s, the Wilkes family first leased and then sold the Dolley Madison House to the Cosmos Club, a social club founded by scientists and intellectuals, including John Wesley Powell and Clarence King. The Club embarked on extensive modifications and additions to the already Wilkes-modified house, including building out a full third floor and expanding the house significantly to the south and east at the first floor level to create large assembly rooms. Further additions were made to the east along H Street in 1894, along with plumbing and electrical upgrades, including an elevator. The club then bought and razed the next two houses to the south (known as the Ingersoll and Windom houses) and constructed a rather bland five-story residential building in their place. Finally the club completed its conquest of the northern half of Madison Place by purchasing the historic Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House in 1917. The Tayloe House, which adjoined the club's new residential building to the south, had been built in 1828.

The indignity of all these expansions and modifications to Dolley's house was nothing compared to the threat of razing it altogether, which hung over the house for the first half of the 20th century. As early as 1902, the McMillan Commission had proposed ruthlessly obliterating virtually all of the existing structures around Lafayette Square and replacing them with a suffocating expanse of leaden, neoclassical, white-marble government buildings. And, for many years, everyone was just fine with this. Fortunately, only slight progress was made towards this ham-handed vision: the ponderous Treasury Annex, designed by Cass Gilbert, was completed at the southeast corner of the square in 1917, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also designed by Gilbert, was constructed on H Street just above the park in 1929. Although the focus of government construction shifted to the massive Federal Triangle project in the 1930s, the plan to redevelop Lafayette Square persisted, and the federal government finally bought the Cosmos Club properties, including the Dolley Madison House, for $1 million in 1940. The club was allowed to lease the building back from the government for another 12 years because funds were not yet available to undertake new construction.

After the club moved out, the Dolley Madison House hosted two federal agencies: the National Science Foundation, from 1952 to 1958, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, from 1958 until 1964. In April 1959, NASA presented its first class of astronauts, known as the Mercury 7, to the world in the assembly room built by the Cosmos Club on the south side of the house.

By the late 1950s, the concept of historic preservation was starting to gain traction just as the government's plans for replacing Lafayette Square's houses were also finally being readied. the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, among others, opposed a large executive office building planned on the west side of the park. As this opposition was voiced, Congress delayed funding, but the development process proceeded. Soon designs were being presented to the Commission of Fine Arts for an executive building on the west side of the park and a courts building on the east side, replacing the Dolley Madison House and others. As described by Kurt Helfrich in a 1996 article in Washington History magazine, the commission was split over the advisability of these plans. Some, including chairman David Finley, wanted to preserve the old buildings and put up new, contextually-sensitive ones alongside them, while others wanted to make bold, modernistic architectural statements free of the encumbrance of the old structures.

Much of the debate up until this point had been in "either/or" terms: either save the old buildings or construct new ones. But the Committee of 100 worked to advance a new idea, originally suggested by philanthropist Charles Glover, Jr., and sketched by architect Grosvenor Chapman, of building the larger new structures behind the existing historic ones, connecting to them at the rear, and integrating the entire complex. Chapman made a sketch of how this might look on the west side of the square, and the sketch was passed on to President Kennedy. Soon the Kennedys—particularly Mrs. Kennedy—were making a full-court press to preserve as much of Lafayette Square's heritage as possible. Despite an estimated $4 million that, according to the Washington Post, had already been spent on planning replacement buildings, the project was re-worked. Architect John Carl Warnecke, who had personal connections with the Kennedys, developed new designs based on the Glover/Chapman vision, and these were implemented in the 1960s. The Dolley Madison House is now part of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

While it may seem strange now, Warnecke's work was dismissed by some, and the "meddling" of the First Lady in the plans for the square derided. For example, Ralph Walker, a member of the Commission of Fine Arts, complained in 1962 that "...we live in an age of bigness. We don't live in an age of tiny little things put together—this is one opportunity that we had of making [Lafayette Square] one of the most important squares in the whole world.... What we have done is frivolously piddled it away in the restoration of unimportant buildings." Fortunately, he was out-voted, and the Dolley Madison House is still with us.

As, perhaps, is the spirit of Dolley herself, which is said to still linger around her house. Tour guides like to pass on the story that late at night men leaving the Washington Club, which was several doors down in the late 19th century, would tip their hats to the ghost of Dolley, seen gently rocking in her favorite chair on the porch of her house. John Alexander's Ghosts: Washington Revisited mentions the story and includes a picture of the porch. Only trouble is, the porch wasn't added to the house until after Dolley had died. Actually, another trouble is that this particular ornamental porch could scarcely accommodate a rocking chair; it's too shallow. But I suppose if you're a gentle ghost and you want to sit rocking late at night, you'll just do it wherever you please...

