Although the snowstorm that just struck the east coast was not as bad as forecasters feared, it's worth looking back at one of the most devastating storms from the past. The great blizzard of March 11, 1888 wasn't even predicted at all in Washington. The weather forecast that day was just for wind and rain, with clear skies to follow. Sure enough, the day began with heavy rains, but by late afternoon it turned suddenly to heavy snow. About a foot of snow fell through the night, followed by fierce winds. It turned out to be a cataclysmic storm, walloping the entire northeastern U.S. and dumping two to three feet of snow in New York and New England. Though Washington was not the worst hit, the storm's effects had a lasting impact on the city.

A street-side snow hut made after the massive snow storm of March 1888 (Source: Library of Congress).

"The storm that visited Washington yesterday was one of the most remarkable known for years, The Evening Star reported on Monday, "In fact, the capital seemed to have dropped into the very center of a cyclone that brought with it a blinding succession of rain, snow, wind, and cold.... [T]he city was sheeted in a mantle of white that grew thicker every minute. As the night fell the heavily-laden telegraph wires began to come down, and in many places the streets were blockaded so that street cars had to turn around and make partial trips. The police wires were out of order, and to add to the discomforts of the night the electric lights began to fail. By midnight the city was almost in darkness, save for a few feeble gas jets that had flickered through the storm."

The combination of rain, snow, and high winds proved especially disastrous for communications, as hundreds of telegraph and telephone poles, laden with wet snow and ice, were easily blown down by the wind. Washington was thoroughly cut off from the outside world in a way it had not known since before the Civil War. No power, no lights, no communications. Police patrols were incommunicado and fire alarms could not be turned in. According to the Star, On B Street [now Constitution Avenue], from 6th to 9th streets northwest, nearly all the telegraph poles were broken about 15 feet from the ground, and the cross-arms and wires formed a net work across the street, making it impossible for the street cars to pass.... The wires connecting the police patrol boxes were either crossed or broken, and all persons arrested had to be marched through the streets in the old-fashioned way." The Washington Post put it more starkly: "Fires, murders, riots or any species of disturbance might have taken place in the remote sections of the city and no assistance could have been summoned."

The Star's observation that Washington seemed to be at the "very center" of the cyclone betrayed how little Washingtonians knew about the extent of the storm they had just survived. In fact, Washington was at the southern end of a massive system that had walloped the entire Eastern seaboard, dumping two to three feet of snow in New York and New England and killing several hundred people there. Washington had gotten off comparatively easy.

It certainly didn't seem that way, however. At the railroad depots, which were so vital for the city's commercial life in those days, no trains had shown up for many hours. The timetable boards that normally displayed dozens of arrivals and departures said merely "We don't know anything." Trains were delayed not just from the snow itself but from all the telegraph poles and wires strewn over the tracks for many miles.

"While the amount of damage cannot be accurately estimated it is certain that not in years has the city been visited by a storm that caused more trouble or endangered life and property as much as did the storm of yesterday," the Post concluded.

A Washington streetcar battles a snowstorm in 1889. (Source: Library of Congress).

The city's half dozen streetcar lines struggled to get their own tracks cleared but were generally successful when telegraph poles didn't block their paths, and service was nominally up and running on many routes. But keeping the cars moving proved to be a daunting task. Washington's street cars in 1888 were still all horse-drawn, and the operators had to stand on open platforms at the front of the cars. Man and beast both suffered mightily in the howling wind and frigid cold.

While most people stayed home, some events went forward as planned. Georgetown University Medical College held its graduation ceremonies at Albaugh's Grand Opera House on Pennsylvania Avenue for its class of 12 new doctors. Rev. J. A. Doonan, president of the university, pointed out helpfully to the budding physicians that "even a day like yesterday was good for pneumonia."

Then on Tuesday, two days after the storm passed, the winds picked up again. Western Union's linemen had to suspend their repair work on the telegraph lines in the face of 40 mile-per-hour winds, and much of the early repair work from Monday was ruined again. Train travel to and from Philadelphia or points farther north was still impossible. Even water travel had been stymied. "Navigation on the [Potomac] river is as much impeded as is the traffic on the railroads. The wind has literally blown all the water out into the [Chesapeake] bay, and the steamers were unable to leave their wharves [along the Southwest waterfront], the Post reported. "The river presented a curious appearance yesterday. The water was so low that brown banks of earth were visible along every side and [the river] seemed to have diminished to half its usual width." Gleeful scavengers happily scoured the newly exposed banks for tools and other long-lost artifacts.

A horse-drawn sleigh and streetcar cross paths in front of the Ebbitt House hotel in 1889 (Source: Library of Congress).

After a few more days, warm weather arrived, and the snow began to disappear quickly, as it often does in Washington. Workers cleared away debris and re-established communications lines, shocking Washingtonians with the news from up north, where the toll had been so much worse. When it was all over and finally cleaned up, the great snow storm of March 1888 left at least one lasting imprint on many Washingtonians: it showed how foolhardy it was to rely entirely on communications systems that used overhead wires. The Evening Star's outspoken editor, Crosby S. Noyes (1825-1908) began a long campaign to have electric wires buried within the downtown area of the city.

Coincidentally, in October 1888, the first electric streetcar line, The Eckington and Soldiers' Home Railway, began service, and it used overhead wires. Noyes was livid.  He won the support of influential congressmen and senators, many of whom undoubtedly remembered all the downed poles and wires from the great blizzard in March. Noyes ultimately was successful in having all wires buried in downtown Washington. The Eckington line would be the only one in the central part of the city to use overhead wires. All of Washington's future streetcars would get power from an underground conduit, accessed through a center slot between the rails. The blizzard of 1888 certainly wasn't the only reason this happened, but it drove home the value of underground systems in a most dramatic way.


Sources for this article included Kevin Ambrose, Blizzards and Snowstorms of Washington, D.C. (1993); and numerous newspaper articles.


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The iconic Masonic Temple building on the northwest corner of 9th and F Streets NW was the first major private building to be constructed downtown after the Civil War, and it was an extraordinary achievement. Richly decorated inside and out and with a grand ballroom on the second floor, it was one of the city's important cultural centers when it first opened its doors in 1869. The building had many lives, including as a bastion of the temperance movement in the early years of the 20th century and later as a furniture store. It would also become the first major building to be successfully protected by the District's Historic Landmark and Historic District Protection Act of 1978.

The old Masonic Temple on the northwest corner of 9th and F Streets NW (photo by the author).

The building was constructed as the headquarters for the local Grand Lodge of Masons. Freemasonry is a centuries-old tradition descended from medieval stone masons' guilds that evolved into a strictly fraternal order dedicated to benevolent acts. Masons organize themselves into lodges, which are chartered by regional Grand Lodges. Masons were first active in Washington in the late 18th century and formed a Grand Lodge here in 1811. By the mid 19th century they were using a hall at 9th and D Streets NW and needed a larger, more prestigious building to house their meeting hall and headquarters. In 1864, as the Civil War raged, Congress gave them a charter to acquire and develop a site for a new hall. The association purchased the 9th and F Streets lot in 1865 and began raising funds to construct the building. The project was run strictly as a for-profit business, with funds raised by the sale of stock. Stockholders would earn income from rental of the building's public spaces on the first and second floors.

