I hope you’ll want to take a look at it when it comes out. In addition to the stories, check out the many fun illustrations that I enjoyed assembling.

There are two big, can’t-miss events in early September to celebrate the book:

• Sunday September 6, I will discuss the book at Politics & Prose at 5pm on Connecticut Avenue. Joining me will be DC Design Tours founder Carolyn Muraskin. Carolyn really knows DC’s built environment, and I can’t wait to discuss the book with her.

• Thursday September 10 will mark the official book launch at the DC History Center at 6pm, sponsored jointly by the DC Preservation League and the DC History Center. I’ll be talking with Kim Williams, an author and architectural historian at the DC Historic Preservation Office who has given me so much invaluable advice and encouragement on this and many other projects. It’ll be a great conversation.

There will be other events to come as well. This is just the start. I hope you can join us!

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Designed by Major William Haywood Bell, an officer in the Army’s ordnance department, the Columbian Armory and “Depository of National Trophies” was built near the northwest corner of 6^th Street and Independence Avenue SW.1 It offered drill rooms for the militia and storage for their arms and also displayed historical artifacts from previous conflicts. In 1858, an article in the Daily National Intelligencer praised the new building, noting that its “beautiful chandeliers” had just been tested and that visitors had complimented the “beauty of the halls and the quality of the materials and workmanship.” The “halls are admirably fitted for the purposes intended, and the lower hall could, in addition to a depository for artillery, be used as a drill room, there being sufficient room for two companies to practice at the same time. The ladies who were present last evening could not forbear expressing a wish that Uncle Sam would let them have a dance or two on the admirable floor of the spacious main hall.”2

The reference to a potential dual purpose as a civilian social hall as well as armory is consistent with widespread 19^th century practice. No one seems to have thought the militia would need exclusive use of the facility. In fact, its use as an armory was short lived. After the start of the Civil War, the building along with the large open space next to it, known as Armory Square, was transformed into a military hospital complex, with rows of additional temporary wooden structures extending out on to the Mall.3

The Armory Square Hospital was only a short distance up Maryland Avenue from the southwest waterfront, where hundreds of casualties from the great battles in Virginia arrived in seemingly endless waves. The most severe cases—those unlikely to survive the bumpy ride to larger suburban hospital camps—would usually be sent to Armory Square. Here a corps of volunteer doctors and nurses would do what they could for them. Walt Whitman visited frequently to comfort the wounded and dying, as did President Lincoln. Nurse Amanda Akin later recalled that Lincoln “came often to visit the hospital and shake hands with the soldiers, always with a kind word, when his eyes had a sad, far-away look, and he often paused before those suffering most intensely to utter a warm ‘God bless you.’”4

At the conclusion of the war, the hospital was shut down and the temporary wooden structures removed, but the old armory remained in place, ready to serve new purposes. After about a ten-year hiatus, it was turned over to the Smithsonian, which used it to store items donated from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The items would be moved to the new National Museum building—now the Arts and Industries Building—when it was completed in 1881.

Later that same year, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, which had been established in 1871 as an arm of the Smithsonian, made its headquarters in the now vacant Armory building. Tasked with addressing a decline in American fish stocks, the Commission’s scientists studied fish propagation and hatched fish by the millions, using Armory building tanks and large ponds on the Washington Monument grounds. A railroad siding was constructed next to the Armory from which special railcars loaded with eggs and young fish were sent all around the country.5

The commission prospered and grew, and the Armory building became a notable tourist attraction in the process. “Here, on the basement floor, can be seen various aquaria filled with growing plants and inhabited by fishes, rare and common, and by quaint and pretty swimming and creeping things that dwell in the rivers and sea,” according to an 1897 guidebook.6 In 1903, the Fish Commission became the Bureau of Fisheries within the new Commerce Department. By then its aquarium in the Armory basement was more popular than ever, and bureau officials began lobbying for a larger building. According to Commissioner George Bowers, in 1911 “more sightseers in Washington now visit the tank in the bureau of fisheries, where are kept two little seals from Alaska, than any other government exhibit in Washington.”7 Congress was predictably reluctant to appropriate funds for a new aquarium, so it stayed put in the Armory for many more years. Finally, in 1932, the Bureau of Fisheries moved into the Commerce Department’s new Federal Triangle building and opened a much expanded National Aquarium in the basement of that building. The aquarium remained at the Commerce Department until it closed in 2013.8

After the fisheries bureau left, the old Armory building found other uses. At one point, the Agriculture Department set up a motion picture theater in the main hall. During World War II, ugly temporary office buildings sprang up all around it and across the Mall. The War Production Board and a Navy photographic laboratory were set up inside the armory. By the early 1960s, the General Services Administration was using the building for storage and a paint shop. Robert D. Daly, commissioner of the Public Buildings Service, reportedly claimed (without evidence) that the armory was the 19th century equivalent of a tempo. This seems to have given the GSA cover for declaring in December 1963 that the building was “obsolete” and scheduling it to be torn down along with several nearby wartime tempos. While the Washington Post ran a front-page article noting the building’s rich historical significance, no one seems to have made any appreciable effort to save the landmark. The Post noted that Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall signed off on the demolition since the National Park Service was its “principal beneficiary.” Sometime in early 1964, it was gone.9

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.1

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.

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.2

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.3

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!

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.4 By the time of its 50th anniversary in 1955, the chain had 155 stores in 7 states.

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.5

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 the 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.

Soon Peoples was once again an industry leader, and Fantle was seen as a masterful turn-around artist. But the changes were not all appreciated. One by one, the beloved soda fountains, for example, were 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.”6

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. 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.

This article first appeared on Streets of Washington in December 2011. Special thanks to Faye Haskins and Derek Gray of the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library for their invaluable assistance.

Sumner was a celebrated orator, packing the halls of Congress when he gave speeches that forcefully condemned slavery with deft and irrefutable arguments. When he died, he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda—only the second senator after Henry Clay to do so—and was widely lionized for his role as the moral center of the country in its most divisive days.

But on a personal level, he was not terribly approachable or even likable. From an early age, he had great difficulty connecting with other people and had a brooding, introverted, and self-righteous manner. His friends at Harvard enjoyed intellectual discussions with him but teased him for his lack of humor. A young Oliver Wendell Holmes noted that “anything in the nature of a jest came very hard to him. He would look bewildered and distressed with the pleasantry that set a company laughing.”1 His relationships with family members were likewise strained.

This aloofness undoubtedly contributed to the famous incident where Sumner was caned on the Senate floor. Single-minded in his zeal to fight slavery, Sumner probably went too far in May 1856 when he delivered his famous “Crime Against Kansas” speech denouncing the pro-slavery Southerners who were trying to make Kansas a slave state. To a packed audience in the Senate chamber, Sumner denounced Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, who co-authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, asserting that he had taken the “harlot slavery” as his mistress. Many on both sides of the debate thought the sexual innuendo inappropriate. Plus, the elderly and ailing Butler was not present to defend himself. Sumner went on to make fun of Butler’s slurred speech—the result of a stroke—calling it “the loose expectorate of his speech” and concluding that he “cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.”

This was all too much for thin-skinned Rep. Preston Brooks, also from South Carolina and a relative of Butler’s, who could think of no other way to respond than with brutal violence. A few days after the speech, Brooks entered the Senate chamber and approached Sumner, who was seated at his desk signing copies of his speech. Brooks repeatedly struck Sumner on the head with a heavy cane, while fellow Southerners prevented bystanders from intervening. Summer was beaten bloody and unconscious, likely suffering concussions and a skull fracture.2

While Sumner was seriously injured and didn’t return permanently to his senate seat until 1859, his attack helped galvanize support for abolition among northerners. Many were shocked that a congressman would take such an uncouth act in the halls of the Capitol—and to do so in defense of human bondage. It seemed to show how fanatical the southern slaveholders were. From that point, slavery’s days were numbered.

All this time, including through the Civil War years that followed, Sumner lived in rented quarters at 13th and F Streets NW. He never would have built and moved into the mansion on Vermont Avenue if it weren’t for a sudden romantic turn his life took in 1865. Sumner, a confirmed bachelor at 55, began courting Alice Mason Hooper, the 28-year-old daughter-in-law of Sumner’s friend, Rep. Samuel Hooper. Alice, a witty and sharp-tongued socialite whose husband had died in 1863, perhaps viewed Sumner as a powerful figure who could support her and her 7-year-old daughter, Bell. In any event, they were married in October 1866.

The couple spent a few months in newlywed bliss, but by early 1867 the marriage was in trouble. Alice insisted on going out to numerous late parties, which were too much for the often-exhausted Charles. Embarrassing him in public, she would tell him to go on home while she stayed at the parties. She despised her father-in-law, Samuel Hooper, whom Charles invited for dinner on a weekly basis. But at the same time the marriage was fraying, the Sumners decided to build a grand house more appropriate to their distinguished status than Sumner’s rented bachelor quarters. Charles worried about the expense but went ahead with the project anyway.

The marriage deteriorated even more as Alice began spending increasing amounts of time away from Charles. On one occasion when Sumner asked where she was off to, Alice responded, “God damn you, ‘tis none of your business. I will go where I please with whom I please.” In fact she was usually with a dashing young attaché of the Prussian embassy, Baron Friedrich von Holstein. Soon Washington was full of gossip about Mrs. Sumner and the state of her marriage. When the baron was recalled to Prussia, newspapers run by Democrats wrote that Charles had been jealous of the Baron and had engineered his recall (not true). Beyond that, Charles’ austere reserve did him no favors, as many gossipers speculated that the real problem was that he was impotent. Through it all, Charles refused to address any of the rumors or impugn his wife in any way. However, in April, he told Alice that he could not live with her any longer. He insisted they maintain strict outward civility and deny any domestic issues. Furious with him, Alice then traveled to Europe with her daughter Bell for the summer.3

In November, the Evening Star attempted to tamp down the rumor-mongering: “Mrs. Sumner is about to return from Europe, and, if her health permits, to join the Senator in Washington in presiding over his new and magnificent mansion on Lafayette Square—which, contrary to common report, has not been disposed of.”4 The newspaper was correct that Sumner still owned the mansion, but Alice was not going to live there. Charles was unsure whether to take on such a large place just for himself. Samuel Hooper urged him to move in anyway and make the house his own. He finally did so in December 1867, embracing the new house as a tranquil refuge from the pressures of his public life. It was certainly big enough for him to entertain close friends on a regular basis and provided ample room to show off his eclectic collection of fine art. Biographer Elias Nason writes:

Mr. Sumner’s house at Washington, a handsome structure with a façade of brown freestone, was built on an eligible site subsequent to 1867 [It was actually finished in 1867], and overlooks Lafayette Square. it adjoins the Arlington Hotel; and the entrance is near the center of the broad front. The sitting-room is on the right of the hall, which contains an old Dutch clock with a beautiful chime. The parlor, upholstered with yellow satin, is on the left, and above this Mr. Sumner’s sleeping-room, which commands a fine view of Lafayette Square and the White House. Contiguous to this room is the library, or what the senator called his “workshop.”

Of refined taste and high culture, Mr. Sumner had surrounded himself with rare and exquisite specimens of the fine arts, in the study of which he found a solace for his senatorial cares. His rooms were crowded with the works of genius,—rare and costly books, beautiful paintings, engravings, illuminated pictures, medallions, statues in bronze and marble,—so that they had almost the appearance of a museum of art….5

Regarding a painting by Tintoretto and pictures of the grand staircase of Versailles and the façade of the Louvre, Sumner told a friend, “When I come home from the senate tired and cross, I like to look at them: It comforts me to think there is something perfect and above criticism.”6 His collection included an illuminated prayer-book of Margaret of Anjou, which had cost three hundred dollars, as well as the Senate desk he was sitting at when Preston Brooks attacked him.

Some visitors sensed loneliness, although Sumner frequently appeared in good spirits at his home. Journalist Ben: Perley Poore penned a poetic description of Sumner’s days in the huge mansion:

[H]e lived alone for several years in his sumptuous house, which he adorned with superb works of art. Here he hospitably entertained personal friends and distinguished strangers. Unforgiving and implacable, his smile grew sadder, the furrows on his face deepened, and he lost his former bonhomie. He was a Prometheus Vinctus, bound to the desolate rock of a wrecked life, but heroically refraining from revenging his great wrong by attacking a woman.7

Sumner died in this house in March 1874. After several subsequent residents, the house was annexed by the Arlington Hotel, which William Wilson Corcoran had built next to it in 1869. The mansion was connected to the hotel and became a special suite for distinguished VIPs, especially foreign dignitaries on state visits to the nation’s capital.8

In the early 20th century, tour guides in “rubberneck wagons” would reverently point out the former residence of Senator Sumner to their carloads of sightseers. Meanwhile, the adjacent Arlington stood as the city’s most prestigious hotel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless it—and the Sumner Mansion—were torn down in 1912 when plans were made to construct an even grander hotel, which was never actually built. Instead, the federal government acquired the property and erected on it what eventually became the headquarters of the Department of Veterans Affairs. No trace of Sumner’s distinguished home survives today.