Sources for this article included: John Alexander, Ghosts: Washington Revisited (1998); Michael Bednar, L'Enfant's Legacy: Public Open Spaces in Washington, D.C. (2006); Richard N. Côté, Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison (2005); Harold D. Eberlein and Cortlandt V. Hubbard, Historic Houses of George-town & Washington City (1958); Kurt Helfrich, "Modernism for Washington: The Kennedys and the Redesign of Lafayette Square" in Washington History (Vol. 8, No. 1, 1996); Historic American Buildings Survey, Richard Cutts House (1958); Charles Moore, Washington Past and Present (1929); Thomas M. Spaulding, The Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square (1949); Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, Our Neighbors on Lafayette Square (1872, reprinted 1982); United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Dolley Madison House and The Tayloe House (undated pamphlets), and numerous newspaper articles.

Doctors Hospital, a 'Hotel for the Sick'

noreply@blogger.com (StreetsofWashington) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:26:00 +0000

It seems that as long as hospitals have been around, they've seemed dreary and depressing, or at times even unhealthful. The first D.C. hospital, for example, was a decidedly morbid place, opened at the Washington Asylum for indigents during a cholera epidemic in 1832. Medical practitioners have been trying for a long time to do better than that. One major step forward occurred downtown in 1940, when a group of doctors realized their long-held vision of constructing a modern, private, un-hospital-like hospital in the 1800 block of I Street NW. (The immense International Square complex, completed in 1982, fills the block now.)

This particular group of doctors, led by acclaimed surgeon Dr. Charles S. White, were no strangers to building construction. Originally a group of eight, they had organized themselves in 1924 to build a medical office building on the corner of 18th and I Streets NW. In those days physicians were increasingly relying on laboratories and other technical facilities for support, and they needed a centralized building where offices and labs could be close by. That first eight-story building, called the Washington Medical Building, was completed by the end of 1925. It was fully occupied less than a year later, and soon more space was sorely needed. Thus a second, twin office building was completed in 1929, at the opposite end of the block, at 19th and I. That one was called the Columbia Medical Building.

In the middle of the block between them was a site they wouldn't be able to get their hands on for another ten years. It had been occupied since the city's earliest days by the Quakers, who secured it for a meetinghouse in 1808 for $465.60. By 1883 a schoolhouse was built next to the meetinghouse, and the Quakers hired a 24-year-old teacher from Baltimore, Thomas W. Sidwell, to run it. The school, of course, flourished. Beginning in 1911, property on upper Wisconsin Avenue was bought and originally used by the school for a clubhouse. In 1937 the school consolidated at that semi-suburban location and finally sold the old I Street property to the doctors who had been coveting it for years.

The former site of Doctors' Hospital as it appears today.

The plan was to build a hospital in the center of the block, connecting it to the office buildings on both sides and thus creating a giant block-long medical complex. While the zoning commission had limited the two medical buildings to 8 stories each, they allowed the hospital building to go up to 10, which had the effect of setting it off as the centerpiece of the block. Groundbreaking occurred in 1939, and the hospital, which cost $1.6 million to build, was ready to open its doors in March 1940. It was equipped with 250 beds, 10 operating rooms, 4 delivery rooms, and nurseries for 65 babies.

The Doctors' Hospital building was a very restrained art moderne edifice, strikingly solid, like a bank building perhaps more than a hospital. The idea was that it shouldn't resemble any hospital you would recognize. Walking in the front door, the lobby looked like—was supposed to look like—a hotel. "The first noticeable departure from the usual in hospitals is the inviting and attractive lobby, furnished and decorated completely with 18th-century authentic reproductions," announced a commemorative book published when the hospital opened. The lobby featured a walnut wainscot and cream-colored walls. The builder, Lee Paschall, was a successful hotel man from Richmond, Virginia, who had been collaborating with the doctors since they built their first medical building. He knew what people wanted in a hotel, and he did his best to give Doctors' Hospital that same feel.

Reviewing the new hospital in February 1940, the Washington Post quoted its administrator as saying that it was to be a 'hotel for the sick.' "Beds will be furnished with foam rubber mattresses and pillows. Wooden furniture, of French provincial design, will be used throughout and every room for patients will have Venetian blinds and gaily colored drapes." The paint schemes were muted pastels; gray-green "of a soft and restful shade" in the elevators, according to an admiring Post reviewer. Patient rooms with a southern exposure were painted with "cool, subdued shades" while those on the northern side had "warmer, creamier tints." What more could an invalid want?