In May 1868 the cornerstone of the building was laid in an elaborate day-long celebration. President Andrew Johnson, a Master Mason, took part in the ceremonies, marching in a procession that began at the old hall at 9th and D, headed up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Treasury and then marched back along F Street to the new building site.

(Photo by the author.)

The Mason ensured that nothing but the best minds and choicest materials were put into the building's construction. B.B. French (1800-1870), the Mason's Grand Master and a former Commissioner of Public Buildings under presidents Pierce and Lincoln, headed the project. The building committee chose Adolf Cluss (1825-1905), the "red" architect from Germany who was a Mason and the most prominent D.C. architect of his day, to design the building. Cluss chose a style he termed "French Renaissance," which actually appears to modern observers more like the great urban palaces of the Italian Renaissance. Ornamented with elaborate cast-iron decorations, the building's façade comes alive with lion's heads, angel's faces, swords, shields, and swags. The structure was originally supposed to be crowned with a mansard roof, as was fashionable at the time, but the rook was left out for lack of funds.

An 1880s drawing of the temple includes a horse-drawn streetcar passing on Ninth Street. (Author's collection.)

The two-toned façade on the upper floors consists of contrasting Connecticut brownstone with pale-green Nova Scotia freestone trim. The first floor was originally finished in ashlared granite from Richmond, Virginia, providing a solid-looking gray base that "will tone beautifully with the brown of the upper stories," as The Evening Star surmised in April 1868. Fitted out with large plate glass windows, the ground floor was designed for shops, while a double-height great hall on the main floor above it would serve as a music hall or grand ballroom for public gatherings as well as Masonic meetings. The two top floors were reserved for office space and private ceremonial use by the Masons.

The building was finished in late 1869, at a hefty cost of $200,000. The great second-story hall, with a capacity of 1,000, was said to be the largest public gathering space in the city at the time. It became very popular, "the scene of some of the most brilliant balls and State sociables given at the capital," according to an 1876 account. Among the more notable events was a grand banquet given by the British Minister for the Prince of Wales.

One of the first merchants to rent space on the ground floor was Elphonzo Youngs (1838-1905), a New York-born mason and grocer who in 1870 advertised dried beef and choice New York butter at his new store, which The Washington Post referred to as a "temperance grocery." The store would remain in business on that corner for many years.

Temperance, in the broad sense, has always been a theme for the Masons, and as the movement gained national prominence in the late 19th century, Masons became resolute proponents. Alcohol was perceived as a destroyer of family life and the cause of much suffering, particularly among the poor, so it was natural that the charitably minded Masons would be opposed to its consumption.

Sarah Doan La Fetra (Author's collection.)

One of the city's most prominent temperance advocates became another of the temple's early first-floor tenants. Her name was Sarah Doan La Fetra (1843-1919), and she was not only a fervent temperance advocate but became a highly successful Washington businessperson as well, in an age when women rarely were allowed to make such a mark in the commercial world. The daughter of Rev. Timothy Doan La Fetra of Sabina, Ohio, La Fetra was a strong religious upbringing and converted to Methodism at age sixteen. She was a grade school teacher in Ohio for several years before marrying Dr. George La Fetra, a Civil War veteran from Ohio, in 1867. The La Fetras moved to Washington, where George got a government job through his cousin, who was Secretary of the Interior, and Sarah soon became active in a variety of charitable projects and joined the Women's Christian Temperance Union when it was organized in 1873.

Trade card from the Temple Café (Author's collection).

La Fetra opened the Temple Café on the ground floor of the Masonic Temple around 1880. Like many restaurants of that era, La Fetra's was also a boarding house, with several rooms available for temporary lodging. Mrs. La Fetra seems to have catered specifically to important women leaders who visited Washington. In 1882, for example, Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, an attorney from Iowa, stayed at the Temple Cafe when she was in town for a temperance lecture at Lincoln Hall, which was only a few blocks away on Ninth Street. The Washington Post praised Mrs. Foster for being "as brave and bold as any man in the advocacy of reform."

Stereoview of the interior of the Temple Café (Author's collection).

The Temple Café soon gained a reputation as hotbed of reform. "Here's where they hatch the assaults on the 'liquor traffic'," a Post reporter observed in 1882. It was also the scene of important charitable activities. In January 1885, a dinner for some 200 newsboys was held at the Temple Café (though it's hard to imagine how so many of them were packed in to the café's small quarters). The Post recounted the Dickensian scene:

All the invited guests put in an appearance last evening, and in addition, as an evidence of their appreciation, many of them brought two or three friends along. The latter, to their by no means voiceless grief, were kept outside on the pavement, while those having tickets passed in. The result was that two hundred happy expectant boys thronged the room, and about two hundred protesting and pleading claimants clamored on the outside. An amicable arrangement was effected by letting all the boys in, and there was a solid mass of boys extending the entire depth of the long room. Some were white, but more were colored; some had freshened up their clothes, and others had come as they were. All were grinning and sat wedged together on the long benches without once punching each other or indulging in other similar amenities of the newsboy's life.... The supreme moment of the evening had arrived, and when the little gamins had a chance at the turkey sandwiches, cake, coffee, apples and oranges they made no delay in putting all these unusual delicacies where they would do most good. The boys then gave three hearty rousing cheers for their kind patrons, and then disappeared in all directions....

Mrs. La Fetra was known as a rousing speaker on the virtues of temperance, and in 1885 she became president of the Washington chapter of the WCTU. Expanding her business enterprises, the following year she leased the former Washington Grove Hotel, which she rechristened the Hotel Fredonia. For several years she kept the Temple Café going as well, while she also devoted more of her energies to helping the poor. As head of the local WCTU, she became involved in the effort to clean up the city's alleys, targeting in 1892 the infamous Louse Alley (where the National Museum of the American Indian now stands, on the Mall), which the Post asserted had an "unimpeached record as one of the blackest and vilest plague spots in darkest Washington." One day in May 1892 La Fetra and her cohorts did some "practical slumming," visiting Louse Alley and making arrangements to open a mission in that "unsavory byway, which has figured so long and often in the annals of the police court." She also proposed changing its name to "Reform Alley." La Fetra was one of many church and social leaders actively involved in the movement to clean up the city's alleys in the 1890s.

Postcard view of Louse Alley, circa 1910 (Author's collection).

Under La Fetra's leadership, the WCTU opened a "Hope and Help Mission" shelter for "poor unfortunate women, inebriates, opium-eaters and incapables of all conditions." Meanwhile La Fetra continued in the hotel business, taking over the former Irvine Hotel on the northwest corner of Eleventh and G Street NW in 1894 and renaming that Hotel La Fetra. The national WCTU met there in 1906 and were treated to an elegant vegetarian dinner, Mrs. La Fetra having becoming a vegetarian at some point after feeding the newsboys their turkey sandwiches. She would retire within a few years and finally passed away in 1919 at her apartment at 3152 Mount Pleasant Street NW.

A crumpled sheet of roofing lies in the street outside the Masonic Temple after a ferocious summer storm that whipped through Washington on July 30, 1913. The storm is also responsible for ripping the steeple off of the nearby Calvary Baptist Church  (Library of Congress).