The building was the brainchild of Sherman F. Mittell, a respected, well-connected editor and educator who came to Washington in 1932 to establish the non-profit National Home Library Foundation. Mittell’s good friend Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis reportedly urged him to start the foundation, which aimed to disseminate inexpensive editions of literary works to schools and home libraries. Before coming to DC, Mittell, who was born in Boston, had worked in real estate in Cambridge and Newport. By 1939 he decided to construct a large building for his foundation’s headquarters on the Connecticut Avenue site where he lived. He would lease most of the building to the government, generating income for the foundation. The site was just across the street from a small vest-pocket park where a statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been erected in 1909, suggesting an appropriately literary name for the foundation’s new building. Mittell tapped avant garde architect William Lescaze, based in New York, to be its designer.1

Born in Geneva, Lescaze learned his profession in Switzerland, where modernism was brewing, before he emigrated to the United States in 1920. In the states no one seemed to know anything about the radical new architecture in Europe. The International Style was first celebrated in the US when the Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition in 1932. That was the same year Lescaze’s revolutionary Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building was completed—the country’s first Modernist skyscraper and a masterpiece that has since become well known to architectural history students.2

Lescaze incorporated revolutionary design features in the Longfellow. It was one of the first office buildings to separate the “service core”—restrooms, ventilation shafts, stairwells, and such—into its own section at the rear of the building, leaving the main area devoted to office space. It was also a pioneer of “curtain wall” design, where the building’s structural framework is on the interior, leaving the façade free for uninterrupted ribbons of windows.3 When the building was completed in 1941, an article in Architectural Forum heaped scorn on Washington’s more traditional architecture while boldly praising the Longfellow:

It’s probably significant that Washington’s first contemporary building of the slightest importance should be a commercial structure. Lescaze’s Longfellow Building would stand out in any city as a first-rate piece of work; against the Washington background its effect is explosive…. Curiously enough, in [being designed] in a straightforward, unassuming way, the building has taken on a monumental quality and a dignity totally lacking in those which tried to achieve that quality. If such a building is a discordant note in Washington, as some have claimed, it is because it so ruthlessly exposes the fakery implicit in the architecture around it.4

Public reaction to the “ultramodern” 12-story structure was mixed. Curiously, the building’s array of balconies facing Connecticut Avenue drew much of the attention. Given it was an office building, people wondered: why all the balconies? As the building neared completion in December 1940, columnist Dudley Harmon wrote, “An average of ten passersby a day stop in to ask the superintendent what [the balconies] are for. The other morning a man entered, explained he lived opposite, and that as he got dressed for breakfast he had been asking himself for the past two weeks, ‘Why the balconies?’ Finally he couldn’t stand the wonderment any longer.”5 The answer: Lescaze added the balconies primarily to serve as sun shields for the ribbon windows during the warmer months.

The Rural Electrification Administration, formed in 1935, took over most of the building when it opened, leaving a couple floors for the Farm Security Administration. In April the REA showed off the great power of electrification by lighting up the entire building for a nighttime open house, the ribbon windows blazing against the sky. It took so much energy that part of the building was illuminated by a mobile generator of the type the REA had been promoting.

The Agriculture Department had leased the whole building. It’s not clear where the National Home Library Foundation ended up, but it intended to use lease income towards its mission. Most of the building’s $2 million costs had been financed by the government, but the Mount Vernon Mortgage Corporation was also involved. Sadly, this would soon lead to trouble. Sherman Mittell, director of the foundation, died suddenly in 1942 from complications following an appendectomy. After his death, the Mount Vernon Mortgage Corporation gained control of both the building and the foundation. In 1951, the government filed a suit on behalf of the foundation’s beneficiaries against officers of the mortgage company, accusing them of siphoning off the foundation’s assets for personal gain. The government won the lawsuit in 1954, and the foundation was finally independently reestablished under court supervision in 1963.6

It took a while for office building design in DC to catch up with the Longfellow. In December 1949, Evening Star real estate columnist Robert J. Lewis observed, “Notably absent among new office buildings is any extremely modern architectural treatment, thus leaving the Longfellow building…in somewhat lonely majesty as just about the only large office building in Washington of strikingly ‘advanced’ design, so far as exterior treatment is concerned.”7 However, by the 1950s, modernist office buildings quickly sprang up across downtown DC, proliferating through the 1960s and 1970s.

The Longfellow was subjected to extensive, unfortunate renovations in 1974 and 1980. All the windows were replaced in 1974, but the 1980 reskinning—a vaguely Post-Modernist refutation of the International Style—was far worse, covering the façade with thick granite bands that gave the building a bizarre, fortress-like appearance. This monstrosity then hulked over the intersection of Connecticut and Rhode Island Avenues for the next 45 years.

But that is all changing now. In 2024, Duball LLC, a local residential developer, purchased the building and announced plans to redevelop it into apartments. The project is taking advantage of tax breaks the District offers to incentivize office-to-residential conversions. The developer is returning the building to something very similar to its original appearance, with the 1980 granite cladding removed from the beige brick walls, which remained in place underneath. It is set to reopen this fall as The Revere, a collection of “60 boutique luxury apartments at the center of Dupont Circle.” The building already looks a lot like its old self. And this time, as an apartment building, it won’t leave people wondering what the balconies are for.

Dorsch’s White Cross Bakery

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, converted about a decade ago to office space, much of which has recently been leased by Howard University for medical services. 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.

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 logo. 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.”

It seems to have been part of a campaign to get people to buy all their bread from large commercial bakeries. An 1893 article in the Evening Star similarly 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, DC 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?”

Corby Baking Company

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 his 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.

The Corby brothers focused from the start on automation, patenting a number of processes and machines for producing bread of a uniform high quality. An article in the October 1915 edition of Baker’s Review marveled at the Corby bakery’s high-speed mixers with their automatic counters, dough slides, six-pocket Duchess dough dividers, Thomson moulders, and 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.

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.

M. Holzbeierlein’s

Not nearly as big as Corby’s, Holzbeierlein’s 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, and sold bread and cakes under the “Famous” label and later featured “Bamby” bread. Holzbeierlein had previously worked as a foreman at the Schneider Baking Company downtown before starting his own business up on 7th Street. Like Dorsch, Holzbeierlein positioned his retail bakery on 7th Street and kept larger baking and distribution facilities nearby, in a factory at 1815 Wiltberger Street that he built in 1913. 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 decades-long history. It finally 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. The former factory on Wiltberger Street was designated an historic landmark in 2017 and rehabilitated as part of a mixed used development in 2021.

The Bond Bread Factory

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. The new product was called Bond Bread because each loaf had General Baking Company’s guarantee printed on its wrapper, warranting that “the loaf of bread contained within this germ and dust proof wrapper is made from the following pure food materials, and no other ingredients of any kind: best spring wheat flour, compressed yeast, pure filtered water, best fine salt, pure lard, cane sugar, and condensed milk.”

By the late 1920s, General Baking was forced to search for a new location after the federal government chose its site to relocate the U.S. Botanic Garden from the center of the Mall. Company officials chose a site on Georgia Avenue in Shaw about a block and a half south of the Corby bakery complex and on the west side of the street. This location offered excellent transportation connections for employees to get to work as well as for the delivery of the bakery’s finished product. Opposite, on the east side of Georgia Avenue, stood 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 Corry B. Comstock of New York, an experienced bakery architect. An article in the Evening Star noted that the building would be one of the largest and most modernly equipped in Washington. “Particular attention will be paid to sanitary measures, the bread being touched by human hands only twice in the baking and once in the wrapping.” It was completed in 1930.

Of all the historic Shaw bakery buildings that remain standing, the Bond Bread Building is the most architecturally distinctive. At a time when many new factory buildings were nondescript, the General Baking Company embraced a more 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 the optimism of the art deco age, though the building is not actually very tall. The clean, white-glazed finish accentuates the message that Bond Bread is pure and healthful. The structure’s design evokes the “stripped classical” or “traditionalized Moderne” style typical of later federal Washington buildings—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 the sensationalism about sanitation fears to 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, which came to be known as the Wonder Bread Factory, was redeveloped by Douglas Development Corporation after being successfully nominated as a historic landmark by the DC Preservation League in 2011.

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.

In 2008, the D.C. government gave the property to Howard University, which planned a development there called Howard Town Center, a mix of housing and retail. In exchange, the university gave the District a parcel at Florida and Sherman Avenues, where a separate project of offices, retail and housing was to be developed. In December 2012, applications were filed with the D.C. government to demolish both the Bond Bread Factory as well as the historic bus garage next door, an elegant brick building designed by Arthur B. Heaton and completed shortly after the bakery. However, the D.C. Preservation League filed nominations to protect both sites, and on May 23, 2013, the Historic Preservation Review Board designated both as historic landmarks. A large redevelopment project is currently underway that will encompass both the bakery and the bus garage.

This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Streets of Washington in February 2011. Kim Williams of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office provided invaluable assistance.

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The building to house the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, opened in 1880, was designed by James G. Hill, who would go on to hit his stride with several classic Richardson Romanesque buildings, including the Washington Loan and Trust Company building at 9th and F Streets NW. This one is a bit of a transitional piece, still adhering to techniques that were soon to be out of fashion, including the use of pressed red brick and architectural elements of the Italianate style popular in the mid-19th century. There are also many features of the Queen Anne style here. But there are also Romanesque elements, pointing the way to a coming trend.

Printing of over-sized national bank notes, four to a page, was a major activity of the Bureau in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it was done almost entirely on small hand presses, which were favored (and still are, among aficionados of hand-crafted printing) for their high-quality results. Rows upon rows of such machines were lined up in the big workrooms of the Bureau’s main building. The machines, nicknamed “spider presses,” had long spoke-like levers on one side to give the printers plenty of leverage when pressing individual sheets of paper against plates inked with a banknote’s design. It took two people to operate one of these machines efficiently: a printer and an assistant, or press-feeder. The printer first heated an engraved metal plate on a small stove and then vigorously rolled ink on to it, forcing the ink into the fines lines of the engravings. Next, the excess ink had to be removed from the smooth surface of the plate by a brisk rubbing with a piece of starched muslin, followed by “polishing” the plate, which the printer did with palms of his hands, removing every trace of ink from the smooth surface without disturbing any of the ink sitting in the grooves of the engraving. The printer then moved the plate to the press itself, and his assistant laid a dampened sheet of paper on it. The printer forced the plate through the rollers of the press by turning the spider levers, and his assistant then removed the printed sheet and set it aside to dry. This printed one side of a sheet; the sheet then had to be rewet and run through again to print the other side.

This postcard of the main press room gives some sense of the working conditions for this messy, back-breaking enterprise. Row upon row of hand presses can be seen lining the main press room, with just a series of small wooden paddles arranged along the ceiling to provide rudimentary air circulation as they turned. Just the toxic side effects alone of directly handling all of that ink must have constituted a substantial health risk. In 1904, the Washington Post reported that “ink from the bureau pollutes the Potomac, and probably is responsible for the death of many fish.” By that time a separate laundry building had been constructed behind the main bureau building, its sole function being to clean all the muslin rags used to wipe the printing plates. Bureau officials proposed constructing a special catch basin for the runoff from the laundry to keep it from polluting the river.

The building quickly became overcrowded and unsafe, despite its seemingly capacious size. An assortment of additions and small outbuildings, such as the laundry building, were added to the Bureau’s complex, but it was never enough to satisfy the need. In his annual report for 1898, the Bureau’s director complained that “there has been no addition to the building since 1896.... The condition of this building, crowded as it is with operatives, is not in accordance with good business methods or proper sanitation. It is with great concern that I call attention to the immense amounts of combustible material stored therein, which make the possibilities of fire so great as to be alarming... This material includes millinets, oils, turpentine, benzine, colors, chemicals, blanketing, paper, &c.” Furthermore, “Every available foot of space in the bureau for hand plate-printing presses is now occupied, and still we are unable in the regular hours to keep up with the average number of sheets to be produced daily.” Frequently the bureau resorted to round-the-clock operations to get production up, but that only added to the stress, wear and tear, and other operational problems. Young women who finished their shifts in the middle of the night were left to walk home at dangerous hours from a part of town that was not very safe, especially at night.

The printers were all men, naturally, but the press-feeders were women. Why is that? It seems no self-respecting man would take the job of press-feeder because it paid so little, only $1.25 per day in 1880s and 1890s. Of course, you could theoretically get boys to do the job, since there weren’t any child-labor laws before 1890, but, according to the Washington Post, the printers objected that children didn’t have the proper skill and dexterity to feed paper just the right way into the finicky presses. The result was back-breaking work for young women who endured deplorable conditions and earned little pay. A passionate letter to the Post in 1882 described “all that is left of what used to be the forms of thirty women.... Fate and necessity combined, forced them at an early age into the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. You see the result of stifling air and overheated rooms, standing on their feet for continuous hours, whilst performing the most incessant labor... These women have given all the days of their youth and early womanhood to the service of the Government, and now, when they should be in the prime of their strength and usefulness, they are almost wrecked....”

By 1909, the women organized themselves into a union, and a committee of them formally petitioned that their pay be raised from $1.50 to $2 per day. The director of the bureau said he was “in entire sympathy with any movement to lighten the burdens of the women workers in this bureau” but quickly noted that “As to increased pay, that is a matter which must be settled by Congress” and furthermore, “When both sides of this salary question are looked into, it is plain that the women workers in the bureau are well off.” The new press-feeders’ union would clearly have its work cut out for it.

