Streets of Washington

Streets of Washington Presents – The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Willard Hotel in the 20th Century

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington, written by John DeFerrari, covers some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history. John is also the author of Lost Washington DC.

Last time we re-lived the Willard Hotel’s early era, when it was run by brothers Henry and Joseph Willard and occupied a sprawling complex of low-rise 19th-century buildings on the northwest corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. With the death of Joseph in 1897, control of the hotel fell to his son, “Captain” Joseph E. Willard (1865-1924), who had big changes in mind. As the 20th century dawned, a new era and a new building were in store for Washington’s most prominent hotel, and there would be plenty of drama ahead as well. At one point the building was abandoned and left in ruins, but it finally took on a new life as the once-again grand hotel we know today.


The Willard Hotel, circa 1910 (author’s collection).

The younger Joseph, though born in the Willard, immediately began planning to replace it when he gained control of the property. He hired architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (1847-1918) to design a thoroughly modern new building. Hardenbergh had designed New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and would soon be working on the Plaza Hotel there as well. For the Willard, he created a soaring Beaux-Arts palace that resembled in many ways his other Washington hostelry, the Raleigh. Sometimes called Washington’s first skyscraper, the new Willard used advanced construction techniques, including a steel frame and reinforced concrete base. The stately exterior finishes included rusticated Indiana limestone curtain walls on the first three stories with beige brick and terracotta detailing above. The highly-ornamented top-floor dormers, curved mansard roof, and bullseye windows have become iconic.

Construction took place in two phases so as to allow hotel operations to continue uninterrupted. The first part of the new hotel—the southern section on Pennsylvania Avenue—went up between 1900 and 1901, while guests stayed in the northern part of the old hotel opening on F Street. The hotel’s sumptuous new main lobby on Pennsylvania Avenue opened for business in October 1901. After guests moved into the new structure, the rest of the building went up between 1902 and 1904.

Like the Raleigh, the new Willard included a lavish ballroom and private dining room on the top floor with magnificent views of the city. At street level were the restaurants. The main restaurant on the first floor was “one of the largest and most elegant dining halls to be found anywhere,” according to The Washington Times. “With its richly decorated ceiling and great columns it is a sight worth looking upon.” Across the long main corridor, which in time would be called Peacock Alley, was the so-called Pompeian Room, a “dangerous” place in some people’s minds, because men and women could mingle there, and women were allowed to smoke. Overlooking all this activity was a balcony designed to accommodate the hotel’s in-house orchestra.

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Streets of Washington Presents – The Willard Hotel in the 19th Century

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington, written by John DeFerrari, covers some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history. John is also the author of Lost Washington DC.

Of Washington’s great hotels, the Willard is one of the most celebrated and easily recognized. Many people know that President Lincoln stayed at Willard’s before he was inaugurated in 1861. Others believe (incorrectly) that the word “lobbyist” was coined to refer to promoters of various causes who hung around the Willard’s lobby, hoping to buttonhole President Ulysses S. Grant for favors. But fewer realize how many incarnations the old hotel has had, that it began life as a rather mediocre hostelry, or that many of the famous events in its history occurred in a very different, earlier building.


Early view of Pennsylvania Avenue with the City Hotel on the right (Source: Library of Congress).

There has been a hotel on the northwest corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, since 1818, almost three decades before the Willard brothers showed up to take over its operations. The prominent early Washington landowner, John Tayloe (1770-1828), whose elegant Octagon House is one of Washington’s great mansions, acquired this property and built a row of six townhouses here as an investment in 1816, renting out the corner building to be used as a hotel two years later.

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Streets of Washington Presents – St. James Hotel

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington, written by John DeFerrari, covers some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history. John is also the author of Lost Washington DC.