Meanwhile, the masons had outgrown their elegant temple building and in 1908 completed an impressive new Beaux-Arts structure at 13th Street and New York Avenue, NW (as chronicled in a previous Streets of Washington article). They decided to rent out the old building for awhile, and it was taken over by the Strayer's Business College (now Strayer University). Strayer's was founded in Baltimore in 1892 by Dr. Seibert Irving Strayer (1867-1941), and it opened its first branch in Washington in 1904, moving to the Masonic Temple in 1909. The school moved to 721 Thirteenth Street NW in 1921 because it needed more space.

The Julius Lansburgh Furniture Company took over the temple building that same year. Julius Lansburgh (1852-1930) was born in Hamburg, Germany, and immigrated to the U.S. with his brothers Gustave and James, settling first in Baltimore and later moving to Washington. In 1860 Gustave and James founded Lansburgh & Bro., a dry goods store that eventually became one of the city's pre-eminent department stores. Julius worked in the furniture department, and in the 1870s he set out on his own. His furniture company became well known, and when he retired in 1919, the new owners kept the Lansburgh name. Lansburgh's extensively remodeled the Masonic Temple for retail use, dividing up the over-sized second floor into two levels, reconfiguring all the interior walls, and removing almost all interior decorations. The company then bought the building in 1926 and kept its furniture store there until it went out of business in 1970.

Though vacant and deteriorating, the distinguished building was recognized as an historic landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. Then, in 1978, The Washington Post reported that the YWCA had made a shocking deal to parking lot magnate Dominic F. Antonelli, Jr. (1922-2010) to acquire an adjoining lot on which to build a new headquarters. As part of that deal, Antonelli would gain possession of the old Masonic Temple, which would "be torn down and paved over for a parking lot." Fortunately, when the Historic Landmark and Historic District Protection Act went into effect in March 1979, Antonelli's plans to demolish the temple were quashed.

The old Masonic Temple in June 1969 (Historic American Buildings Survey)

Establishing a pattern that developers would repeat time and again, Antonelli then filed a petition to be allowed to tear down the protected building because saving it would be an "economic hardship." He offered to save the exterior walls that faced the street, but only if allowed to construct a new, larger office building behind them. According to the Post, Kirk White, Antonelli's attorney, argued that "no commercially viable undertaking is possible in the present building." Fortunately for posterity, Antonelli's plea was denied by the Historic Preservation Review Board at its very first meeting under the new preservation law. Don't Tear It Down, the predecessor of the D.C. Preservation League, led the defense of the building at the board's hearing. In 1981, the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld the board's decision, declaring that the mere fact that a new office building would be more profitable was not justification for demolishing the historic structure. The building then continued to sit empty for more than a decade.

Finally in 1992, through the benefit of a credit system whereby unused development rights are sold to developers to use at other sites, funds were obtained to restore the building to its former glory. Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey observed that "an unwanted duckling of a building has been transformed into an aesthetic swan." Repairs included removing layers of drab paint from the exterior and installing fiberglass reproductions of the long-lost exterior cast-iron ornaments, made from original molds that had been saved by the Smithsonian. Further restoration was undertaken beginning in 1998, when work began to construct a modern office building next to the historic temple. Even some traces of original painted interior decorations were uncovered and preserved. Finally, in 2001, the new office building, designed by Martinez & Johnson for the Gallup Organization, was completed and connected with the old building, bringing the old temple back again for another life.


Special thanks to Bruce Yarnall of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office for his research assistance and to Jim Berger, who graciously provided the stereoview of the interior of the Temple Cafe. Some of the material in this article previously appeared in an earlier Streets of Washington post. Other sources included EHT Traceries, Inc., The Masonic Temple: Interior Configuration and Decoration (1998); Joseph West Moore, Picturesque Washington: Pencil and Pen Sketches (1880); National Capital Planning Commission, Downtown Urban Renewal Area Landmarks (1970); Nancy B. Schwartz, ed., Historic American Buildings Survey District of Columbia Catalog (1974); National Register of Historic Places: Julius Lansburgh Furniture Company (1974); William B. Webb and J. Wooldridge, Centennial History of the City of Washington, D.C. (1892); Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, A Woman Of The Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied By Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (1893); and numerous newspaper articles.


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View of the Mall from the U.S. Capitol, circa 1870 (Author's collection) Click to enlarge.

When this photo was taken around 1870, the Mall still had most of its original layout, although much would change in the coming years. The bottom third of the photo shows trees on the west Capitol grounds. Left of center are the three white domed buildings of the old U.S. Botanic Garden, before it was moved to its present-day location on the south side of the Mall. The sharp white line to the right of the Botanic Garden is a path through the grass, but just above it is a segment of the old Washington City Canal, which has not yet been covered over. The canal is barely discernible as it jogs to the right, but then it continues to the Potomac River at an angle in the upper right center of the photo. The unfinished Washington Monument is faintly visible rising directly in front of the river a short distance to the left of where the canal runs into the river. Along the right side of the photo runs Pennsylvania Avenue, which looks empty because the long exposure of the photo has made all moving objects disappear. The black marks in the center of the road are streetcar tracks. Looking much rougher is Maryland Avenue SW, which runs along the left edge of the photo. A natural gas storage tank rises next to it, at about where the Air and Space Museum now stands. The short dark tower rising near the river is the Smithsonian Castle. What other early landmarks can you pick out in this view?

If you've done research on any aspect of Washington's past and would like to present your results to an enthusiastic and attentive audience, then please consider submitting a proposal for the 42nd Annual Conference on D.C. Historical Studies, to be held this November:





The Conference Committee of the Annual Conference on D.C. Historical Studies cordially invites presentations on all topics relating to the history of Metropolitan Washington, D.C., including nearby Maryland and Virginia as well as the federal government. Particularly welcome are complete sessions or papers addressing the theme of “New Freedoms, New Lives” as historians continue to reconsider the legacy of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Civil Rights struggles, and the waves of demographic changes on Washington and the nation. Presentations that compare D.C. to other urban centers are especially relevant and encouraged. However, submissions are not required to reflect the conference theme.

Complete information on making a submission for the conference can be found here or at the Conference website. We look forward to seeing everyone, either in the audience or making presentations, in November!

Very few monumental government buildings stood in Washington before the Civil War. Other than the Capitol and the White House, City Hall (the subject of our very first blog post more than five years ago) was one that stood prominently on Judiciary Square. The still unfinished Treasury Department building rose grandly on 15th Street. In addition to these, an elegant pair of distinguished neoclassical buildings straddled F Street NW, between the Treasury and the Courthouse, looking slightly out of place on the outskirts of downtown. On the south side of the street was the General Post Office building, now the Hotel Monaco, which we've previously profiled. On the north side was the Patent Office Building, home to one of the oldest agencies of the U.S. government and a grand showcase of its official artifacts. Patents are important!

The Old Patent Office Building, south (F Street NW) facade (photo by the author).

Before work on the Patent Office was begun in 1836, the site was an undeveloped hill on the edge of the embryonic capital. A couple of blocks to the north, Richard Butt built a large potter's kiln in 1827. According to a 1906 reminiscence in The Sunday Star, smoke from the kiln annoyed Butt's neighbors for decades. The only significant structures on the Patent Office site itself were an ice house and the cabin of Jimmy Orr and his wife, squatters who raised chickens and tended an orchard of mulberry, apple, and cherry trees. Orr died just as the square was sold to the government, and sympathetic Patent Office employees chipped in to pay for a small cabin nearby to house his displaced widow.