One has to wonder why a more automated printing system hadn’t been introduced by the early 1900s. Sophisticated steam-powered industrial machinery was certainly common by then. This is where politics comes into the mix. Steam-powered presses were certainly available as early as the 1870s, before the Bureau had even moved to its own building. But switching to steam power would mean elimination of lots of jobs, and that was a problem. Those seeking to protect the jobs of the printers also had the excuse that steam presses at first did not produce the same quality results as hand presses, giving rise to fears that forgers could more easily duplicate the currency produced by such presses. The supporters of hand presses dominated Congress, which repeatedly passed laws severely restricting the use of steam presses at the bureau. It wasn’t until 1912 that legislation finally passed allowing power presses to be gradually phased in over a five-year period.

In the midst of that conversion, the bureau finally gave up on its 1880 building altogether, moving in 1914 to a much larger new limestone neoclassical building just to the south of the original complex. That building remains the bureau’s main plant to this day, although it has been supplemented by an annex built on the other side of 14th Street in 1938 and connected to the main building by two underground tunnels. The 1880 building was turned over to the government for other agencies to use and in recent years has been occupied primarily by U.S. Forest Service workers, who are now destined to be relocated. Various small-scale outbuildings, such as the old laundry building, had been built to supplement the 1880 building and occupied the space between it and the 1914 building. These remained in place for many years but were finally cleared away to make room for the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which opened in 1993.

The only outbuilding to survive, known as Annex #3, was designed by James Knox Taylor and built along the western side of the 1880 building in 1905. The following postcard shows women making postage stamps in the annex. The building now houses a cafeteria and offices for the Holocaust Museum.

This article first appeared on Streets of Washington in April 2010.

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Long before it adopted a lizard as its mascot or had cavemen serving as spokespeople, the Government Employees Insurance Company began modestly in Texas in 1936. Leo Goodwin, who had worked for years in the insurance industry, started the firm with two innovative ideas: (1) directly market auto insurance to customers rather than using agents and (2) target federal employees and military officers—a group that had fewer accidents than other drivers. The following year, he and his wife Lillian moved their operation to Washington, DC to be closer to their customer base. But it wasn’t until investment banker Lorimer Davidson became involved in 1948 that the company began rapidly expanding. Davidson’s connections brought substantial new investment and energy. One investor was David Lloyd Kreeger, a lawyer who initially served as the company’s general counsel. Kreeger became more and more involved in the company as it grew, eventually taking over as its chief executive officer. In the process he earned a fortune that he spent lavishly as a patron of the arts. His 1963 home on Foxhall Road, designed by Phillip Johnson, is now the Kreeger Museum. Lorimer Davidson’s connections also led to Warren Buffett, who first purchased stock in GEICO in 1951. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., would eventually absorb GEICO as a fully owned subsidiary.

In 1950, the company moved into a six-floor office building at 14th and L Streets NW that it had acquired from the Federal Housing Administration. It seemed plenty big, but GEICO was growing by leaps and bounds and soon needed something much larger. That is when it acquired the 26-acre tract along the south side of Willard Avenue in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and began planning its new office park. Even as it planned the new building, the company kept growing. With construction just beginning in 1958, the building was expanded by more than a third.2

Historian Louise Mozingo coined the term “pastoral capitalism” to refer to the mid 20th century trend of large corporations fleeing cramped and congested city centers for sprawling suburban parks. Employees who used to ride streetcars and buses to downtown jobs happily drove their cars from their suburban homes to these new office parks, turning their backs on the city. According to Mozingo, benefits for large corporations included cheaper, more spacious quarters; better employee productivity and retention; and an opportunity to foster a corporate image conveying benevolence, strength, and futuristic vision.3

GEICO’s award-winning Operations Building—top management remained in downtown DC—was a spiffy corporate gem when it opened in 1959. Covering 276,000 square feet and accommodating 1,140 employees, the building is as long as two football fields. The four-story building’s brown and beige office segments, faced with textured, porcelain-enameled panels, are juxtaposed with taller opaque blocks that break up the horizontality and allow for future expansion.4 In 1964, a seven-story tower was added at the front of the building on Willard Avenue. Parking for hundreds of cars was provided in vast underground and surface lots.

This was all the work of accomplished designer Vincent Kling, who was born in East Orange, New Jersey, and earned his architecture degree from Columbia University. By the 1960s, Kling headed the largest architectural firm in Philadelphia. He is probably best known for the Penn Center project he designed in downtown Philadelphia in the 1950s.

GEICO went through a dramatically rough patch in the 1970s as inflation, the rise of no-fault liability laws, and costlier accidents turned profits into losses. GEICO stock, trading at $61 in 1972, went for just $7 in 1975. Patient investors, including Warren Buffett, who bought up more than a million shares at around $3 each, helped bring the company back on course.5 By the mid 1990s, when Berkshire Hathaway absorbed GEICO as a wholly owned subsidiary, its leaders were already thinking about dumping the Chevy Chase office park.

In 1999, Montgomery County approved a future plan for the site that envisioned demolishing the GEICO building and replacing it with a mix of housing and office space. Nothing happened for another 25 years. Then, in February 2025, GEICO announced it would finally vacate the Chevy Chase site, moving to a high-rise building in nearby downtown Bethesda. The old office park “is no longer suitable for our needs, and we need a more modern, right-sized workspace for our associates,” said a politely worded company email quoted in Bethesda magazine. Within months the county amended its 1999 plan to provide for housing only—no office space—as most everyone now wanted. This spring, developer EYA submitted plans for hundreds of townhomes and apartments to fill the building footprint as well as the surrounding open spaces. (A community park at the rear of the property will remain.)6

There seems not to have been much thought of preserving and reusing the building. It’s interesting to reflect on how rapidly structures like this have lost favor. Emily Badger has written in the New York Times on the subject, pointing to the pandemic as a decisive factor. Employees looking for quiet and isolation to focus on their jobs now just work from home. Office buildings, in contrast, need to be centrally located and nurture close personal interaction. As Badger puts it, “Offices meant to evoke and blend in among suburban homes have been cannibalized by actual homes.” The trend also reflects an inevitable change in tastes. Majestic buildings that were once sleek and fashionable are now historical relics, taking up more room than they’re worth. Time for a redo.

Almost every notable American businessman in the early 20th century had a Horatio Alger-type origin story, and Gustave Lansburgh was no exception. Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1839, Lansburgh came to the U.S. in 1854 at age 15, along with his father, Solomon, and brother James.1 Arriving at the port of Baltimore, Gustave, whom everyone would know as Gus, got his first job sweeping the floors of Joseph Gutman’s dry goods store. Supposedly young Gus’s first meal when he arrived was a mere crust of black bread and half a radish. According to a maudlin story in the Washington Post, he worked long hours at Gutman’s store for pittance wages, and “often he sat and longed for just enough money to buy a whole radish,” which you may believe if you wish.2 However spartan his early lifestyle, Gus and his brother Max, who had followed him to America and worked at a similar job, were clearly able to save money. Within a couple of years, Gus and Max launched their own modest dry goods store in Baltimore.

In 1857, the Lansburgh family moved to DC, where Gus’ father, Solomon, served briefly as the first hazan of the newly established Washington Hebrew Congregation.3 In 1860, Gus and Max opened “Lansburgh & Bro’s Baltimore Bargain Store,” in a tiny 10-foot-by-15-foot space on 7th Street NW, just north of Center Market. Seventh Street was fast developing as the retail heart of Washington, extending north some seven blocks from the market to Massachusetts Avenue. Everything from umbrellas to underwear could be purchased from the shops that lined this busy thoroughfare. Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe would own and operate many of 7th Street’s stores, including Kann’s (1893, at 8th Street and Market Space) and Hecht’s (1896, a block north of Lansburgh’s on 7th).

Lansburgh & Bro’s began as a small shop selling clothing accessories—buttons, collars, shoestrings, hose, and such. Max was in charge of the store, while Gus would traverse the 7th Street strip lugging two large sample cases full of merchandise that he peddled to other stores. (Another story has it that Gus carried it all in a backpack.) As business grew, the Lansburghs shifted quarters several times but always stayed at the busy lower end of 7th Street. They also expanded their stock to silks, linens, and other fabrics, as well as dresses, coats, and a complete assortment of garments.4

From the store’s ads, you’d have no idea that the Civil War was raging all around, filling the streets with troops, wagons, horses, and mules. An April 1863 advertisement proclaimed “GREAT EXCITEMENT” for a Lansburgh’s closeout sale, with such tempting specials as “A beautiful assortment of Black and White PLAIDS for dresses, …SHEETING COTTONS at all widths, at much reduced prices, …Spring CASHMERES and COTTONADES for Men and Boys’ wear, …Ladies and misses Cord and Tape HOOP SKIRTS—having a very large lot on hand, we have to sell at any price,” and many other items. “Ladies who wish to avoid a crowd” were advised to “please call early in the morning or late in the evening.” Clearly the war footing was not dampening Washington society’s buying habits.5

Company lore also highlights Gus Lansburgh’s response to the shooting of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865. Realizing that the President would die soon and that Washington businesses would need black bunting to drape on their buildings, Gus supposedly jumped into a carriage and rode all the way to Baltimore that same night to buy black fabric. He somehow managed to buy up all that was available (Why were these businesses open in the middle of the night?) and had effectively cornered the market by the time he returned to DC early the next morning, when Lincoln actually died. The story goes on to claim that, having accomplished this improbable feat, Lansburgh then distributed the material around the city for free, garnering massive goodwill in the process.6 —So what are the real facts? —Lansburgh’s was certainly the leading dry goods store at the time and undoubtedly had excellent connections, enabling it to obtain and make available black fabric more easily than other establishments. The store may have given some away—perhaps to federal agencies, for example—but in other cases it clearly charged the going market rate, as demonstrated in the brief ad for black cambric at 30 cents per yard that ran in the Star on April 18.

After the war, Lansburgh’s gradually developed into one of the city’s first great department stores. It made its last physical move, in 1882, to an elaborate four-story Romanesque Revival building that architect Adolf Cluss designed for the company. A notice in the Post summed up the building’s appearance as “plain, but quaint [attractive], giving an air of solidity.” Its advanced technology included an elevator described as “the largest in the city, an improved Otis, noiseless and absolutely safe.” The first floor was the main retail area, while the second featured “ready-made garments of every description in glass cases.” Storage and workrooms filled the top two floors.7 The crush of customers on opening day—lured by the promise of a free silk dress to the first female patron—led to at least one of the store’s French plate glass windows being smashed.

Lansburgh’s prospered at this location for many more decades, expanding along 7th Street and also in the rear along the 8th Street side of the block. The first 7th Street addition came just two years after the 1882 building was completed; the first 8th Street annex went up the year after that. At the corner of 8th and E Streets NW stands the store’s 1916 annex, gracefully composed of a series of rhythmic arched bays of glazed terracotta. Expanded in 1924, it has been called “one of the finest commercial style facades in the entire Washington downtown.”8

Several Lansburgh family members had a hand in running the business. Brother James had replaced Max as Gus’s partner in 1869. Julius, the youngest of the Lansburgh brothers, also joined the firm in the 1870s and handled the furniture, rugs, and carpeting department. In 1894, Julius broke away to establish his own store. The Julius Lansburgh Furniture Company would operate for many years in the old Masonic Hall at 8th and F Streets NW, which we previously profiled.

Gus died in 1911, but his store continued to grow. By 1940, Lansburgh’s Department Store filled six buildings on 7th Street, and the firm decided it needed a more modern look to keep its curb appeal fresh. It hired the architectural firm of Porter & Lockie to design a Streamlined Moderne façade of Alabama limestone and aluminum trim to cover the motley assortment of Victorian storefronts. Patrons of the renovated store could rest assured they were entering a technologically advanced emporium. “The entrances will have doors that open at the slightest touch,” a newspaper notice promised.9

Everything went really well for Lansburgh’s—until it didn’t. Downtown shopping went into decline in the 1950s and 60s as white customers fled to the suburbs and began doing their shopping in malls. Business nosedived after the civil disturbances following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968. Seventh Street was particularly hard hit, with many businesses in the blocks above Massachusetts Avenue burnt to the ground. What’s more, Lansburgh’s had been sold in 1951 to a New York holding company, City Stores Inc., and was slower than other businesses in expanding into the suburbs. By 1973, it was losing too much money, and City Stores shut it down.10

The Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, federally chartered to redevelop the rundown blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, gained control of the old Lansburgh’s complex and began planning for new development. Arts organizations and the DC government temporarily leased space in the buildings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The neighborhood was quite desolate at night, and the PADC was determined to see residential apartments and condos as part of any new development—something that many people thought a far-fetched dream.11

Boston-based architect Graham Gund beat out five other contenders to build the new Lansburgh development that filled two-thirds of the block and preserved the facades of three buildings along E Street, as specified by the PADC. (The original Lansburgh’s building on 7th Street was demolished.) Gund bucked conventional wisdom by planning a complex that had no office space—just residential, arts (theater), and retail. When the Lansburgh opened, critic Benjamin Forgey called it “an idiosyncratic, polychrome, postmodernist stew,” but it helped lay the foundation for what is now a thriving residential neighborhood with a vibrant nightlife.12

The street began as a residential district in the early 1800s, lined with townhouses of the wealthy. In the 1820s, John Quincy and Louisa Adams lived in an F Street townhouse where James Monroe had previously resided. William Thornton, first architect of the Capitol and first superintendent of the Patent Office, lived across the street with his wife Anna.1 But by the time of the Civil War, retail stores were beginning to take over former residences. By the late 1880s. large companies, like Woodward and Lothrop, began migrating from flood-prone Pennsylvania Avenue up to F Street, which was on higher ground, where they lined with street with shops.