When traveling to Washington in the early 1900s—by train, of course—you would have arrived either at the Baltimore & Ohio Station on Capitol Hill or at the Baltimore & Potomac Station on the western end of the Mall, where the National Gallery of Art now stands. Stumbling out of that station, in desperate need of lodgings, you would have to travel a block north to Pennsylvania Avenue to get to the famous National Hotel across the wide street on the right or the nearly-as-famous Metropolitan Hotel down the block to the left. But if you didn’t want to lug your bags that far, you could choose the St. James, immediately to your right, on the southeast corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania.

The St. James was never quite as prominent as its rival neighbors, although it strove for its own brand of distinction and capitalized on its strategic location. It was opened as Bunker’s Avenue Hotel by George W. Bunker (1834-1889) shortly after the Civil War. Bunker, a native of New Hampshire, had been a manager at the National Hotel for six years and had also worked at the Seaton House hotel, a block to the west. John Wilkes Booth stayed at the National in April 1865, and during the court inquiry into the assassination of President Lincoln, Bunker testified about Booth’s comings and goings, which he had observed.

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Streets of Washington Presents – The Government Printing Office in Swampoodle

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington covers some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history and is written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of Lost Washington DC.

The reputation of DC’s charmingly-named Swampoodle neighborhood was for its tough Irish street brawlers. Both the Irish toughs and their swampy ground are now gone, but one immense institution has remained there through it all, the Government Printing Office at H and North Capitol Streets, NW. The printing office—nicknamed “The Swamp” in its early days—has been one of Washington’s most contradictory institutions. Once a grimy factory of hard-working laborers culled largely from the surrounding rough-and-tumble neighborhood, for 150 years it’s also been an elite producer of elegant government documents, including extraordinary hand-bound volumes of the nation’s most precious records.


GPO’s 1903 building (postcard from the author’s collection).


The 1903 GPO building today (photo by the author).

There has always been a recognized need for printing official government documents; the British designated “publick printers” for this purpose in the early colonies. Benjamin Franklin was one, producing official documents for Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. After independence, the U.S. Congress continued the practice of chartering private companies to do public printing, usually at fixed rates, but as the 19th century progressed and the need for printed documents mushroomed, private companies fortunate enough to be designated as official printers were increasingly accused of fraud and corruption. Congress put an end to all that by passing a law establishing the Government Printing Office in 1861. It would be a completely government-operated facility, and its chief would carry the title of Public Printer.

To outfit the new GPO, the government purchased the printing office that Cornelius Wendell (1811-1870) had built in 1857 at the corner of H and North Capitol. Wendell had been an official printer, and most of the government’s printing work was already taking place at this site, one of the largest and most complete printing plants in the country.

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Streets of Washington Presents – The Chevy Chase Ice Palace

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

It was supposedly “one of the largest parking and shopping units in the country” when the Chevy Chase Ice Palace and Sports Center opened in 1938 on upper Connecticut Avenue. As strip malls go, the building, which still stands in the 4400 block of Connecticut Avenue just north of the Van Ness Metro stop, now looks quite tiny, which says something either for the exaggeration of the Washington Post article of November 20, 1938, the growth of shopping malls since then,—or both.

In 1938, this part of the city was well on its way to transitioning from a lightly populated “suburb” within the District to an urban residential zone. The avenue had been zoned in 1920 such that most of it was to be lined with medium-density apartment buildings. At regular intervals, single blocks were designated for commercial development. The 4400 block was one such commercial zone.

Developer Garfield I. Kass (1890–1975) saw a great opportunity at this location, despite the difficult site that sloped steeply from street level down to a tributary of Rock Creek in the valley below. There was pent-up demand for shopping from local residents that did not have other options in their neighborhood. Beyond that, “park and shop” centers like this one were hot commodities in the 1930s, after the successful development in 1930 of the Park and Shop center just down the street in Cleveland Park. Kass had already developed park and shop centers in the Rosslyn and Clarendon neighborhoods of Arlington County, Virginia, and another at Georgia Avenue and Rittenhouse Street, NW, in Shepherd Park. Situating such centers along main commuting arteries—on the same side of the street as the evening, homeward-bound traffic—was sure to make for substantial profits.