The Patent Office had previously been located a block to the south in Blodget's Hotel, the largest privately-owned structure in Washington until the federal government bought it in 1810. It had been constructed by Samuel Blodget, Jr. (1757-1814), a native of Massachusetts, as part of an outlandish scheme to finance construction of the capital city through a lottery. The grand prize in the lottery was to be this magnificent hotel, designed by James Hoban (1758-1831), architect of the White House. The lottery was a dismal failure, however, and Blodget lost everything in the process. The government took over the hotel for office space, primarily the Patent Office.

Blodget's Hotel (Source: Library of Congress).

Four years later, the British occupied the city, burning public buildings, including the Capitol and White House. They had set their sights on Blodget's Hotel as well and were about to set it on fire, when William Thornton (1759-1828), head of the Patent Office, intervened. Thornton's exact words to the British officer in command were not recorded, but he apparently argued that the patent records housed in the building were private property and thus not fair targets for the British. One story has it that he claimed that destroying these records of the inventive genius of the American people would be the equivalent of burning down the great Library of Alexandria, a devastating crime against civilization. Whatever his argument, the British apparently were duly convinced of the importance of patents, and they spared Blodget's Hotel. After they were gone, it was the only substantial public building still standing, and Congress met there for about a year while the Capitol was being reconstructed.

Then, in December 1836, a servant accidentally dumped hot fireplace ashes into a wooden refuse box, setting the building on fire. It burned to the ground, destroying thousands of patent models and records. Fortunately, the Declaration of Independence, which previously had been proudly on display in the building, had been moved to the State Department shortly before the fire and was safe. Not so for all the exquisite patent models and records that William Thornton had so valiantly saved from the torches of the British.

In fact, plans had been afoot for several years to build a new, larger, fireproof home for the Patent Office. The new building would be part of a mini-boom in government office construction during the Jackson administration, all of it in the fashionable Neoclassical Revival style. This included the Treasury Department and the General Post Office (which would rise on the site of Blodget's Hotel) as well as the new Patent Office. The trio of buildings was certainly a start toward creating a distinguished seat of government, but it was an incomplete one. When Charles Dickens visited Washington in 1842, his formula for creating a comparably awkward town was to

...plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought not to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody's way the better; call one the Post Office, one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; ...leave a brick-field without the bricks in all central places where a street may naturally be expected; and that's Washington.

The ostensible designer of the Patent Office was a young, ambitious, would-be architect named William Parker Elliot (1807-1854), who had studied under George Hadfield, architect of City Hall. The real genius behind the building's final design, however, was Robert Mills (1781-1855), who also designed the Treasury and Post Office buildings.

The Patent Office in 1846, when only the sandstone-clad south wing had been built. Photo by John Plumbe (Source: Library of Congress).

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Mills was one of America's first professional architects, learning his trade from James Hoban and Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820). He is probably best known as the architect of the Washington Monument. Mills was a favorite of Andrew Jackson, and he undoubtedly expected the president to choose his design for the Patent Office, but young Elliot's rival proposal had won the backing of key senators. Rather than spend political capital taking one side or the other, Jackson decided to compromise, choosing Elliot's design but directing Mills to be the architect in charge of building the new structure. This awkward resolution would lead to years of rivalry between Mills and Elliot, with Elliot tirelessly plotting ways to undermine Mills. After construction was well underway, Elliot encouraged his Whig friends on Capitol Hill to mount an inquiry into ongoing federal building projects, including the Patent Office, which was portrayed as extravagant and wasteful.

Ground floor staircase and vaults (photo by the author).

Mills came in for all sorts of criticism, most of it unfair. His finest achievements, including the gracefully curving staircase in the center of the building's original wing as well as the elegant arched supporting vaults that allowed for fireproof stone construction, came in for the severest attacks. Architect Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-1887), another young rival of Mills, claimed that Mills' vaults would collapse if not supported by iron tie rods. Walter would go on to become one of the country's most prominent architects and would best Mills in the competition to be architect of the Capitol's House and Senate extensions in 1850. Mills' superb Patent Office designs survived most of the criticism, but in 1851 Mills himself was dismissed, largely on the basis of trumped up charges that he mismanaged construction contracts. Walter took his place, finishing work on the Treasury and Post Office buildings as well as the Patent Office. At the time, the vaulting for the hall on the top floor of the building's east wing had just been set in place and was secured with temporary tie rods. Though the tie rods should have been removed when the ceiling was finished, Walter left them in place. The unneeded tie rods remain there today as a perpetual reminder of the architectural bickering that plagued the building's construction.

Superfluous tie rods mar Robert Mills' graceful vaults in the top floor East Gallery (photo by the author).

The Patent Office building was constructed in stages, the first being the south wing with its grand central portico bristling with heavy Doric columns. The Aquia Creek sandstone construction, dictated by Congress, gives it a brawny, imperious look. Mills had wanted to substitute marble, but President Martin Van Buren, who had succeeded Jackson, refused. In contrast, the east, west, and north wings, constructed in later years, are of marble. When finished in 1867, the building's four wings surrounded an open courtyard. Offices were located throughout the lower floors, while the top floor featured large open galleries for displaying patent models.

Stereoview of the Model Hall. The model display cases are among the columns on either side of the center aisle (author's collection).

The practice of displaying models (which inventors were required to submit with their patent applications) had begun at Blodget's Hotel, called the "American Museum of the Arts" by The National Intelligencer in 1836. The model hall on the top floor of the new building had room for vastly more patent models as well as many other unrelated government artifacts. In addition to the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin's printing press was there, as were artifacts from a wide variety of sources. According to historian Charles J. Robertson, two thirds of the display cases were filled with artifacts gathered by the government-sponsored Wilkes Expedition to the South Pacific, which lasted from 1838 to 1841. The mission had been led by the colorful Lt. Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), who had a reputation for being arrogant and capricious, Wilkes was court-martialed (but acquitted) on his return for mistreating his subordinate officers and for excessive punishment of his sailors; he may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

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

In addition to the Wilkes items were numerous paintings, sculpture, relics and curios of every sort, including many medals awarded to military heroes. When thieves stole gold, silver, and jewelry from the museum in 1848, the newspapers enumerated some of the items that had been taken: ancient Roman gold coins, Peruvian gold medals form the 1820s, a diamond-studded gold snuff box, a pearl necklace, and the scabbard of a gold sword presented to Commodore James Biddle (1783-1848).

By 1860, the non patent-related items (at least, the ones that hadn't been stolen) were transferred to the Smithsonian, where they went on display in the institution's Gothic Revival building on the Mall. An article in The Evening Star noted that items "such as the collection of the Exploring Expedition, under Captain Wilkes, in South America and the South Seas; that of Lieutenant Herndon's exploration of the Amazon; Capt. Stansbury's exploration of the Great Salt Lake; Capt. Perry's Japan Collections, &c, &c" had all been moved to the Smithsonian, with Congress providing a generous $1,000 annually for their upkeep.