The photo above, taken from a stereoview, shows F Street facing east around the turn of the twentieth century. Nothing but horse-drawn carriages and delivery wagons in the street here. Some sort of roadwork seems to be underway halfway up the block. Notice that many of the shops on the north (left) side of the street have large awnings that extend over to the curb. The shade from these awnings was essential to combat the heat of the midday sun in the warmer months, helping to keep the shops relatively cool.

A couple of the tall buildings are in view: midway on the right is a white building with an elaborate Second Empire mansard roof and a large flag flying from its tower. That’s the Ebbitt House hotel. The Ebbitt first opened in 1856, and the large mansard and towers were added in 1895. Before it was demolished in 1925, the Ebbitt held a massive auction of its fixtures. A large oak bar and other decorations were sold to a Swedish-born entrepreneur named Anders Lofstrand, who installed them in a small F Street storefront (out of view on the left side of this photo), which became the Old Ebbitt Grill. That’s the only connection between the restaurant and the old hotel.

There’s another towered building in the distance on the left side of the street in the photo above. That’s the Sun Building, named for the Baltimore Sun newspaper that had offices there. It was DC’s tallest skyscraper when it was built in 1887. Rather than repairing the wooden steeple in 1950 after it had become dilapidated, the owners simply tore it down. The rest of the building still stands and is now a historic landmark.

The circa 1911 postcard below shows roughly the same view but with more of the south side of the street visible. Already, automobiles have large replaced horse-drawn vehicles. The back of the card states that this is “Washington’s Bon Ton Shopping District” and notes the presence of “the famous Café Republique on the corner.” The posh Café République, which we previously profiled, opened in 1910 and closed just three years later, unable to turn a profit. The large red building which houses it is the Corcoran office building, built in 1875 by wealthy banker William Wilson Corcoran as a real estate investment. Corcoran, of course, was a great patron of the arts, and his building became the art center of Washington in the 1880s. Many prominent artists kept studios there. The building was replaced in 1917 by the Hotel Washington.

Looming behind the Corcoran Building is the Willard Hotel—then known as the “New Willard.” The original hotel, dating to the early 19th century, was replaced in 1900-1901 by this tall Beaux-Arts structure, which still stands today. The Ebbitt House behind it looks quite small in comparison.

Our next postcard is from about 1940 and shows many changes to the neighborhood. The Hotel Washington dominates the right-hand side of this shot. Though it’s hard to make out from this angle, the New Willard has been extended further toward us with an annex built in 1925 on the site of the Union Trust and Storage Company building. Beyond the Willard Hotel, the Ebbitt House has been replaced by the National Press Club Building, built in 1926 and housing offices and headquarters for many newspapers and journalists.

On the left side is a new, large building at the end of the block. This is Julius Garfinkel’s specialty department store, which we previously profiled. It was built in 1929-30 and in operation here for many years until the store closed in 1990. At the near end of the block, on the northeast corner of 15th and H, we see Rhodes Tavern. By the time of this postcard, Rhodes Tavern, built around 1800, was the oldest commercial structure in downtown Washington. Its first tenant, William Rhodes, ran a tavern here, giving the building the name by which it would be known for almost two centuries. Seminal early city events, such as early town hall meetings and the first election for a city council took place here in the early 1800s, when few other commercial buildings had yet been built.

Many people are familiar with the long, valiant, and ultimately futile attempt to save the Rhodes Tavern from callous destruction in 1984 by the Oliver T. Carr company, which prioritized the income from those extra dozens of feet of office space over the loss of goodwill from all the voters who supported a referendum to save the historic building. Beginning in 1977, seven years of hard-fought legal and political battles led ultimately to a final appeals court ruling allowing the building to be demolished. One would certainly like to think that it would no longer be possible for such an historic building downtown to be destroyed this way...

Here’s the same scene today, from street level. Few of the old buildings remain. The Hotel Washington still stands on the immediate right. The 1986 expansion of the Willard Hotel takes up the middle part of the block behind it. On the right side, the Metropolitan Square office development, completed in 1986, has left no trace of Rhodes Tavern, other than a couple of historical markers, seen below.

This is revised version of an article that first appeared on Streets of Washington on December 24, 2009.

The street that crosses in the foreground is B Street, now known as Independence Avenue SE. It climbs Capitol Hill from right to left. The Capitol grounds are in the foreground, and you may notice the scattered pieces of stone laid out in the street and on the sidewalks at what is the south entrance to the Capitol grounds. These might be blocks of granite for the low retaining walls that still gracefully line the grounds. Frederick Law Olmsted designed them, and their presence is one way to date the photo. If you look closely, you’ll see streetcar tracks along the left side of the roadway. The stones are all over the tracks. One wonders how long they blocked streetcars from accessing the Capitol grounds.

Brock’s Congressional Hotel

The prominent four-story, Second-Empire building on the left side of New Jersey Avenue is the Congressional Hotel, constructed around 1872. In January 1885, owner A.W. Fletcher of Philadelphia sold the hotel and all its furnishings to Henry Brock for $30,000. An experienced hotel manager, Brock moved to Washington from New Jersey to run the Congressional, which he advertised as “out of the malaria district, being one hundred feet above the level of the Potomac river.” Brock continued: “From its Balconies a beautiful view can be had of the entire city of Washington, Arlington Heights, Potomac River and Capitol grounds.” The price for short-term hotel guests at Brock’s was $2 per day—a typical rate in that era.1

Born in Bingen, Germany in 1830, Brock came to the US as a teenager in 1846 and was swept up in the California Gold Rush, traveling to California aboard the Star of the West, a ship that was later famous for attempting (unsuccessfully) to resupply Union troops under siege at Fort Sumter in early 1861. How well Brock did in gold is not clear, but by the late 1850s he had glommed on to the Comstock Lode silver rush, centered around the Virginia City mining camp in the Utah Territory (now Nevada). Brock began his hotel career in Virginia City, where he was said to have built the boomtown’s first hotel—which promptly burned to the ground within days of opening. Undeterred, Brock continued in the hotel business, eventually moving back east to New York City. After serving in the Seventh New York cavalry regiment in the Civil War, he married and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he ran Brock and Brenner’s Hotel before coming to DC.2

The affable Brock made many friends on the Hill. “Senators and Representatives after their hot debates would saunter through the broad avenues of the Capitol grounds to enjoy the comforts of the Congressional,” according to the Washington Post. Brock’s was the nearest bar on the House side of the Capitol. Perhaps Brock joined in a few too many toasts with his congressional friends; he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1902. His hotel and the other buildings on that block were razed in 1904 for construction of the Cannon House Office Building.3

The Butler and Richards Buildings

The large building on the right of New Jersey Avenue in the top photo is the Butler Building, constructed in 1875 by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, one of the Civil War’s more controversial military officers. Butler, whom historian Margaret Leech has called “a stout, crafty-looking, forceful little man,” was a staunch Unionist during the war, hell bent on suppressing the rebellion by any means necessary.4 He was the military leader who declared that escaped enslaved people from the South were enemy “contraband” and thus free, a policy that was adopted by the Union Army before the Emancipation Declaration formally freed these people. What Butler lacked in military training and experience he made up for in sheer belligerence. Admired in the North and despised in the South, he served for a time as the military governor of New Orleans. There he issued his infamous General Order No. 28 in May 1862, stating that any women who insulted or disrespected Union troops would be arrested as prostitutes. Southerners were outraged, but troops had been subjected to serious harassment, including spitting in their faces, mocking of funeral corteges, and dumping of chamber pots on patrolling squads. After Butler’s order, the harassment decreased markedly.

After the war, Butler was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, serving from 1867 to 1879, with a break between 1875 and 1877. A multi-millionaire thanks to many investments during and after the war, Butler in 1873 built a large mansion on the site directly across the street from the Capitol, constructing it of granite from a Massachusetts mine he partially owned. The building actually comprised three separate units. Two were residences; Butler rented one of them to offset the cost of the parties he threw in his own house, the other residential unit. The third unit, at the rear and next to the Richards Building (see below), was a special fireproof unit with iron doors and window frames for storing records, which was leased to the US Coast Survey. After James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, President Chester A. Arthur used the rental residence as his official home for several months while Louis Comfort Tiffany redecorated the White House.5

Directly behind the Butler Building was the Richards Building, a Gothic Revival office building designed by Adolf Cluss that was constructed in 1871, just before the Butler Building. Alfred Richards, owner of the Alfred Richards Brick Company, offered to construct the building on property he and a relative owned. It became the headquarters of the US Coast Survey (later the US Coast and Geodetic Survey). The building—actually a group of five interconnected structures—included not just offices but also laboratories and storage rooms for instruments, maps, and books, and space for a printing operation.

In 1891, the government purchased both the Richards Building and the Butler Building outright, creating a sizable federal scientific complex adjacent to the Capitol. The Coast and Geodetic Survey turned one of the Butler Building residences into offices, while the Marine Hospital Service, which later became the U.S. Public Health Service, took over the other former residential unit.

The science agencies would remain in the pair of buildings for almost 40 years but would ultimately be forced out by congressional demand for more office space. Just as the block across New Jersey Avenue was razed in 1904 to build the Cannon House Office Building, this narrower block containing the Butler and Richards Buildings was leveled in 1929 to make way for the Longworth House Office Building. The additional space helped for a time but ultimately was not enough to address the insatiable demand for congressional offices. The immense Rayburn Building would join these two in 1965, creating an unbroken line of monumental House office buildings along the southern side of the Capitol grounds. Standing on Independence Avenue today, it’s difficult to picture the motley Victorian buildings that used to crowd these blocks in the 19th century.

In November 1921, on the third anniversary of the armistice ending the war, representatives from nine world powers met for a disarmament conference, known as the Washington Naval Conference, at DAR Continental Hall. Closely watched in world capitals and massively hyped in the press, the conference was organized by the Harding administration at the urging of congressional leaders. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes invited the nine nations to come to Washington to discuss mutual naval reductions and how to de-escalate tensions in the Far East—arising largely from fears of Japanese expansionism. On the whole, the conference proved a success. The participating representatives signed four international treaties that successfully constrained rivalry in the Pacific and the proliferation of naval armament for ten years. However, the treaties were limited in scope and had many loopholes, providing only limited, temporary peace benefits.1

American women’s political groups, energized by enactment of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in August 1920 giving women the right to vote, were redoubling their efforts to address the problem of war. Four women delegates to the 1921 disarmament conference also attended a separate “women’s mass meeting” at the Masonic Hall at 13th Street and New York Avenue NW (now the National Museum of Women in the Arts) on November 13. Alice Ames Winter, one of the four delegates and President of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, railed against the use of science for warfare: “Militarism twists every element of civilization to some perverted purpose…. After the great war, instead of turning our backs on engines of destruction, we…invented a gas that was more destructive than any ever used by any other nation…” Despite her dour tone, Winter concluded on a hopeful note. “But at last we have turned another way,” she said, referring to the disarmament conference. She led the group in unanimously adopting a resolution supporting the disarmament conference and urging “the reduction of existing military establishments and control of the yet unmeasured powers of chemical science.”2

Four years later, both the successes and limitations of the disarmament conference were clear, and the leaders of nine national women’s groups felt an urgent need to bring the discussion to a higher level. Naming Carrie Chapman Catt, the celebrated women’s suffrage activist, as it chair, the groups brought 1,000 women to Washington for a seven-day “Conference on the Cause and Cure of War” to review data on the problem of warfare and develop plans of action. They began with a plenary session at the Belasco Theatre on Lafayette Square on Sunday, January 18. Speakers addressed topics such as “Can Civilization Withstand Another World War?” and “Can War Be Abolished?” Judge Florence Allen of the Ohio Supreme Court, who spoke on “Women and War,” observed, “Women in the long run have to help establish peace in a very peculiar and real sense…. They will have to change the conviction of the [human] race with regards to war.”3

Subsequent sessions were held at the nearby Hotel Washington, and on Monday President and Mrs. Coolidge received the delegates at the White House. When the week was over, the conferees released their findings, which included an analysis of the causes of war broken into four main categories: (1) psychological, such as fear, greed, and lust for power; (2) economic, including aggressive imperialism, rivalries for energy resources, and population pressure from migration; (3) political, including secret or unjust treaties; and (4) social and contributory, a catchall category for factors such as exaggerated nationalism, apathy, and influences from the press.