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Streets of Washington Presents The Old Post Office Building

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The Old Post Office building at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW is easily recognized and admired these days, though it wasn’t always so. The building was threatened with demolition in the early 1970s and spurred the creation of Don’t Tear It Down, a group dedicated to preserving the city’s historical heritage. After successfully pushing to save the Old Post Office, Don’t Tear It Down, which eventually was renamed the D.C. Preservation League, went on to advocate for many other historical structures in the city and continues to be the city’s leader in encouraging real estate development that doesn’t needlessly destroy important historic structures.


Postcard view of the Old Post Office (Author’s collection).

Monumental as the building is, people have wanted to change it almost since the day it was completed in 1899. The site for the new building was the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, always the less-desirable side of the street in the 19th century. The land south of the avenue where an old creek had been turned into the city canal tended to be swampy, unstable ground, not particularly suited to construction of large buildings. The area immediately to the west of the Old Post Office had been known as Murder Bay during the Civil War, an area of dingy saloons, gambling dens, bordellos, and ramshackle frame shanties housing hundreds of poor people, mostly African-Americans. “The water soaking through from the canal kept the ground continuously wet, and the feet of the people passing churned the soft ground into black and odorous mud, making even the ground consistent with the depravity that existed there,” remarked The Washington Post in 1888. In the decades after the war, the worst problems had been addressed; the old city canal was turned into an underground sewer, and light industrial buildings—machine shops and lumber yards—began to fill the area. It was this edgy, semi-industrial neighborhood that was chosen one day in 1890 to be home of the enormous new government office building.

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Streets of Washington Presents The Equitable Building

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The former home of the Equitable Co-operative Building Association at 915 F Street NW, completed in 1912, is a small but eminently distinguished bank building. One glance at the facade dominated by four great Ionic columns, and you know what type of business operated here. What’s less obvious is that this was a uniquely progressive financial institution, meant to help the “little guy” save money, and it was founded by one of Washington’s most prominent and civic-minded citizens, John Joy Edson (1846-1935). The unique building—designated as an historic landmark both for its exterior and main banking room—has survived years of neglect as a nightclub and is currently being rehabilitated for retail use by the Douglas Development Corporation. It will be the site of the D.C. Preservation League’s 41st annual gala fundraiser on April 26, 2012, where attendees will have a unique opportunity to enjoy the beautiful former banking room inside.


The Equitable Building in 2010. Photo by the author.

Equitable was founded in 1879 by a group of leading citizens, including John Joy Edson, who would become its president in 1893. It was one of the first such associations to be founded in Washington. The intent of these small institutions was to encourage ordinary people to save money and also to make it easier for them to purchase homes by making loans on better terms than traditional banks offered. Members would “subscribe” to one or more shares of the association, pay modest monthly dues on those shares, and receive dividends in return as well as access to low-rate loans.


John Joy Edson, circa 1903. Source; Library of Congress.

Edson, Equitable’s leading light, was born in Jefferson, Ohio, in 1846. His family later moved to New York City, where in 1861, at the age of 15, he enlisted in the 61st New York Infantry (he said he was 19). He fought with the Army of the Potomac in several major Civil War engagements, including the Battle of Fredericksburg, where he was wounded. He was taken to the Armory Hospital on the Mall in Washington and discharged in March 1863. Once out of the army, he got a position as a clerk in the Treasury Department and went to school at night, earning a law degree from Columbian College (now George Washington University). In 1875 he went into practice as a patent lawyer and also began his involvement in banking, participating in the organization of several institutions, including Equitable in 1879 and the Washington Loan & Trust Company in 1889. He became president of Washington Loan & Trust in 1894, a year after assuming the same position at Equitable.