Meanwhile, the patent models, which by law had to be readily accessible to the public, remained on display in the Patent Office's galleries and quickly filled the spaces vacated by the other collections. Several Patent Office employees were regularly stationed in the model hall to open display cases for those wishing to examine the models. "The models are placed in large show cases in such a manner as to be easily seen... Great care is taken that no model be injured by unskillful handling, while, at the same time, every reasonable facility for research is courteously afforded," noted The New York Tribune in 1857. It called the patent model display "by far the first of its kind in the world, and of all museums it certainly is the most interesting, and of the greatest benefit to the human race." A visit to see the patent models remained de rigueur for early Washington tourists, even with the Smithsonian's competing exhibits beckoning on the Mall.

Detail from an early stereoview of the south facade of the Patent Office. The sandstone facade has been painted white, at Robert Mills' insistence, to look like marble (author's collection).

The arrival of the tumultuous Civil War years would wreak havoc on the Patent Office and the city in general. The Patent Office was one of the first sites to be affected. That story will come in our next installment.

I am particularly indebted to Charles J. Robertson's beautiful and thoroughly researched history of the Patent Office Building, Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark (2006). Additional sources for this article included: A Popular Catalogue of the Extraordinary Curiosities in the National Institute (1859); Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, Vol. I (1842); Ernest Ingersoll, Handy Guide to Washington and the District of Columbia (1897); Sara Amy Leach, ed., Capital IA: Industrial Archeology of Washington, D.C. (2001); Charles Moore, Washington Past and Present (1929); Pamela Scott & Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); National Register of Historic Places nomination form for the Old Patent Office (1965); and numerous newspaper articles.


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The era of the tea house craze in the 1910s and 1920s left a legacy of restaurants located in quaint, rustic settings such as old mills, former carriage houses, and stables. Customers found the rustic settings charming; they also conveyed a sense of refuge or escape from the pressures of urban life. Notable Washington stables converted to restaurants included the Iron Gate Inn, first opened in 1923 and now operating as the Iron Gate Restaurant; the White Peacock/Tally Ho Tavern at 812 17th Street NW (1923-1959); the previously profiled Water Gate Inn on the site of the Kennedy Center (1942-1966); and the Stables, at 2700 F Street NW in Foggy Bottom, to which in the 1940s an elegant Victorian era coach drawn by two bay horses carried diners from their downtown hotels.

Circa 1960 postcard of the Twining Court Stables. Note Chef Mario Semha wearing the black toque (author's collection).

One of the last in this tradition was the Twining Court Stables Restaurant at 2123 Twining Court NW, an alley running behind P Street near Dupont Circle. An electrical contractor named Jim Travis bought the old stable and carriage house located here and opened it as a restaurant in the summer of 1960. An August 1960 advertisement in The Washington Post jokingly claimed that "George Washington's horse slept here" and promised that the "intimate, early American" eatery was "steeped in Early American charm and history." Guests were presented with menus on scrolled parchment paper, which they were invited to keep as souvenirs.

The "Early American" claim was a bit of an exaggeration. Though unquestionably an important historic landmark, the stable and carriage house was not built until 1905. Scottish-born master builder John McGregor (1847-1911) constructed it as a combined stable, carriage house, and servants' quarters for Samuel Spencer (1847-1906), a powerful railroad magnate who was president of the Southern Railway. Unfortunately Spencer never saw the carriage house completed; he was killed in a spectacular train wreck near Lynchburg, Virginia the year after work on the carriage house began. His private sleeping car had been traveling at the end of a train with Spencer and several distinguished guests sleeping in it. The car along with several others was accidentally detached and stranded on the tracks when another train plowed into it, splintering Spencer's car to pieces and crushing and burning him and his companions.

Spencer's son, Henry Benning Spencer, inherited the carriage house and used it for many years. According to the DC Historic Alley Buildings Survey, stables typically were two-story, two- or three-bay brick structures with a wide carriage door and pedestrian door on the first floor and a hayloft opening and windows on the second story. The Spencer carriage house, though plainly designed, is unusually large for a stable and could accommodate as many as eight horses in the stable section with separate storage for carriages. The Spencers' butler and chauffeur and their families lived on the second floor of the building. Located close to an entrance to Rock Creek Park, the carriage house in the 1900s and 1910s allowed the Spencer family to go riding in the park, a favorite pastime among the wealthy. By 1919 it had been converted to use as an automobile garage.

The restaurant's logo.

After using it for decades as a garage, the Spencer family finally sold the building in 1957 to Jim Travis. The Evening Star's restaurant critic, Emerson Beauchamp, visited the new Twining Court Stables restaurant after it opened in 1960 and found that Travis had done a nice job of recreating the former stable. The exposed brick of the dining room was quaint and striking, and in the Coach Room cocktail lounge in the rear, "you can see the holes where the nails were ripped out." The building's original forge was used to display wine bottles in the summer and as a fireplace in the winter. A ladder leading up to the hayloft was said to be original. Another Star critic, John Rosson, insisted that the charming atmosphere of the Twining Court Stables was at least as important to his memorable dining experiences there as the quality of the food itself.

Travis hired noted chef Mario Semha (1904-1961) to add sophistication to his restaurant. Semha, one of only a handful of black hat chefs in the world, had been born in Nice, France, and trained under August Escoffier in Paris. He was head chef at the Waldorf Astoria in New York before moving to Washington in 1939. His Twining Court Chicken consisted of a chicken breast "bedded down in a half coconut, laved over with essence of esoteric seasonings, topped with the other half of the shell, and the division's sealed with flaky pastry while it bakes to its optimum," according to The Evening Star's Gabby Gourmet. Sadly, Semha died of cancer just a year after the Twining Court Stables opened.

The restaurant was very successful, even if newcomers often had trouble finding it. In time the second floor was opened as a nightclub called The Room at the Top, featuring live entertainment from local singers. Then in 1966, after just six years, the restaurant was sold to Ray Walters, Jr., son of the well-known D.C. restaurateur and owner of the Cafe Burgundy on upper Connecticut Avenue. Walters rechristened it as Ray Walters' The Stables, adding colorful decorative frills, including old saddles and bridges, flickering lanterns, and bales of hay.  He continued a similar restaurant/nightclub format. A late night fire a month after the new restaurant opened destroyed much of the second floor and the building's roof, including a decorative cupola, but the damage was repaired.

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

Like so many small D.C. businesses, Ray Walters' The Stables saw patronage decline substantially after the riots of 1968. The building's days as a traditional fine dining restaurant ended when Walters began renting it as entertainment space in 1971. For awhile it was The Reading Gaol. Then in 1976 it opened as the Fraternity House nightclub, a gay bar. The bar, which eventually changed its name to the Omega, became a fixture of the Dupont Circle gay community and stayed in business for 37 years, far longer than the brief reign of the Twining Court Stables. In 2013, the Omega closed after the building was sold. The new owners intend to convert the building into a private residence, and the Historic Preservation Review Board has approved their design.


This article was based in part on Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C.: Capital Eats, published by The History Press in 2013. Additional sources included the DC Historic Alley Buildings Survey, the National Register of Historic Places nomination form for the Spencer Carriage House and Stable, and numerous newspaper articles.


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Thousands of Union troops overwhelmed Washington at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. As the Union's most important border outpost, the city became the staging ground for a massive campaign against the South. Virtually all large public structures were quickly repurposed for emergency war needs, beginning with the Capitol, where basement ovens baked bread daily for the city's soldiers while troops upstairs sat at senators' desks and staged mock sessions of Congress.

The Patent Office circa 1870, seen from 7th and E Streets NW. Early streetcar tracks can be seen in the rough cobblestone roadway (Author's collection).