As to cures, the women called on Americans to “break down national and racial prejudices and fears, and build up a spirit of friendship and trust among the people of the world.” They argued that peace required a “permanent International organization as its instrument” and said the U.S. needed to adhere to the Permanent Court of International Justice, which should outlaw war. Further, the country should look toward legal and friendly methods of settling international disputes. They foresaw international cooperation as overcoming economic inequalities, and they promoted education about history and social responsibility as a bulwark against rash deeds. Responsible government action, they stated, should be based on informed, intelligent public opinion.4

Of course, the 1925 women’s conference was no more effective than the 1921 disarmament conference in preventing the next world war 18 years later. The ambitions of a small group of fanatical leaders and their followers in Germany and Japan led to holocaust and catastrophic destruction across the world. No one at the time seemed to appreciate the ability of a demagogue surrounded by sycophants to rapidly destroy democratic institutions. Nevertheless, the women’s assessment of the cause and cure of war stands as an fervent expression of faith in the human spirit to overcome the grave perils of war.

As noted in our last post, Mary Foote Henderson sought in the early 20th century to re-make the then sparsely developed Meridian Hill neighborhood into a grand European-style enclave of exotic chateaux. She and her husband bought up house lots on 15th and 16th Streets and began erecting lavish houses they intended to rent or sell to high government officials and diplomats. The first were along the west side of 16th in the blocks north of the Hendersons’ Boundary Castle, including the Venetian-style “Pink Palace” (1906) at the corner of 16th and Euclid, and the supremely Beaux-Arts Embassy of France (1907), just south of the intersection with Kalorama Road. Other Henderson projects include the Lithuanian Embassy at 2622 16th (1908), the Polish Embassy at 2640 16th (1919), the former Spanish Embassy at 2801 16th (1921), and the Josephine Butler Parks Center at 2437 15th (1927), among others. All of these residences were designed by Henderson’s favorite architect, George Oakley Totten, in a variety of styles.

In 1920, Mary Henderson announced plans to build an embassy building on the southwest corner of 16^th Street and Park Road NW. For this building, Totten chose an English Renaissance (Tudor) Revival style, faced in Indiana limestone. The northernmost of Mary Henderson’s speculative embassy projects, this immense residence contained 30 rooms, including a large library, salon, and dining hall on the first floor; seven bedrooms on the second floor; and five more on the third.

With no embassy prospect in sight, Henderson sold the mansion in 1921 to Breckinridge Long, a wealthy lawyer and government official who would later become infamous for blocking the immigration to the U.S. of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Long had served as Assistant Secretary of State in the Wilson administration and was a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the 1920s, while he owned the 16th Street mansion, he mounted two failed bids to be elected a senator from Missouri. In exchange for supporting FDR’s presidential campaign, Long was named ambassador to Italy in 1933, serving for three years. When the Long and his wife returned from Italy, they moved to the historic Montpelier Mansion in Laurel, Maryland, which they had purchased in 1928.

Subsequently, in 1940 Long became the State Department official in charge of matters concerning European refugees. An extreme nativist and admirer of European fascism, Long had a particular suspicion of Eastern Europeans. In his State Department role, he systematically reduced opportunities for Eastern European Jews to be accepted as refugees in the US, imposing draconian requirements that were virtually impossible to fulfill. It has been estimated that some 190,000 people could have escaped the Nazis if not for Long’s restrictions.1

Meanwhile, the Longs had intermittently rented out the 16th Street house in the early 1930s. In September 1931, for example, Mr. Leander McCormick-Goodhart, Commercial Secretary for the British embassy, moved in. According to a newspaper notice, McCormick-Goodhart and his wife were to take possession of the mansion “on their return from Bar Harbor, where they have been spending the summer.” —Just the sort of people Mary Henderson would have wanted as neighbors.2

In 1938, the Capitol Radio Engineering institute (CREI), a nationally known radio school, purchased the building. Eugene Reitzke, who learned radio engineering when he was in the Navy during World War I, founded the institute in 1927. After teaching at the Naval Research Laboratory, Reitzke wrote a textbook on radio engineering for home study. CREI developed from that into a comprehensive vocational school that included hands-on classroom training.3 Before moving into the 16th Street mansion, the school had occupied the nearby Riggs-Tompkins Building at 3300 14^th Street NW, where pioneering radio station WRC’s first broadcast studio was located.

CREI used the 16th Street building for everything from classrooms, laboratories, shops, and equipment rooms to business offices and support personnel for the school’s home-study programs. In addition, rooms were set aside as dormitories for the school’s one-year resident program, which attracted students from across the country. It was a hive of activity during World War II, its windows lighting up at night as students toiled away inside.

In 1964, the school added an expansive, two-story laboratory and classroom annex to the southern end of the building, and the organization was rechristened the Capitol Institute of Technology (CIT). The increase in classroom space did not satisfy the school’s needs for very long, however. In 1969, CIT moved to larger rented quarters in Kensington, Maryland. It is now Capitol Technology University, offering a range of undergraduate and graduate degree programs at its current campus in Laurel.

More vocational schools followed after CIT left 16th Street, the first being the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) . Dr. Leon H. Sullivan, a charismatic Baptist minister, civil rights leader, and accomplished social activist, started the OIC in an abandoned Philadelphia jailhouse in 1964. OIC offered practical retraining programs for the “hard-core unemployed and handicapped” in areas such as office skills, auto mechanics, and offset printing. OIC’s program included counseling, placement, and follow-up to help graduates find and keep jobs. The organization quickly spread to cities around the country, including DC in 1967. In 1972, OIC took over the former CIT building as its DC headquarters. By that time, it had placed more than 4,000 trainees with some 540 local employers. About 450 were enrolled at the 16th Street building. OIC/DC expanded to multiple locations around the city, and it eventually gave up the 16th Street headquarters building.4

In 2000, the Unification Church purchased the mansion and annex as well as an older townhouse adjoining them at the rear (1604 Park Road NW), paying $2 million for the complex. The church began renting complex out to several different educational institutions. In 2014, for example, the International School of the District of Columbia moved in, staying for three years.

Most recently, the Latin American Youth Center (LAYC) ran its LAYC Career Academy and YouthBuild Public Charter School in the building. Founded in the late 1960s by Garry Garber and Arturo Griffiths, LAYC offers educational and work opportunities for at-risk Latino youth. Its longtime headquarters at 3045 15th Street NW was designated a DC landmark in 2025. The school in the 16th Street building, which operated until 2025, provided college preparatory education, college-credit classes, and career training in high-growth occupations, such as health care and information technology, for young people between the ages of 16 and 24.

In 2023, the Unification Church put the complex up for sale, prompting LAYC’s departure two years later. After two years on the market, the church finally found a potential buyer. According to the Washington Business Journal, Dila Development & Construction signed a contract to purchase the building and has developed concept plans for turning it into a residential housing complex. On January 22, 2026, the Historic Preservation Review Board will review those plans.5

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, 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 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 both their party and widespread 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.

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.

A turning point came when the Hendersons decided to move back to Washington in 1887. They purchased several house lots along 16th Street NW on a steep hill 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, 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 highly sought-after.1

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 a 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, 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.2 Two years later, Henderson made another attempt, this time based on a proposal by Franklin W. Smith. 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.

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 and 16th Streets, were all designed by Mary Henderson’s favorite architect, George Oakley Totten, Jr., 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.3

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.”4 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 Henderson fought many battles. She wanted the Lincoln Memorial built on Meridian Hill rather than the Mall. She had a house built 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, 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.

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.5

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. 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.

This article first appeared on Streets of Washington in July 2011. Many more entertaining anecdotes about Mrs. Henderson and 16th Street are in the book I co-authored with D. Peter Sefton, Sixteenth Street NW: Avenue of Ambitions, published in 2022.

Kim Prothro Williams, who has done much valuable research on Mrs. Henderson and her influence on Meridian Hill, 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); and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

As originally designed by James Hoban, the Executive Mansion was a rather straightforward, albeit finely decorated, box of a building. The hip-roofed, two-story Neoclassical structure was based on Leinster House, the seat of government in Hoban’s native Ireland. There were no porticos protruding on the north or south sides; those were added in 1824 and 1829. And there were no wings on the east or west.

Jefferson’s East Wing

In the early days, some of the executive mansion’s support functions, such as kitchens, storage rooms, and servants’ quarters, were in small outbuildings separate from the house. When Thomas Jefferson arrived in 1801, he decided to conceal these functions in narrow, single-story wings extending to the east and west. These wings—also called colonnades or terraces after they were built—would also serve as walkways connecting the executive mansion with the two government office buildings on either side—the War and Navy building on the west and the State and Treasury building on the east (both much smaller than the current structures). Connecting such buildings with utilitarian colonnades was a favorite design principle of Jefferson and others of his era; it can be seen in the layouts of Monticello, Mount Vernon, and the University of Virginia.1

Jefferson’s wings were constructed in 1805, but they were incomplete. Neither the East nor West Wing was ever extended all the way to its adjoining office building. The East Wing was lengthened a bit in 1809, but only about halfway to the State and Treasury building. The south side of that wing, on the same level as the basement of the mansion, included a neoclassical colonnade and walkway facing the South Lawn. On the north side of the wing, only a row of lunette windows was visible above ground level.2

Alfred Mullett’s colonnade

It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the next big change came. By 1866, the East Wing had fallen into neglect and was being used as a tool house, potting shed, and for compost storage. It looked terrible and smelled worse. The ceilings sagged and their copper roofs leaked; the lunette windows on the north side were cracked and jagged in places. On the recommendation of architect Alfred B. Mullett (who would later design the Eisenhower Executive Office Building), the East Wing was demolished. Mullett created a new one-story stone colonnade along the east side of the White House, topped by a fine balcony for East Room guests to enjoy. In place of the East Wing, a path ran from the newly-established street between the White House and the Treasury to the east side of the White House; it was beautified with a fountain, stone steps, and ornamental fences.3

Charles McKim’s “restored” East Wing

By the end of the 19th century, much more radical ideas for expanding the White House were afoot. First Lady Caroline Harrison commissioned a plan from Army engineer Colonel Theodore Bingham for massively extending the building with huge wings directly attached on both sides. After making various refinements, Bingham showed off a plaster model of his sprawling Versailles-like vision in the East Room of the White House in December 1900. Expecting praise, Bingham instead received swift condemnation. The Washington Post reported,

The idea of the historical associations of the White House, which for a hundred years has played such an important part in the nation’s history, being marred by additions or decided improvements, is repulsive to many citizens of the United States, who love the old building for what it is and has been.

Distinguished architect and historian Glenn Brown added, “You might as well paint the White House red. It would seem just as much like home. We mean to fight this thing to the bitter end.” Brown and others did fight, and Bingham’s plan, thankfully, was never implemented.4

Instead, Theodore Roosevelt took s different approach. He hired distinguished architect Charles McKim of the firm McKim, Mead & White, to do a thorough and cohesive “restoration” of the White House that would evoke stylistically the house’s Georgian-style origins. McKim worked closely with Glenn Brown, whose role in preserving the White House he acknowledged: “The country owes you a great debt of gratitude for saving the White House from a fate worse than the British brought to it in 1814,” he wrote.5 As part of the renovations, McKim convinced Roosevelt to rebuild the demolished East Wing.

McKim excavated the foundations of the East Wing that dated back to Jefferson’s time (they had simply been covered over), adding a single-story pavilion at the far end. McKim thought of the East and West Wings as the “saucer” that nestled the “cup” of the White House—additions with an elegant but clearly subordinate role to the original building. The new East Wing pavilion became the mansion’s principal guest entrance, designed to appear like “a neoclassical garden loggia,” according to historian William Seale.6 Between the East Wing pavilion and the White House proper ran the reconstructed Jefferson colonnade, a light-filled passage with “hat box” cloak rooms on the partially below-ground north side.

It was an ingenious construction, offering an elegant solution to the problem of how to handle increasing numbers of visitors. Previously, a visitor coming in the front entrance of the mansion found no coatroom, restrooms or other support fixtures—just the formal public rooms where receptions were held. The new East Wing provided a beautiful visitor entrance pavilion with plenty of spaces for hats and coats, and a connecting colonnade to the basement level of the mansion, which McKim transformed into new public spaces. From here guests ascended to the East Room and the other formal reception rooms.

Expansion during and after World War II

The East Wing remained unchanged until 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt ordered his architect, Lorenzo S. Winslow, to design an expansion of the visitor pavilion to accommodate a planned White House museum. But things changed after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Army insisted on building a secret underground command bunker underneath the wing. The expanded East Wing—with space for offices rather than a museum—was partially constructed but left unfinished when funds ran out. A few years later it was completed during the Truman administration, which also undertook a massive, much-needed reconstruction of the original mansion.

The expanded East Wing preserved the low profile and discreet Neoclassical styling of its predecessor, assiduously deferring to the original White House as the star of the Executive complex. In addition to the underground bunker and added office space (much of it for the First Lady), the East Wing included a spacious new movie theater that replaced the extensive hatbox coatrooms McKim had positioned in the corridor between the East Wing and the White House.

After the Truman administration completed the new building, few if any changes were made to the external appearance of the East Wing until it was abruptly demolished in October 2025.

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The building came as part of a federal building spurt under Franklin Roosevelt. Crowning his New Deal of socially progressive programs was the establishment of Social Security in 1935 to ensure financial security for ordinary American workers. The new Social Security Board managing this vast program needed a substantial building as its headquarters.