Washington Loan & Trust was the first trust company in the city and for many years the largest. It built and occupied the huge Romanesque Revival structure on the southwest corner of 9th and F Street, NW, across the street from Equitable. In running the two institutions, Edson had both the power and prestige of the large savings and loan company as well as the good karma of the smaller cooperative association across the street.

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Streets of Washington Presents the National Bank of Washington building

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The monumental bank building on the southeast corner of 14th and G Streets, NW—vacant now for well over a decade—is one of several such landmarks in Washington’s old financial district, but it has lived the ups and downs of the banking industry much more dramatically than the others. It was born as the home of a feverish enterprise that burned itself out after only 20 years. After going on to host the venerable National Bank of Washington for many decades, it went dark when that institution also collapsed in 1990. For more than a decade now, plans have been afoot to turn it into a museum to commemorate the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. The building, including its interior, is protected as an historic landmark. It’s one of only 13 properties in the District with an historic interior designation. As reassuring as it is that plans are in the works for the building’s future, it is also disheartening to see it stand vacant for so long—an unintended reminder, should we need one, of how impermanent our financial institutions can be, despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise.


The bank building as it appeared in 1995 (Photo courtesy of the archives of the D.C. Preservation League).

Constructed in 1926, the building was originally the home of the Federal-American National Bank, which had been founded 13 years earlier. Its first and only president was John Poole (1875-1940), an extraordinary individual who once wielded enormous influence in the local financial world. Poole’s roots were humble; he was born to a Parkersburg, West Virginia, grocer who moved his family to Washington when John was only a month old. Young Poole was educated in DC public schools and began his professional career as a messenger for the United States Express Company. His talents apparently were recognized, and he quickly worked his way up through several DC financial institutions.


John Poole (Source: Library of Congress).

By 1912, Poole was 36 years old and at the top of his game as cashier of the Commercial National Bank. The Washington Post noted that Poole was “near the head of this city’s group of younger bankers.” It was an opportune time to be in the financial world; Washington’s banks had grown tremendously since the turn of the century, more than tripling their assets. Then in January 1913, Poole, who was also on the board of directors, led a group of 13 board members who decided to split off from the Commercial National and form their own bank. Their new Federal National Bank was an instant sensation, raising $1.5 million from investors within three days of being announced. It opened the doors of its fully-furnished banking room just two days after that. A throng of new customers deposited almost $500,000 on opening day.

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Streets of Washington Presents The Aqueduct Bridge, Gateway to Georgetown

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The Aqueduct Bridge, Gateway to Georgetown

Before the magnificent Francis Scott Key Bridge was completed in 1923, a far homelier structure linked Georgetown to Rosslyn. Known as the Potomac Aqueduct or Aqueduct Bridge, it was born of Alexandria’s aspirations to rival Georgetown as a commercial hub. A remarkable engineering achievement, the bridge served as a vital Potomac crossing for 80 years.


The Potomac Aqueduct, c. 1865. Source: Library of Congress

It all began with construction of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in the 1820s. The canal project was a long, complex, and expensive effort originally intended to spur commercial trade with Georgetown (and Washington) by establishing an economical transportation link to the vast and fertile Ohio Valley. It turned out to be too expensive to build it all the way across the mountains to the Midwest, and it never lived up to its investors’ early hopes, but in the 1820s it seemed like the next big thing for the city. Alexandria merchants sorely wanted to get in on this expected action. It would have been too expensive to unload canal boats arriving in Georgetown and reload them on river boats to take them down to Alexandria, so a non-stop method was needed to get the canal boats to Alexandria.

The solution was to build an aqueduct bridge over the Potomac and connect it to a canal on the Virginia side to carry boat traffic down to Alexandria. Congress granted a charter to the Alexandria Canal Company in 1830 and pitched in $100,000 to support the project, which was to be privately owned. Work began in 1833 on both the bridge and the Alexandria canal and lasted a full decade. (All that’s left of the canal is a recreated lock at the privately-owned Tidal Lock Park on the Alexandria Waterfront.)