By this time the Patent Office was almost finished, with final touches underway in the north wing. The completed south, east, and west wings offered spacious top-floor galleries suitable for many non patent-related purposes, the first of which was as a temporary barracks for the First Rhode Island Regiment in March and April 1861. The Rhode Islanders slept in crudely assembled three-tier bunk beds ranged alongside the delicate glass display cases of the West Model Hall. Inevitably, this led to rough treatment of the model displays. Reportedly, some 400 panes of glass were broken, and numerous patent models went missing when the troops left.

From Harper's Weekly, June 1, 1861 (Source: Library of Congress).

In command of the regiment was Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside (1824-1881), an ambitious and genial career military officer and inventor of the Burnside carbine. He would go on to serve as one of the many failed commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Accompanying him and the Rhode Island regiment was the state's "boy" governor, William Sprague IV (1830-1915), the impetuous and fabulously wealthy heir to a textile manufacturing fortune who had been elected governor at the age of 29. Sprague, like many northerners, presumed the war would end quickly and enthusiastically joined his state's troops on their brief and excellent adventure south (as did several of the men's female relatives, who "utterly refused to be left at home," according to The Evening Star). Pulitzer Prize winning author Margaret Leech, in her magisterial Reveille in Washington 1860-1865, says Sprague paraded with the troops wearing military dress and a yellow-plumed hat.

Just a block away from the Rhode Island Regiment's Patent Office encampment stood the handsome brick mansion of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873), on the northwest corner of Sixth and E Streets NW. Living with him was his irrepressible daughter, Kate (1840-1899), who at 21 years of age was the undisputed queen of Washington society—the "Belle of the North," as she was called. Strikingly intelligent, poised, and charming, Kate was also determined to advance both herself and her beloved father, who aspired to the presidency.

Kate Chase, circa 1861 (author's collection).

Scornful of other women, Kate conquered men's hearts easily, and at a young age she was particularly taken with military men. The onset of the Civil War brought legions of interesting Army officers virtually to her doorstep—the Chases even allowed their own home to be used for recovering wounded soldiers at one point early in the war. Margaret Leech notes that Kate Chase "appeared to be acting in the capacity of hostess at the Rhode Island quarters" in the nearby Patent Office. The Rhode Island regiment had been noted for the high social standing of a number of its recruits, in addition to the rich young governor. While she enjoyed the attention of them all, she had her sights set on the governor. The newspapers' gossip columns soon were publishing rumors of Kate's engagement to Sprague, and she would, in fact, marry him two years later in one of Washington's most celebrated and elaborate fetes.

Meanwhile, the brutal reality of the war soon made itself felt across the city, and nowhere more painfully than at the Patent Office. Unexpectedly high casualties from the nearby Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg battlefields brought a stream of wounded soldiers into Washington. Not long after the Rhode Islanders decamped in early 1861, a temporary hospital ward was set up that quickly grew to fill all three of the Patent Office's finished top floor halls, providing room for hundreds of patients. Though officially designated "Indiana Hospital," most people just called it the Patent Office hospital. President and Mrs. Lincoln paid several visits to the soldiers recuperating there.

And so did poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), as Garrett Peck describes in his engaging new book, Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America's Great Poet. Whitman had left his native Brooklyn, New York, in December 1862 to search in Washington for his brother George, who had been wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. George turned out to be okay, but Whitman was amazed at all the wounded soldiers that seemed to be everywhere in the capital. "It was the desperate plight of these young men that convinced Whitman to remain in Washington and to help wherever he could," Peck writes. The not-yet-renowned poet took it upon himself to visit soldiers at various Washington hospitals, including Indiana Hospital at the Patent Office, providing food and articles of clothing and helping the soldiers write letters home. Among the press articles Whitman wrote about his activities and later compiled into Memoranda During The War is this description of the Patent Office:

Feb. 23 [1863].—I must not let the great Hospital at the Patent Office pass away without some mention. A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings, was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes at night to soothe and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill'd with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter'd into the mind of man to conceive; and with curiosities and foreign presents. Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide, and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick; besides a great long double row of them up and down through the middle of the hall. Many of them were very bad cases, wounds and amputations. Then there was a gallery running above the hall, in which there were beds also. It was, indeed, a curious scene at night, when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble pavement under foot—the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in various degrees—occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repress'd—sometimes a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative—such were the sights but lately in the Patent Office. The wounded have since been removed from there, and it is now vacant again.

As Whitman notes, the Patent Office hospital finally closed in early 1863. Newer and larger infirmaries, arranged in camp-like pavilions, were being built on the outskirts of the city in the hopes of providing better treatment for the wounded and sick as well as separating them better from the general population so as to limit the spread of contagious diseases.

Wounded and sick at the Armory Square Hospital, 1864. Beds at the Patent Office were likely lined up much like this. (Source: Library of Congress)

Heavy traffic from army vehicles burdened the Patent Office and its neighborhood, as it did much of the formerly "sleepy" city. In 1862, a reader wrote to The Evening Star to complain about the teams of horses parked in front of the building at all times ("a string daily is waiting for commissary stores").  The army's teamsters were apparently less than vigilant and would sometimes leave the horses unattended. "Today six wagons were started [i.e., the teams ran off on their own] by the passing of a runaway buggy," the reader wrote, concerned about the safety of the neighborhood's residents.

Perhaps the closing of the hospital in 1863 made life a bit easier for the Patent Office clerks who toiled in the basement on the many patent applications that continued to stream in during the war years. Clara Barton (1821-1912) was one. As the only female clerk, she suffered intense harassment from her insecure male colleagues in addition to the same daily privations they endured, including cold and dampness in winter as well as brutal heat in summer. She worked long hours copying patent applications. "My arm is tired and my poor thumb is all calloused holding my pen," she wrote to her sister-in-law.

Then, in March 1865, all the soldiers and government workers and their grim labors were forgotten for a brief evening of extraordinary glamor and embarrassing excess. "Arguably the single most dramatic historic event to take place in the Patent Office Building was the ball held on the evening of March 6, 1865, for Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration," states Charles F. Robertson in his Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark, the authoritative work on the Patent Office building.  With victory nearly at hand and the capital in a celebratory mood, the grand inauguration ball was meant to be a shining emblem of the Union's triumph. It was certainly an elegant event, but the war's tensions were not easily set aside.

The ball had been announced in the newspapers as a charitable event, the proceeds of which would go to "the families of our 'brave boys' in the field." Tickets were a hefty ten dollars apiece (roughly $130 in today's money). Each ticket admitted a gentleman accompanied by two ladies. The announcement noted that "An elegant Supper will be served at the Ball, for which no extra charge will be made."

The Evening Star did its part to play up the event. Despite the fact that tickets could still be purchased in the Patent Office rotunda on the day of the event, the newspaper noted that "The number of distinguished personages in attendance will be very large; and the arrivals of representative belles from all parts of the country with huge Saratoga trunks, indicates, with sufficient distinctness, that the display of beauty and rich costumes will be unprecedented."