Where should the Board go? The great Federal Triangle project, started in the Hoover administration, was finished by 1935, so there was no room left there. A new area of the city was needed. Agency officials wanted to find a site in Northwest, but planners worried that traffic congestion was already too high in that part of the city. Land in Southwest, south of the Mall, seemed like a better option—it was still very close to other government buildings and had been deemed ripe for redevelopment.

In fact, the large block where the Cohen Building now stands was heavily populated with lower-income residents before it was cleared for new construction. It had been home to Willow Tree Alley, a poster child for the dire, unsanitary, and crime-ridden conditions of the city’s “interior” alleys. Since the Civil War, rows of cheap one- and two-story houses had filled the alleys that crisscrossed the interiors of large city blocks. Poor African Americans and immigrants crowded into these ramshackle dwellings.1 Social reformers in the early 20th century, seeking to alleviate the crime and disease of Willow Tree Alley, pushed for the center of the block to be razed and replaced with a park. With federal funding, the Willow Tree Court playground was completed in 1913. It was Southwest’s largest recreation area for African Americans (all DC recreational facilities were segregated in those days), but it would not last.2

The block that included Willow Tree Court at its center was chosen as the site for the new Social Security Board building. All the remaining houses as well as the playground were razed, and former residents were dispersed to find new homes wherever they could. Construction began in 1939, and the building was completed the following year.

Prominent Philadelphia architect Charles Klauder was chosen to design the new building. Klauder was highly respected for his many educational buildings at Ivy League and other universities and colleges, most of them done in a Collegiate Gothic style. Perhaps his most famous work is the soaring Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the tallest educational buildings in the world. Sadly, Klauder died in 1938, before work had even begun on the new Social Security Building or its “twin” to the south, the Railroad Retirement Board (Switzer) Building.

Klauder was a master at integrating historical elements into modern buildings. While the default classical allusions for federal buildings are often Greek and Roman, Klauder chose subtle Egyptian motifs for the new Social Security building. The building’s monumental brown granite main entrance on Independence Avenue—complete with a prominent concave (“cavetto”) cornice and granite relief sculpture of “Unemployment Compensation,” by Emma Lou Davis—could be the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple. The shot-sawn limestone walls and tall, deeply recessed window panels magnify the sense that this is not just an office building; it is a monument.3

Yet the building’s imposing design also firmly embraces the aspirations and anxieties of its time. It has the clean lines and decorative reserve of the Art Moderne style, also called “Stripped Classicism.” Lavish ornamentation, which had become an embarrassment in the Depression years, is nowhere in sight. Instead the building strives to be forward-looking, exuding efficiency and economy. If this is a temple, it is a temple to American workers and their hopes and aspirations for a better future.

The interior public spaces on the main floor have refined touches, like the lobby’s polished green granite walls. An unusually attractive escalator is finished in wood and brass. But the real highlights are the numerous, outstanding murals. Many public buildings of the 1930s in Washington and across the country are decorated with murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and other federal entities. Most are in the emotionally charged Social Realist style that was popular at the time and conveyed the zeitgeist of its era.4

The Cohen Building has some of the best of these, including works by Seymour Fogel, Philip Guston, Ethel and Jenne Magafan, and Ben Shahn, among others. In 1938, Ben Shahn won the commission for a set of murals on either side of a main corridor. He was overjoyed to get it. “To me, it is the most important job that I could want,” he wrote. “The building itself is a symbol of perhaps the most advanced piece of legislation enacted by the New Deal, and I am proud to be given the job of interpreting it, or putting a face on it.” When he finished the work four years later, he concluded, “I think the Social Security mural is the best work I’ve done. Anyway, it is the most satisfying.”5

His poignant art speaks to us across the decades. The “Unemployment” segment of “The Meaning of Social Security” portrays idle and restless Depression-era workers with brawny, capable arms waiting hopefully for jobs. In another panel, a fiercely determined elderly woman sits holding her crutches, clearly needing assistance but not asking for it. These seem to be real people, their experience vividly captured for the ages.

The status of some works in the Cohen Building is uncertain. Notably, the married couple Jerome Snyder and Gertrude Goodrich of New York City created “Barn Dance,” “Bronco Busting,” and “Western Barbershop” for the cafeteria, but the paintings may no longer be there or may be covered up.6

The masterpieces that remain, along with the entire building itself, are in jeopardy. When it was completed in 1940, the building was taken over by the War Production Board, a military agency that had priority for available federal space, even though the US had not yet entered World War II. After the war, Social Security’s parent agency was headquartered here, but it left in the 1950s, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare moved in, sharing space with Voice of America. HEW (later renamed Health and Human Services) shifted to a new headquarters building, the Marcel Breuer-designed Hubert H. Humphrey Building, in 1977, leaving Voice of America as the principal tenant of a building much larger than it needed.

The VOA is a small agency that never had the budget required to pay for the proper upkeep of its huge building, which was renamed the Wilbur J. Cohen Building in honor of Social Security’s first employee in 1988. Predictably, major refurbishments, such as a roof replacement and interior renovations, were deferred. Now, the cost of restoring the building to its rightful place among the federal government’s monumental structures is steep. Rather than conserve this tremendous investment, shortsighted politicians pushed through a law to clear the VOA out of the building and sell it off.

Officially, the General Services Administration is offering the building for sale. It’s uncertain when this might happen. Any private developer who buys it will undoubtedly want to tear it down because of the expense of renovating it. GSA is supposed to take steps to protect the building’s invaluable artworks, but whether this will happen is also unclear. Meanwhile, the Living New Deal project has organized a petition to save what it calls the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”

Update: In June 2026, a government official stated that GSA was considering removing the Cohen Building from its list of buildings for disposal, due to the potentially high infrastructure costs that could ensue from deaccession.7 Let’s hope that the building is indeed saved and restored to good condition!

Cabinet department office buildings have stood on this site and the corresponding space on the other side of the President’s House since the federal government moved to Washington in 1800. George Washington wanted the government’s offices here, and under his direction, architect George Hadfield (1763-1826), designed the first two distinguished, federal-style office buildings. After the British burned the buildings in 1814, they were reconstructed, and two more matching structures were added, one on either side, to form a symmetrical Executive Branch campus surrounding the President’s House. On the east side, along 15th Street, stood the State Department to the north and the Treasury Department to the south. On the west, along 17th Street, were the Navy and War Departments.

The Treasury building burned (again) in 1833, and in its place a grand, neoclassical palace, designed by Robert Mills (1781-1855), was built in stages between 1836 and 1866. The old State Department building was torn down in 1866 to allow the Treasury Building to be completed, filling the block on the 15th Street side. This left the old War and Navy buildings, which everyone agreed were inadequate, on the west side. After much inaction, in 1871 Congress authorized construction of a large new building to house the State, War, and Navy departments. The building was to be “similar in ground plan and dimensions to the Treasury Building.”

Supervising Architect of the Treasury Alfred Bult Mullett (1834-1890), saddled with many other commissions, reluctantly took the job of designing the large new building. In those days the Supervising Architect of the Treasury was responsible for designing most new federal buildings, and Mullett was responsible for numerous courthouses, post offices, and other federal buildings around the country. Born in England, Mullett in 1845 settled with his family in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he got a job with the architectural firm of Isaiah Rogers (1800-1869) in 1857. Rogers moved to Washington in 1861 to be Supervising Architect of the Treasury, and Mullett later joined him there. After Rogers retired in 1865, Mullett was appointed to take his position.

While working in several different styles, Mullett soon settled on the fashionable French Second Empire style, with its prominent mansard roofs, as his preferred idiom. In addition to many lesser works, he designed seven great public building complexes—in Boston, New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Hartford, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. All were large, ornate, Second-Empire style buildings.

Mullett’s design for the State, War, and Navy Building surpassed all of his other projects. It is a great mountain of granite, poised proudly as a peacock and decked out with a tour-de-force of Renaissance Revival ornamental detail. Mullett chose two shades of gray—a lighter variety from Maine for the base and courtyards and a darker stone from Richmond, Virginia, for the exterior walls and porticos. While the composition as a whole is unmistakably Victorian, individual elements—columns, capitals, pediments, cornices—can be traced to neoclassical sources. Using his favorite Second Empire architectural vocabulary, Mullett throws so much decoration at us that we can’t possibly take it all in. The principal entrances on each of the building’s four sides are nested in a forest of columns and porticos piled within giant pavilions, creating the subtle and pleasing appearance of porousness and openness—it’s hard to make out exactly where the limits of the doors and walls are.

To the Gilded Age sensibility, the building’s design is elegant, sophisticated, and unrestrained. The Second Empire styling reflects Continental tastes, showing that America not only embraces European sophistication but can vigorously outdo it. The building’s immense proportions—the bewildering array of columns, windows and pediments—serves to convey the authority and power of the U.S. government and the country’s wealth. Just as the eye cannot possibly take in so much rich décor, so the breadth and richness of America’s presence in the world cannot be fathomed at a glance.

Construction of Alfred Mullett’s masterpiece took 17 years of continuous effort, from 1871 to 1888, and cost over $10 million, an astronomical sum at the time. Mullett resigned as supervising architect in 1874, and others, including Col. Thomas Lincoln Casey (1831-1896), who also oversaw the completion of the Washington Monument, took on the task of finishing the building, which they executed very closely to his original design. The State Department wing, on the south side of the building was constructed first, allowing State Department personnel to move in in 1876. Second in line was the Navy Department wing, on the east side of the building, which was begun in 1876. The old War Department building remained in service until 1879, when work began on the north wing. The final west wing, also reserved for the War Department, was started in 1884 and finished four years later. When it was all done, it was the largest office building in the world, with more than 10 acres of floor space, eight grand cantilevered staircases, several large and dramatic skylights, and hundreds of spacious rooms sporting 16-foot ceilings.

The interior spaces were as elaborately decorated as the exterior. Among the most exquisite interior spaces are the Diplomatic Reception Room, designed and furnished to impress visiting dignitaries, and the lavishly decorated Navy Department Library, designed more as a reception room than a library. More money was spent on this room than on any other in the building, with a dazzling array of finishes that include domestic and imported marbles, onyx, encaustic tiles, and bronze and ornamental ironwork. After the Navy Department moved out in 1918, the room became known as the Indian Treaty Room, although no one knows why, as no Indian or other treaties were ever signed in it. Remarkably, it has been virtually unaltered over the years, and it remains one of the building’s most spectacular spaces.

While the building’s extraordinary expense drew some detractors, ordinary people marveled at both the immensity and elegance of the structure. Tourists frequented the building to see the rich trappings of the Diplomatic Reception Room and to stop in the State Department Library, where they could inspect copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, a ritual activity for out-of-town visitors. Local residents also enjoyed the building. Boys in winter would run their sleds down the grand staircase on the south side, and President Taft’s Holstein cow, Pauline Wayne, grazed on the lawn in summer.

Meanwhile, the building’s explosively temperamental architect, Alfred B. Mullett, did not have an easy life. In 1874 he had quit the post of supervising architect in a huff, because of disagreements with the new Secretary of the treasury, Benjamin H. Bristow. Fifteen years later, after the State, War, and Navy Department Building was finally completed, he sued the U.S. government for $158,441 for work related to this and several other projects. He argued that his design work for the building had been done in his spare time, since he was fully occupied during regular working hours, and thus the government owed him an architect’s fee for this extra work. By this time he had overextended himself with real estate investments and desperately needed the money. However, the court was unsympathetic with his claims. He received nothing.

Mullett was widely known to have a volatile personality, and his abrupt resignation from the powerful supervising architect’s position was just one manifestation. He once hauled off and punched a Cincinnati official in the face, right on a downtown city street, for calling him a liar. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873) was quoted as calling him “the little fellow from Cincinnati who explodes at the lowest pressure of any man now living.”

Sadly, Mullett died by suicide on an October day in 1890. “For several months he had suffered from fits of depression and, being naturally an extremely nervous man, his ordinarily irritable temperament was not soothed or amended by these later-appearing periods of melancholy,” the Evening Star commented. Mullett had been in an unusually cheerful mood that day, something that his colleagues at work noticed, and he went home around 3:30 in the afternoon. He headed upstairs, telling his wife and daughter that he needed rest. To his wife he suggested, “I think I could drink a little beef tea.” While she went downstairs to prepare it, he secluded himself in his bedroom and shot himself in the head with a revolver.

In detailing the sad circumstances of his death, the Star also praised Mullett’s work, noting that “All Mr. Mullett’s designs were characterized by great artistic beauty, coupled with practical utility.” The reporter admired in particular the “massive and imposing building for the War, Navy and State Departments, which will stand as the greatest monument to his artistic taste and skill.”1

Yet as tastes changed, Mullett’s creations increasingly were reviled. Many of his great public buildings were torn down, leaving the State War and Navy Building as one of the few survivors. Gradually all three of State War and Navy’s tenants outgrew their space and moved out. The Navy Department left in 1918, preferring hideous (but spacious) temporary buildings on the Mall to their former elegant headquarters. The War Department followed in 1938 and the State Department in 1947—all of them decamping to much plainer, boxier spaces. White House offices began taking over the vacant space in 1939, and in 1949 the building was officially turned over to the Executive Office of the President and renamed the Executive Office Building.

