Mount Vernon Squangle

Streets of Washington, written by John DeFerrari, covers some of DC’s most interesting buildings and history. John is the author of Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C.: Capital Eats, published by the History Press, Inc. and also the author of Lost Washington DC.

One of Washington’s perennial struggles has been to find suitable indoor venues for large public performances, conventions, and other events. The first convention hall was the one built at 5th and K Streets NW in 1875, which we profiled in 2010. It had many limitations, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, city leaders craved something more worthy of the nation’s capital. As we saw last June, Susan Whitney Dimock (1845-1939) tried unsuccessfully to have a grand George Washington Memorial Hall built on the mall. But even as the cornerstone for that project was being laid in November 1921, the city’s business leaders decided—wisely—not to wait for it. Instead they raised funds entirely on their own to demonstrate the business community’s independent ability to build a large, elegant new auditorium to meet the pressing need. But the beautiful and expensive theater they built would entertain Washingtonians for just ten years before being taken over by the federal government for office space.

The Washington Auditorium in 1926 (author’s collection).

The effort to build the Washington Auditorium, as it was called, was headed by “Colonel” Robert Newton Harper (1861-1940), a native of Leesburg, Virginia, who was president of the American National Bank. Harper broke fundraising up by commercial sector, with 100 different committees of business leaders in charge of raising $5,000 each. True to their business roots, the organizers decided to offer subscriptions to the project as investments, equally split between stock and bonds, rather than charitable contributions. Philip King, president of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, pledged to head one of the fundraising committees, and in a letter to Harper he summed up the rationale for the new auditorium: “Not merely from the standpoint of the dollars that come to the community from a big assemblage but more particularly from the better understanding and educational factors, do big conventions appeal to me as an admirable acquisition to the community. Great gatherings of tradesmen, of the professions and all classes of people generally tend to the refining and betterment of all who come within the range of such gatherings.” (more…)