Sadly, African Americans were not invited to the fête. The Daily Morning Chronicle, an organ for the Lincoln administration, ran an obnoxious notice shortly before the ball stating that "there is no truth in the story which has been circulated, that tickets to the inauguration ball have been sold to colored persons. The ball is a private affair, in which the parties concerned have a perfect right to invite whom they please, irrespective of color.... The story, therefore, if not fabricated with a view to injure the success of the ball, may at any time be dismissed as idle and frivolous." In a bizarre twist, several Democrat-controlled newspapers attacked the pro-Lincoln Chronicle for advocating the exclusion of blacks ("The poor negroes!"), though their shallow, politically-motivated tirades barely hid their lack of genuine concern for African Americans.

Indeed, no African Americans attended as guests. According to The New York Herald, "The absence of negroes was much remarked. They were so conspicuous during the inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol, and the reception and in the procession... Nobody could have objected, probably, had they been present, for this was a thoroughly abolition ball, all of the old Washington aristocracy refusing to attend. But either the inclination or the ten dollars was wanting, and the colored race was unrepresented." Of course, plenty of African Americans were still present, serving as cooks and waiters.

The East Model Hall was used as the "Promenade Hall" (Author's collection).

On the evening of the ball, guests arrived on the south side of the building and ascended the grand staircase that led up to the main entrance. There they found the building's large halls elegantly decked out for the affair: "Such another magnificent ball room, supper room, promenade hall, and series of apartments for refreshment rooms, dressing rooms, cloak roams, &c., were probably never before found in conjunction under one roof," the Star claimed."

Dancing in the North Hall, from The Illustrated London News, April 8, 1865 (Source: Library of Congress).

From 10pm to midnight guests danced in the great, just finished North Hall, a vast open space lit by gas jets shooting from pipes hung over the crowd. Withers' Band played above them on a temporary raised wooden platform. The blue and white marble tile floor was hard on dancers' feet, especially for the women, and probably limited the amount of actual dancing. By midnight everyone was famished and eager to get their ten dollars' worth of the promised "elegant supper."

And elegant it was. Like the dinner at the Napier Ball six years before, the banquet was a classic display of Victorian excess. The bill of fare included oysters (provided by the renowned Harvey's Oyster House), terrapin stew, beef a l'anglais, veal Malakoff, boned and roasted grouse, pheasant, quail, venison, pâté de foie gras, tongue en gelée, lobster salad, caramel nougate "with fancy cream candy," almond sponge cake, and endless other cakes, jellies, creams, fruit ices, and chocolates. As was customary, the centerpiece of the buffet spread was an elaborate confectionery sculpture. This one was of the Capitol, high on a pedestal with historical scenes depicted around it.

The official menu for the Inauguration Ball supper.

The banquet was laid out on a 250-foot stretch of tables in the relatively narrow center aisle of the West Model Hall, a space that could comfortably accommodate about 300 diners. Event planners had failed to devise a way to manage the flow of the 4,000 guests actually in attendance, who all wanted supper at midnight. At first policemen kept the crowd back while the Presidential party was served, and then, according to The New York Herald, "the doors were thrown open to the guests, who dashed in pell-mell in dreadful confusion, ladies being crushed against the walls, or dragged half fainting through the crush. Men tried to tear down the temporary doorway. The table was cleared almost in a moment, and after the first ten minutes the waiters could bring nothing except for a fee." President and Mrs. Lincoln had been escorted to an upstairs alcove where they could observe the commotion below. "Mrs. Lincoln said it was a 'scramble.' 'Well,' said the President, 'it appears like a very systematic scramble.' This was his only little joke during the evening," the Herald reported.

Stereoview of the West Model Hall, where the banquet table was set up (Author's collection).

Supper goers who couldn't get near the food camped out in the alcoves to eat whatever their companions could forage from the tables and bring back to them. These foragers, according to a New York Times correspondent, "seiz'd upon the most ornamental and least nutritious part of the table decorations, demolished them, carried the pieces off in handkerchiefs or crushed them under foot. Then the more substantial viands were served likewise. Large dishes of choice meats, patettes, salads and jellies were carried off vi et armis into the alcoves, or elsewhere. One gentleman presented a very ludicrous attitude with a large plate of smoked tongue, requiring both hands to hold it, no place to sit down, and no way to eat it! He looked the picture of despair." The Evening Star added that "The floor of the supper room was soon sticky, pasty and oily with wasted confections, mashed cake and debris of fowl and meat." The Herald concluded, "All the dresses which escaped spoliation below were spoiled here. The ladies were very angry—so were the men. Some bullied, some bribed the waiters, and some ate the remains of other people's suppers. The mass surged to and fro like a sea. Plates were broken by dozens. There was a general mess."

The President and his party left around 1am, but many revelers stayed later. When they finally left, they found the great staircase of the south portico lit by "powerful lights from reflectors" that "threw a glare for many squares in every direction," according to the Star. Hacks and private carriages "were there by the acre, and as far as the eye could reach." The Star was confident that the ball had been a great success. In succeeding days, editorial opinions were mixed, however. Some newspapers claimed that the event had failed to pay its expenses by several thousand dollars, leaving nothing for soldiers' families. Many critics of the Lincoln administration took pleasure in recounting the melée at the supper table, taking it as an indication of the uncouth nature of the attendees and, by inference, their party. Whatever the case may have been, it was an extraordinary event, a night to remember, though the newly re-instated president would have barely more than a month left to live.


Sources for this article included: Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War(2004); James M. Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings (2003); Ernest Ingersoll, Handy Guide to Washington and the District of Columbia (1897); Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War (1995); Lucinda Prout Janke, A Guide to Civil War Washington, D.C.: The Capital of the Union (2013); Sara Amy Leach, ed., Capital IA: Industrial Archeology of Washington, D.C. (2001); Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865 (1941); John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood, The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union (2011); John Oller, American Queen: The Rise and Fall of Kate Chase Sprague, Civil War "Belle of the North" and Gilded Age Woman of Scandal (2014); Garrett Peck, Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America's Great Poet (2015); Ben: Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (1886); Charles F. Robertson, Temple of Invention: History of a National Landmark (2006); Pamela Scott & Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Walt Whitman, Memoranda During The War (1875); and numerous newspaper articles.


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On Monday, July 20, 2015, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez of Cuba once again raised the Cuban flag over the country's venerable embassy building at 2630 16th Street NW, in the Meridian Hill neighborhood that was once home to many of the city's finest embassies. Close by are the former Italian, Mexican, and Spanish embassies as well as the current embassies of Poland and Lithuania. For decades the building has quietly served as the Cuban Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy, but before that it had a long social career, hosting many of the city's classiest balls and receptions.

Photo by the author.

The Republic of Cuba had a diplomatic outpost in Washington even before the country existed as an independent nation. In the 1890s, as Cubans mounted their war for independence from Spain, Gonzalo de Quesada (1868-1915) established a legation at the fashionable Raleigh Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. A graduate of Columbia University, Quesada had met revolutionary hero José Martí in New York at a rally of Cuban exiles; he quickly became an important figure in the struggle for independence. The movement had the sympathy of many Americans, and on President William McKinley's inauguration day in March 1897, its flag flew proudly atop the Raleigh. "All sympathizers with the struggling patriots could not suppress a yell of patriotism as they observed the flag of the little would-be republic floating as proudly to the breeze as that of the big, powerful country the strong protection of which is sought," wrote The Evening Star.