Imbued with the reactionary neoclassical conservatism of the early 20th century, federal bureaucrats twice tried to reclothe Mullett’s masterpiece in tidy neoclassical garb. An urban legend had developed that Mullett’s design violated Congressional direction to create a building that matched the Treasury on the other side of the White House. There is no historical basis to the claim, but in 1917 distinguished neoclassical architect John Russell Pope (1874-1937) first sketched a plan to re-skin the structure to look more like the Treasury. By the late 1920s, another distinguished Washington architect, Waddy B. Wood (1869-1944), developed more detailed plans to make the building Treasury-like. In 1929 Charles Moore (1855-1942), previously clerk to the McMillan Commission and an early chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, endorsed Wood’s plan to remodel the “ridiculous architectural creation of former Supervising Architect Mullett,” observing that

Both President Hoover and Secretary Mellon have inveighed publicly against the State, War and Navy Building as an architectural monstrosity; but it may not be beyond redemption. The architect Charles McKim used to say that he could do a great deal with the edifice if he only had a rake! Secretary Mellon has a design that would remake it into what Congress supposed it was going to be—a counterpart of the Treasury.2

In 1930 Congress happily authorized $3 million to carry out the transformation, but the job proved more complex than it had originally appeared, and the true costs were not clear. With other Depression-driven priorities at hand, Congress thankfully withdrew the authorization.

But the old State, War and Navy building was not out of jeopardy yet. In 1957, the President’s Advisory Commission on Presidential Office Space recommended that it be torn down and replaced with a new White House office building. Views were beginning to change, however, and tearing down grand old buildings like this one was not something everybody agreed on any more. The commission’s proposal was opposed in Congress, and in the end attention shifted toward supplementing the building with new construction to the north of the White House on Lafayette Square.

Still, old attitudes died hard. One day in April 1958, former president Harry S Truman was taking a stroll about town with a group of newspaper reporters, and the group passed by the old Executive Office Building. Truman, chuckling, remarked: “They’ve been trying to tear this down for 20 years. But I don’t want it torn down. I think it’s the greatest monstrosity in America.”3

In 1971 the Old Executive Office Building, as it was called at this point, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That same year Don’t Tear It Down, which eventually became the D.C. Preservation League, was founded to save the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. Preservation was finally gaining traction. In the early 1980s, the General Services Administration began a concerted effort to restore and rehabilitate Mullett’s masterpiece, an effort that has been going on in stages ever since. Architecture critic Benjamin Forgey pointed out that this was “one of the Reagan administration’s few laudable acts in the domain of architecture.”

Renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in 1997, the building today houses White House offices, is closely guarded, and no longer offers public access. In November 2025, President Trump said he wanted to paint the entire building white, a drastic move that could damage the building’s exterior surfaces and that preservationists, including the DC Preservation League, have filed suit to oppose. Hopefully the building survives this latest threat as it has so many others in the past.

A version of this article first appeared on Streets of Washington in September 2014.

Other sources for this article included: Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Palace of State: The Eisenhower Executive Office Building (US Commission of Fine Arts, 2018); Executive Office of the President, The Old Executive Office Building A Victorian Masterpiece (1984); General Services Administration, Executive Office Building (1964); and numerous newspaper articles.

The Marshall Hall estate was originally part of a tract of land that Joshua Marshall obtained in 1696. Joshua was the son of William Marshall, an emigrant from England who acquired land farther to the east in southern Maryland in the 17th century. In 1700, John Ackatamaka, leader of the local Native American nation known as the Piscataway, signed a confirmation of the land deed, leading to inaccurate later claims that Joshua Marshall had obtained the land directly from the Piscataway.1

Joshua’s nephew, Thomas Marshall, gained control of the property in the early 1700s. He was a successful merchant, buying and selling goods from his Potomac River pier at Marshall Hall and running a prosperous tobacco plantation there, powered largely by enslaved labor. He began constructing the Marshall Hall mansion around 1725, adding a large extension around 1760. The sizable, one-and-a-half story mansion was one of the largest in southern Maryland and featured elegant architectural details, such as decorative molded window bases and rich interior wood paneling. The National Register of Historic Places nomination for Marshall Hall calls it “an impressive structure skillfully executed in Flemish bond brick.”2

The Marshall family was one of the most prominent in southern Maryland, and Thomas Marshall’s son, Thomas Hanson Marshall, knew George Washington and engaged in at least one land swap with him as each sought to increase their respective holdings. By Revolutionary War times, the Marshalls and Washingtons were close enough to jointly run a public ferry across the river between their estates. However, tobacco farming was using up the soil on the Marshall estate, and in the 1850s financial constraints forced the Marshall family heirs to sell the property. After 1867, no Marshall family member lived at the mansion.3

Resort and Amusement Park

After the Civil War, a new business model superseded Marshall Hall’s old raison d’être. Entrepreneurs around the country began establishing country resorts and picnic groves outside of large cities for day-tripping middle-class workers to relax and commune with nature. Many were located along rivers and accessible by steamboat. Marshall Hall became a classic example.4 Beginning around 1870, James Sykes and Thomas Stackpole began adding fixtures to the fledgling Marshall Hall park and bringing more and more excursionists to the site.

One spring day in 1890, a reporter for the Washington Post tagged along on one such excursion, complete with a famous planked shad dinner that became customary in the springtime. Though tainted with white male chauvinism, his narrative captures the bucolic serenity of the mansion and its resort grounds in the late 19th century:

The white wooden house [is] set back—from the river—among its park of trees, surrounded by its orchards. The buildings have been freshly painted and present a spring-like appearance on their lawn of turf…

Our steamer cast anchor and the passengers filed down the gang ways and went ashore and scattered themselves on rustic seats under the trees and in the summer houses over the park… Many of the crowd invade[d] the halls of the old Marshal mansion, and filled the chairs on the front piazza, and on the lawn around the doors.

Almost every one tried to recall reminiscences of the Marshal’s, and to relate something new about the old-time families on the Potomac…

Savory odors floating from wreaths of smoke on the outskirts of the park attracted attention… Two tiers of thick planks, with rows of shad nailed to the boards faced a long smoking fire of logs. Negroes with cloth pouches on the end of poles, soused their pouches into gourds of butter and sauce, and applied these flavoring condiments to the shad as the fish fried and sissed in the heat of the fire.

When one plank of shad was baked to a perfect brown they were taken from the nails and placed on plates on the tables and fresh fish put on the boards. At 1 o’clock dinner was announced, and the crowd came in from the groves and sat down in the big dining-hall…

After our repast of Potomac shad we came out on the lawn to while away the afternoon… Those who had girls with them wandered off along the river side to enjoy whatever pleasures live in the pathless woods and the joys found along lonely shores. Others who had no girls with them resigned themselves in the chairs under the arbors to the solace of their pipes, and the quieting effects of lager...5

A 1902 newspaper account similarly describes the “old Marshall house,” and its “large comfortable rocking chairs.” “As [visitors] sit in the arm chairs on the balcony of the Marshall mansion they look at the river and the small craft skimming about over its surface from under the canopy of oaks.” Beyond the porch view, “If interested in things historical, the visitor to Marshall Hall has a feast at hand. Hanging on the wall under the roof of the front gallery is a fac-simile copy of the transfer or deed to the land on which Marshall Hall is situated, from John Ackatamaka, Emperor of the Piscataways, to Joshua Marshall, the first of the Maryland family of that name, given in the year 1701.” As mentioned above, the claim about the document being a land deed is not strictly correct, but hanging the “fac-simile” on the wall added historical gravitas to the experience of picnicking and cavorting at the resort—the place was not as frivolous as it might otherwise appear.6

The article goes on to declare, “Most of the furnishings of Marshall Hall are those that were in President Lincoln’s private cabin and saloon on the steamer River Queen at the time he went to the Hampton Roads conference, and which were purchased after the war by the company that now owns Marshall Hall.” Among the historic furnishings that the Mount Vernon and Marshall Hall Steamboat Company had acquired were “a pair of very handsome and valuable Japanese vases, that now stand on the old-fashioned mantelpiece in the parlor of the Hall.” What ultimately happened to these relics remains a mystery.7

As the Marshall Hall park prospered, various fixtures were added, such as a large dance pavilion (1891), wooden roller coaster (1899), Ferris Wheel (1905), and carousel (1910). But it wasn’t until after World War II that the modern amusement park began to take shape when a modern roller coaster replaced the old one in 1949.

After purchasing the amusement park and the Wilson Line in 1958, developer Joseph I. Goldstein undertook extensive renovations. Almost all of the remaining old Victorian resort fixtures were removed and replaced, including most of the surviving outbuildings of the pre-resort era, including a distinctive stables building. In their place, colorful new rides and amusement park structures went up. In 1966, the mansion itself was drastically renovated. The iconic veranda was ripped away, and inside, historic rooms were fitted with drywall, drop ceilings, and fluorescent lights so they could serve as offices.

Creating Piscataway Park

Since the 1950s, supporters of Mount Vernon had grown increasingly concerned that the beautiful view across the Potomac to pristine woodland on the Maryland side—still looking mostly like it did when George Washington was alive—would soon be forever ruined by commercial development. There were plans to locate large oil storage tanks there, and in 1960 a proposal was announced to build a sewage treatment plant directly across from the estate. Activists and influential landowners successfully countered those threats by buying up land and lobbying for restrictive covenants. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed into law an act authorizing the creation of Piscataway National Park to protect the Maryland land along the river. After more than a decade of additional legal actions, easements, and acquisitions, in 1974 the park reached its full planned extent, protecting some 5,000 acres on the Maryland side of the river, including Marshall Hall.8

Marshall Hall had been a major sticking point. Owner Goldstein had his heart set on building a greatly expanded amusement park on the site, to be called the “Spirit of America.” Concerned neighbors and conservationists battled Goldstein in court for years, finally winning in 1970. By 1971, after it became clear that the site would likely be purchased and incorporated into Piscataway Park, the truculent Goldstein tried to harass the federal government into quickly agreeing to his asking price by cutting down five trees along the waterfront every week until his terms were accepted. At least 40 trees were callously destroyed before his rampage finally stopped. In 1974, an act of Congress stipulated a $10 million price for the site, slightly more than Goldstein’s original asking price of $9.5 million. Goldstein was allowed to keep the amusement park operating until 1979.9

When the amusement park finally closed in 1979, it was barely operational. The roller coaster, its main attraction, had been ruined in a storm in 1977 and never repaired, and other attractions were likewise creaky and in poor condition. The park service immediately began clearing away these structures, restoring the site largely to the way it was in George Washington’s day.

All that remained were the stately Marshall Hall mansion, a small historic outbuilding, and the 1910 carousel—the only surviving element of the original amusement park. The park service prepared a historic structure report documenting the mansion and its unique features. To protect the vacant building, a chain-link fence was installed around it, topped with barbed wire.

Disaster Strikes

Late on the night of October 16, 1981, fire destroyed the priceless 256-year-old mansion, leaving almost nothing standing but the brick outer walls. The fire had been deliberately set by someone who broke the lock on the gate to the barbed wire protective fence. The arsonist(s) also destroyed the 1910 carousel. A reward was posted for any information about who had committed the crime, but nothing ever came of it. At the time, the park service anticipated rebuilding the mansion. Its 1983 plan for Piscataway Park stated, “Marshall Hall will be a primary visitor contact area for the park. The restored Marshall Hall mansion will be adapted for use as a contact facility, with parking for 50 cars,”10

But reconstruction never happened. Instead, worse destruction ensued. In January 2003, the distraught driver of a tractor-trailer plowed his truck directly into the mansion, leaving gaping holes in the brick walls on either side. The driver apparently was attempting to kill himself.

The park service agreed to repair the truck damage but said the mansion would not be rebuilt, reclassifying it as a “ruin.” In an odd bit of 19th century romanticism, the park service’s policy is that ruins should be left as is and not rebuilt. In the case of Marshall Hall, this stance ignores the fact that extensive documentation, including photographs and measured drawings by the Historic American Buildings Survey, exists to ensure an accurate reconstruction.11

Sadly, no further action to restore the mansion has been proposed. Marshall Hall now stands cursed by the very attribute that once made it popular—its secluded location away from the city. Too few potential visitors—and too many competing historic attractions—mean that park officials are unlikely to change their minds and commit funds to reconstruct the house. Its brick walls are almost all that remains of the historic estate’s long and rich legacy.

Special thanks to Peggy Marshall for generously sharing her vast expertise on Marshall Hall.

The golden age of the Wilson Line’s Potomac excursion service lasted from the 1930s through the 1960s. Each summer, Wilson Line boats ferried hundreds of thousands of revelers down the river to Mount Vernon and Marshall Hall. In 1940, the Wilson Line replaced the City of Washington with the Mount Vernon, a newly rebuilt steamer with a very modern look, complete with canted smoke-stack, “streamlined” railings, and other trendy design features.

In addition to visiting Mount Vernon and enjoying the amusements at Marshall Hall, customers could take advantage of the Wilson Line’s popular moonlight dance cruises. “Cool off on summer nights by taking a ‘moonlight’ trip on the Wilson Line streamliner S.S. Mount Vernon,” urged an advertising brochure. “There is a spacious air cooled dance deck, with a top orchestra and entertainment, for your dancing pleasure. The broad top deck, with only the stars for a canopy, provides the perfect setting for relaxation and romance.”