When Congress stepped in, it put the U.S. Topographical Engineers, predecessors of the Army Crops of Engineers, in charge of the bridge work. Captain William Turnbull (1800-1857) headed this daunting task. Building the bridge’s piers was the biggest challenge. The plan was to construct cofferdams at appropriate spots in the river, pump the water out and then build the piers inside them. However, they had to be built at an incredible depth—through 18 feet of water and 17 feet of silt—to reach a solid bedrock foundation. River cofferdams had never been built so deep before. The first ones erected leaked mercilessly and had to be completely replaced. The second set were little better, filling with water after an hour or so and with mud oozing in from below.

As recounted by Pamela Scott, Turnbull was clearly concerned that the deep and unproven cofferdams—even when finally watertight—might not hold up while the bridge piers were being constructed inside them. In his journal, he observed that the spectacle of “men busily at work so far below the surface of the river, seemed to interest the public exceedingly; but to the engineer, whatever might be his confidence in the ability of the dam to resist the immense weight which he knew to be constantly pressing upon it in the most insidious form, the sight was one which filled him with anxiety, and urged him to the most unceasing watchfulness.”

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Streets of Washington Presents Bertram’s Pipe Shop

By Prince Of Petworth

Streets of Washington is the brilliant blog covering some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history written by John DeFerrari. John is also the author of the equally brilliant Lost Washington DC. ‘Streets of Washington Presents…’ will feature some fascinating buildings and history from around PoPville.

The art of making a really good pipe seems to have died out, and many would say that’s a good thing. But if we set aside the health and social issues for a moment, we discover a business that once relied on skilled artisans to make its very finest products. In Washington, D.C., the very best pipes were made by Bertram’s on 14th Street, opposite Franklin Park, and it seems like almost every famous world leader from the early 20th century who smoked had his pipe made there.

Benjamin Bertram Goldmann was born in Leipzig, Germany, some time in the late 1870s, the son of a master pipe maker who passed the exacting craft on to his son. Bertram emigrated to the United States and had a pipe shop first in Baltimore but then moved to D.C., where he settled on 14th Street early in the 1900s. A Washington Post reporter visited the old man in his shop in 1933 and found him muttering about all the bad things that pipe owners and other pipe makers do to their pipes. Beyond not scrupulously caring for a good pipe, anyone who would paint or varnish the outside of a pipe was essentially committing a crime against humanity, according to Bertram. His pipes were handcrafted from carefully selected pieces of briar root imported from Algeria. Only the pieces with the grain just-so were acceptable. Beyond the briar pipe bowls, Bertram used amber, Bakelite, and bands of silver and gold. The pipe bowls were a light, blond color when new and would darken to a rich shade of mahogany as time went by. These pipes were veritable works of art.

Bertram passed the business on to his son, Sydney Bertram Goldman (c. 1904-1960), who ran the store during its peak years. The shop sold President Franklin Delano Roosevelt his famous goose-quill cigarette holders. It also sold only the best pipe tobacco and cigars. When Winston Churchill was in town he bought his fine Romeo y Julieta cigars, made in Havana, from Bertram’s. They sold for a dollar apiece at the time. According to the Post, Bertram’s also supplied Joseph Stalin with its best Capitol Blend pipe tobacco via the Soviet Embassy. General Douglas MacArthur’s iconic corncob pipes came from Bertram’s. Entertainers such as Edward G. Robinson and Red Skelton were also customers.


The location of the former Bertram’s store (Photo by the author).

The store moved a few doors up to 920 14th Street NW in 1947. The new building was festooned with a rather eccentric carved glass frieze of a hunting scene on its facade. When the new place opened, Sydney Goldman, who had served in the Marines during the war, made a point of hiring 49 disabled veterans to work in the pipe-making shop.

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