More importantly than the soothing decor, the new hospital was intended to be a model of machine-age automation and efficiency. The architects, Francisco & Jacobus of New York, were primarily an engineering firm that had built factories and power houses. For the operating rooms, specialized treatment facilities, and other support areas at the back of the building, they designed large expanses of glass-block windows, giving that part of the building a semi-industrial feel. In addition, much was made in the press of the hospital's communications systems. "Special measures have been taken to eliminate the ancient complaint about nurses who fail to answer patients' calls. Instead of a bell system, patients will have two-way communication with the central office for the floor. A secretary or floor administrator will be on duty on each floor to receive calls from patients, route directions to nurses and receive guests," reported the Post, which was apparently unaware that electronic signals can be ignored as readily as mechanical bells. More elaborately, the delivery rooms had foot-operated emergency call buttons, which "ring a bell at the obstetric nurse's station, light a corridome over the delivery room door, sound a buzzer, and light a lamp at the nurse's annunciator." With all that commotion, somebody was sure to take notice.

The idea of industrial efficiency surely resonated deeply with the successful early-20th-century doctors who had built this hospital. And let's be clear; they were nothing if not hard-nosed businessmen. By the time the block-long medical complex was completed, it was owned by a corporation with some 300 stockholders, most of them doctors. All three buildings had been constructed as inexpensively as possible, were funded entirely with private funds, and were expected to turn a profit. Further, they wouldn't take anyone who couldn't pay. "The person who is unfortunate enough to become ill should not be expected to contribute to the support of the indigent," Dr. White said at the hospital's groundbreaking. "That is the responsibility of the municipality and not the duty of a small percentage of our citizens.... We expect to conduct the institution on a sound business basis..."

Doctors' Hospital prospered during its first couple of decades. In 1950, Dr. White reported that the hospital was reliably filled to capacity, and "we always have a waiting list." An addition was built to the rear of the hospital in 1957, bringing the total number of beds to 368, and plans were being made for a further addition as late as 1966, although those apparently were not realized. In an article for the Post entitled "Doctors Hospital Joins The Community," Stuart Auerbach wrote in 1968 that the formerly aloof, profit-oriented institution was beginning to loosen up a bit. A group of younger doctors had took the leadership of the hospital's board in 1965 and made changes, including adopting a "not-for-profit" status, opening an emergency room, and accepting approximately 3 percent of patients as charity cases. Hopes were high that the days of worrying about paying for the indigent sick were over. With the new Medicaid and Medicare programs in place, the hospital's administrator told Auerbach that "every patient will be a private patient."

So, with everything going along swimmingly, whatever happened to Doctors' Hospital? It used to be right there in the heart of the downtown medical community, which is still quite extensive. But Doctors' vanished without a trace. A combination of factors seems to have done it in, including hard-to-resist development pressures, some hints of scandal, and a dose of bad timing.

By 1973, the complex had already lost one of its three components—the original Washington Medical Building, which was torn down to accommodate Metro construction. An entrance to the Farragut West station is now on that corner. In January of that year, the hospital owners announced grand plans to redevelop the entire property. The idea was that while the Doctors' Hospital block would be redeveloped as commercial office space, a new hospital would be built in the next block to the west, where land was (inexplicably) much cheaper. The hospital, of course, wouldn't move until its new home was completed.

But the plans started to fall apart almost immediately. In August, the Post published a six-part exposé on the hospital industry by Victor Cohn in which Washington-area hospitals were blasted for planning extravagant and unneeded additions and replacements. The unneeded hospital beds would surely drive up health care costs, Cohn argued. The fallout of the series was increasing scrutiny by government regulators of hospital building plans. Doctors' was nevertheless able to retain a "certificate of need," which gave it approval to plan a replacement facility (some said as a result of connections between a key board member, parking-lot magnate Dominic Antonelli, and the head of the D.C. Department of Human Resources, Joseph P. Yeldell). But that planning effort grew shakier all the time. Financing supposedly was difficult at the originally intended location, though health professionals favored it, and that site was sold. Other sites were proposed, as were alliances with other organizations that sought hospital space, but all ultimately fell through.

Soon Doctors' Hospital was getting squeezed on both ends. By 1977, the first segment of the new International Square complex, on the K Street side of the block, was completed, and yet Doctors' had nowhere to go. One of its last gambits was to propose moving into a facility known as the Metropolitan Hotel (not to be confused with the famous hotel of the same name on Pennsylvania Avenue), which had been constructed in 1971 as an extended-care center but had been converted into a regular hotel. Much haggling with the D.C. government ensued over several years. The specific arguments were over financing and planning details, but the larger issue was always whether another hospital was really needed.

In September 1979, Doctors' suddenly announced that not only had it been unable to obtain adequate financing to convert the Metropolitan Hotel into its new facility, but that it was bankrupt and would close its doors for good within weeks. While some commentators expressed shock, other suggested that the impact of the closing on health care would be minimal, since other area hospitals indeed had extra capacity. The hospital building was torn down in 1980, and by 1982, the International Square complex—one of the few brutalist structures in D.C. that does not spark immediate revulsion in the eyes of most observers—filled almost all of the block. Incidentally, the Metropolitan Hotel also went bankrupt; it was renovated and is now the Renaissance Washington DC Dupont Circle Hotel.