Patrick Buckley, who grew up in Alexandria, remembers being mesmerized by the Wilson Line’s pleasure boats at an early age. His mother would sometimes take him down to the river, and he remembers once seeing the Mount Vernon suddenly rounding a bend. He could hear the music from the boat’s dance hall, and his imagination was stirred. He wanted to be on that boat! Buckley would get his first job on the Wilson Line at age 17, serving as a deckhand on the Mount Vernon’s successor, the George Washington. In the 1970s, he was the George Washington’s helmsman, responsible for steering the boat down the river. “I could make that GW dance,” he boasts.2

In 1956, when the Mount Vernon was still running, Elvis Presley played his one and only DC show on the boat. The 21-year-old entertainer, just becoming well-known in the music world, was set to kick off a season of Country Music Moonlight Cruises on the Potomac. The excursion itself turned out to be a bust: the boat had blown a valve earlier in the day, and it could not be brought back into service that evening. Concert organizer Connie B. Gay explained to the crowd at the pier on Maine Avenue that the boat would not be sailing but that the onboard concert would proceed anyway. Anyone who was unhappy would be refunded their admission fee. Some took him up on the offer and left with their two dollars, but others remained and packed themselves into the boat’s glass-enclosed deck to escape the cold. They were treated to a rousing, intimate performance; the future King of Rock ‘n Roll didn’t disappoint.3

The Mount Vernon’s service came to an abrupt end in January 1963, when a seacock valve failed and the boat sank in 25 feet of ice and water at her Maine Avenue berth. The damaged vessel was later refloated but never returned to excursion service on the Potomac.4 The M.V. George Washington, a diesel-powered boat formerly known as the Hudson Belle, took its place. The George Washington featured a “fake” smokestack with an air blower inside that made the boat look like a traditional steamer.

The GW had four decks: the first (main) deck included concessions, games, and food. The second deck featured a dance floor that could accommodate 1,800 and hosted live bands on moonlight cruises. The third deck was the observation deck, and the fourth was the sun deck.

Buckley recalls that once in the early 1970s, the cast of the Star Trek TV series, including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, took a ride on the George Washington. The captain of the Starship Enterprise was given the opportunity to helm the George Washington, but Buckley quickly took back control when Shatner was unable to steer the boat.

The Stain of Segregation

For almost its entire existence, the trip to Marshall Hall amusement park sadly was strictly off-limits to Blacks. Black resentment over the Jim Crow exclusion from Marshall Hall and other amusement parks, including Glen Echo, was always strong. As early as 1908, Rev. S.L. Corrothers of the Galbraith A.M.E. Church railed against local members of the Republican party for their hypocrisy in “always professing undying friendship for us,” while choosing such a polarizing location for their upcoming presidential campaign ratification meeting: “Where are they going to have it? They are going to have it at Marshall Hall, where no negro is allowed, and they are going on a boat on which no negro is permitted unless in a menial capacity [the Charles Macalester]. That’s undying friendship for you.” Because of the snub, Corrothers urged the National Negro American Political League to break with tradition and support the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in the upcoming presidential election.5

By the late 1950s, African Americans were allowed to ride on Wilson Line boats but were supposed to get off at Mount Vernon. According to Patrick Buckley, in one incident a Black family unexpectedly stayed on the boat at Mount Vernon. By prior arrangement, the boat sounded a long warning call on its horn to signal across the river as it left the Mount Vernon pier. When it docked at Marshall Hall, Charles County police were on hand to prevent the Black family from disembarking. When the father asked why they couldn’t get off there, a cop struck him in the head, drawing blood. His wife had to tear off part of her dress to make a bandage for him as they waited to return to DC.6

By the 1950s, African Americans in DC had successfully raised broad awareness of the injustice of discrimination in public accommodations. Mary Church Terrell and other Black leaders organized pickets of restaurants, department store lunch counters, and movie theaters and persuaded the city government to sue Thompson’s Restaurant for refusing to serve them. In 1953, the Supreme Court ruled that longstanding laws on the books in DC prohibited discrimination, and soon most public accommodations in the District were desegregated. However, facilities in the suburbs were another matter.7

In July 1959, a Colombian neurophysiologist, Dr. Arturo Morillo, was vacationing with his family in Washington. He was told at the Wilson Line ticket office that he and his family could ride the boat but wouldn’t be able to get off at Marshall Hall because it was segregated. The Morillos declined. Then, in March 1961, the George Washington University Student Council voted to end its annual “Colonial Cruise” to Marshall Hall because of the amusement park’s racial ban was still in effect. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1964, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.8

End of the Line

The oil crisis of the early 1970s put pressure on the Wilson Line to phase out fuel-guzzling boats like the George Washington, which had its last run in 1974. The company decided to modernize by adding a fleet of three catamarans: the America, Liberty, and Freedom, expecting a booming business during the Bicentennial. But 1976 came and went without a business boom, and the loans on the catamarans began to weigh heavily on the business. The company declared bankruptcy in 1977 and shut down for good in 1978—just ahead of the closure of Marshall Hall amusement park. It was the end of an era in Potomac river excursions.9

Special thanks to Patrick Buckley for sharing his reminiscences and memorabilia of the Wilson Line.

Next time we’ll conclude our series on Potomac excursions with an in-depth look at the Marshall Hall mansion and its fate.

The major sightseeing draw was Mount Vernon—specifically George Washington’s tomb there—and the most popular way to get down to see it was to take a boat. As early as the 1850s, when a much-dilapidated Mount Vernon was still a private estate owned by one of Washington’s heirs, a small wharf was built for the site’s many visitors. In 1858, the mansion and estate were taken over by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a group of prominent women who organized to restore the property as a permanent memorial to the first president. Despite the deplorable condition of the house, one of the first things they did was commission Army engineer Montgomery C. Meigs, who had been working on the expansion of the U.S. Capitol, to design a larger wharf. The new wharf was constructed in 1860. The secretary of the fledgling ladies’ association, Sarah Tracy, managed to keep Mount Vernon open throughout the Civil War by extracting promises from generals on both sides to steer clear of the venerable mansion. Nevertheless, military activity in the area was incessant.

Beginning in the late 1860s, excursion boats that traveled to Mount Vernon also often stopped at Marshall Hall, directly across the river on the Maryland side. Now part of Piscataway Park, Marshall Hall was originally part of a large tract of land that Joshua Marshall obtained in 1696. Marshall’s nephew, Thomas Marshall, gained control of the property and ran a prosperous farm here in the early 1700s. He began constructing the Marshall Hall mansion around 1725, adding a large extension around 1760. However, the farm’s productivity gradually declined in the 19th century, and in the 1850s, financial constraints forced the Marshall family to sell the property. After 1867, no Marshall family member lived at the mansion.1

In 1868, entrepreneurs James Sykes and Thomas Stackpole started offering steamship service to Mount Vernon aboard the Arrow, which left the southwest waterfront on a “semi-weekly” basis around 4:30 pm and returned at 10pm. The boat was also available for charter by “private parties, clubs, or associations to make afternoon or moonlight excursions on the Potomac.”2

Along with several other stops, the Arrow docked at Marshall Hall on a regular basis as part of its Mount Vernon route. By 1870, Sykes and Stackpole had purchased the site to develop as a summer resort. In April, Stackpole, who captained the Arrow, took reporters on an excursion to preview the new attraction. The Evening Star’s reporter commented that the Arrow was “not quite up to its name for speed, but it is cozy little boat,” and Marshall Hall, he explained, “is now being fitted up as a place of summer resort, with a dancing pavilion and all the etceteras desired by pic-nic and pleasure parties. The plateau here at the bend of the river commands a superb view of river scenery, including the wooded heights of Mount Vernon.”3 The venture proved very successful in the 1870s and 80s. Along with croquet matches and shooting competitions, jousting tournaments were an early attraction that became a lasting Marshall Hall tradition. And for those wanting to stay the night, accommodations could be had in the old mansion.

As patronage increased, the Arrow proved too small, and in 1878, Sykes and Stackpole replaced it with a new and larger steamer, the W. W. Corcoran. Named after wealthy banker and philanthropist William Wilson Corcoran, who had donated funds to help restore Mount Vernon, the steamer was built by the Quintard Iron Works of New York at a cost of $45,000.

The first official guidebook for Mount Vernon, written by Elizabeth Bryant Johnston and published in 1876, states that the steamer W.W. Corcoran was “the only Boat allowed to land Passengers at Mount Vernon Wharf,” suggesting a special arrangement with Sykes and Stackpole’s venture.4

The Corcoran served excursionists for 12 years before coming to a dramatic end in the early morning hours of September 3, 1891. The previous day had been the steamer’s busiest day of the season, due to a tournament at Marshall Hall that drew thousands of spectators. The Corcoran had made three round trips that day, finally returning home to the southwest waterfront at 2:20 am. The exhausted crew of seven went to sleep in their berths, only to be woken up around 5 o’clock by the smell of smoke. Within minutes an intense fire tore through the wood-hulled boat. The crew scrambled to jump ashore, casting the burning boat adrift so that the blaze would not spread to the other boats docked alongside it on the wharf. But Robert Grantley, a young boy in his early teens, was still on board. He worked as a bootblack and usually went home in the evening when the boat returned to the wharf but stayed onboard that night because the Corcoran had come in so late and the streetcars had stopped running. As Grantley ran up to the deck railing, those on shore yelled at him to jump in the water, but he hesitated because he couldn’t swim. With the flames practically at his back, he soon was forced to jumped in anyway and sadly drowned before rescuers could reach him. Grantley was the only casualty that day, other the boat itself, which was nothing but a smoldering, twisted wreck when firemen finally doused the last flames.5

By this time, the Mount Vernon/Marshall Hall venture was in new hands. Levi Lowell Blake and Joseph Chamber McKibbin took over in 1889, rechristening the enterprise the Mount Vernon and Marshall Hall Steamboat Company and ordering a new and larger steamboat, the Charles Macalester, which entered service in 1890. Named for the father of Lily Lytle Macalester, then-regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the new boat was built in Wilmington, Delaware, and featured an iron hull. It was significantly faster than previous steamers like the Corcoran. The boat was docked alongside the Corcoran when it caught fire in September 1891, and the Corcoran bumped against its side at one point, singing some timbers, but the Macalester escaped serious damage due to the quick action of the Corcoran’s crew in cutting that boat loose from the wharf.

Known far and wide as the “Charlie Mac,” the Charles Macalester ferried thousands of tourists and excursionists to Mount Vernon and Marshall Hall for many decades, even as the financial health of the steamboat company was sometimes precarious. In 1898, for example, Blake and McKibbin were pushed out for failing to pay debts, and their enterprise was sold at auction to new owners. The steamer trips kept operating, however. Tourists kept marveling at the restored Mount Vernon, and partygoers kept carrying on at Marshall Hall, where, according to the Washington Post, “Dancing is as popular as ever, for the big pavilion is always cool, the floor is smooth, and Prof. Schroder’s band plays all the latest music.”6

By 1932, the Charlie Mac was a distinctly old-fashioned vessel, and her days were numbered. Though almost all her voyages were happy and incident-free, one that year turned into a disaster. Two local companies, Chesnut Farms Dairy and Chevy Chase Dairy, held a company picnic at Marshall Hall for 900 employees on July 21, 1932. Unfortunately, something served at the lunch—probably the deviled egg salad—was bad, and a few people gradually started getting sick that afternoon. By the time the Charlie Mac came around to pick them up at 4pm, more people were sick. The Charlie Mac hightailed it back to the DC waterfront, making the trip in one hour instead of the usual two. One passenger described the scene on the boat:

I didn’t get sick at all, but pretty soon women all around me began to get up and go to the rail. And then they’d stay there and other people would push them aside. And one man got real sick and just leaned his head over, and then everybody started to do that….

More than 400 ill picnickers were taken to local hospitals for food poisoning, some on stretchers because they were too ill to stand. Overwhelmed first responders commandeered taxicabs and private autos to accommodate all the victims. To compound the problem, some of the leftover deviled egg salad was taken to the Bonus Army camp in West Potomac Park, and some of the veterans there also got sick before the word got out that the salad was tainted. Fortunately, everyone appears to have recovered.7

The following year, all operations of the Mount Vernon and Marshall Hall Steamboat Company ended, and the Charlie Mac was retired. Frederick Mertens, scion of the wealthy Mertens family of Maryland and president of the company, testified that the newly opened Mount Vernon boulevard—now called the George Washington Memorial Parkway—had ruined his business. Driving along the modern highway made traveling to Mount Vernon on a side-wheel steamboat seem hopelessly antiquated.8

However true that may have been, Mertens didn’t mention that another factor was at play as well—the recent arrival of a strong new competitor in the Potomac excursion boat business. We’ll pick up with the story of that company—the Wilson Line—in our next installment.

Special thanks to Peggy Marshall for sharing invaluable information and photos of Marshall Hall and to Carolyn Muraskin of DC Design Tours for sharing her expertise on Montgomery Meigs.