Gonzalo de Quesada, from a 1902 newspaper advertisement

That protection arrived the following year when the U.S. intervened in the Cuban struggle, Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders stormed up San Juan Hill, and Spain quickly capitulated. It was not until 1902, however, that Cuba officially gained its independence, and it would take many years for the country to build a permanent home in Washington. Gonzalo de Quesada became Cuba's first minister to Washington, continuing the prominent role he had played in cementing good relations between the two countries. In 1907, Quesada bought a distinguished brownstone mansion at 1750 Massachusetts Avenue NW as a temporary site for the legation (Cuba and the U.S. had not yet established full embassies), while grander quarters were envisioned for the future.

The house at 1529 18th Street NW, which served as the Cuban Legation from 1914 to 1918. (Source: Library of Congress).

Quesada gave up his Washington post in 1912, and two years later the legation moved to another brownstone mansion, at 1529 18th Street NW, which later would become the home of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948) and still stands today. But the new minister, Dr. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, considered this also to be a temporary outpost. By 1915 he was hard at work securing the Meridian Hill site and designing the lavish new legation to be built there.

The site's former owner was Mary Foote Henderson, whom we've previously profiled. In keeping with her vision of Meridian Hill as a grand enclave of diplomatic residences, she had commissioned noted architect George Oakley Totten (1866-1939) to design an elegant five-story Elizabethan-style mansion to be built there. But Totten's design was never built. The Cubans were not interested in it, nor did they want anything reflecting their recently cast-off Spanish heritage. "Classicism belongs to the whole world, while the Spanish style is of only one nation," Minister Carlos Cespides told The Washington Post to explain why he preferred a more Continental look.

The light-filled central atrium on the third floor of the building (Source: Library of Congress).

Construction began late in 1916 and continued into 1918. The building was designed by the short-lived architectural firm of Macneil & Macneil, composed of Robert Lister Macneil (1889-1970) and his older brother, Paul Humphreys Macneil (1883-1964). Robert Macneil, the more prominent of the two, is generally credited with the design of the Cuban legation. Though born on a farm in Michigan, he was the son of Roderick Ambrose Macneil, the 44th Macneil of Barra, Scotland, a title Robert inherited in 1915. Educated as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Robert Macneil became a prominent socialite in Washington as well as a noted designer of high-society residences. He would later move to New York City and finally to Scotland, where his architectural training came in handy as he oversaw a meticulous restoration of the Macneil clan's ancient Kisimul Castle. Macneil was the perfect choice to design the new Cuban legation; his high-society connections and sophisticated architectural training meant he knew all the important features of a grand residence intended for lavish entertainment.

A sitting room (Source: Library of Congress).

Once completed, the distinguished building soon became the site of numerous important social and diplomatic events. In April 1927, Cuban President Gerardo Machado (1871-1939) visited Washington, arriving at Union Station in a driving rain. The high profile event, covered extensively in the press, included a formal dinner for Machado at the "temporary White House" on Dupont Circle, where President Coolidge and his wife were staying while the White House underwent renovations, as well as a reception for Presidents Coolidge and Machado at the Cuban Embassy (it had been elevated from a legation in 1923). The elaborate and carefully orchestrated diplomatic dance was intended to show how close the United States and Cuba were at the time—and possibly set the stage for new U.S. loans to the Caribbean nation.

President Coolidge with President Machado and Cuban officials at the Cuban Embassy in 1927 (Source: Library of Congress).

From the 1920s through the 1940s, the Cuban Embassy was one of Washington's brightest social spots, especially during the term of Ambassador Pedro Fraga in the late 1930s. "It ranked with the best embassies in town in terms of glamour and prestige," Hope Ridings Miller, The Washington Post's society editor, explained many years later. "The Cubans frequently held moonlit garden parties in the back, with rumba music and the finest food imaginable. The elite constantly went to parties there because it was quite a social center." Gloria Vanderbilt was among the notables said to have danced the cha-cha in the ballroom to the accompaniment of the 21-piece Cuban orchestra.

Meanwhile, Cuban politics grew increasingly strained. President Machado overstayed his reign and was forced out in 1933. In his place rose strongman Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973), a former Army sergeant who promoted himself to the rank of Colonel and took over the government with the tacit approval of U.S officials. On Armistice Day in 1938—the 20th anniversary of the end of World War I—Batista visited Washington at the invitation of a high U.S. Army official. It was reportedly the first time he had ever left Cuba, and he was received warmly. The U.S. was happy to embrace what it considered a reliable and supportive ally. "Developments in Europe and Asia during the last few months have tended to emphasize the community of interest that exists among the nations of this hemisphere," the Post's editors wrote. Close relations between the U.S. and Cuba were thus vital as the two nations "face the common necessity of securing themselves against possible attack from outside."

Col. Batista shakes hands with Ambassador Pedro Fraga at the Cuban Embassy while Mrs. Batista looks on, November 1938 (Source: Library of Congress).

Cuba remained a staunch U.S. ally through World War II and the years afterward, but by the early 1950s, Batista's oppressive dictatorship began to spawn resentment and then active resistance by Fidel Castro and his band of Communist revolutionaries, but there was certainly no sign of looming trouble at the embassy in Washington. When Ambassador Nicholas Arroyo and his wife arrived in Washington in 1958, Washington Post social writer Marie McNair cheered their arrival, noting a sense of new life at embassy. Both Arroyo and his wife were architects—they had designed the Havana Hilton— and, according to McNair, they redecorated the embassy beautifully. But then the old ways came to an abrupt end. On January 2, 1959, after the New Year's revolution, Castro's supporters mounted a "friendly invasion" of the embassy and were on hand to greet Arroyo as he returned from spending the holiday in New York. Arroyo promptly resigned, and there was much celebration among the foes of the repressive Batista regime.

Cuba swiftly changed from a friendly U.S. ally to one of its worst enemies. The garden parties were all forgotten as the new regime's functionaries took over at the embassy. When diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba were severed in January 1961, the embassy was abruptly closed. In an odd incident in 1963, three veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco tossed a Molotov cocktail at the former embassy one night but succeeded only in burning some of the shrubbery outside. Cuba left the building in the care of Czechoslovak diplomats, several of whom lived on the third floor and reportedly used the rooftop flagpole to hang out their laundry. In 1977, the Cubans finally returned to the building when it was reopened as the Cuban Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy.

Only two years later, in May 1979, someone tossed a homemade bomb over the fence at the rear of the embassy late one night. The resulting explosion broke a number of windows but did no serious damage, and no one was hurt. An anti-Castro group called Omega-7 claimed responsibility. The event reminded some of the 1963 incident, but, despite the ebb and flow of tension between Cuba and the U.S. over subsequent decades, the former embassy building has rarely seen much drama during its long years of hibernation. Perhaps it will soon begin to move back toward to its historic importance in Washington's diplomatic and social life.

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"Sun is Slaughtering the People of the Great Cities," proclaimed a banner headline on the front page of The Evening Times on August 12, 1896. An extraordinary and unrelenting heat wave had spread over the entire eastern half of the United States, stretching from Chicago to Boston, lingering for more than two weeks and killing some 1,500 people. "When Will It Stop?" cried the anguished headline on the front page of The Evening Star on August 11. For more than two weeks, daytime temperatures had remained steadily in the upper 90s but were compounded by high humidity and relieved by little or no wind and only slight cooling at night.


The sweltering began when the temperature reached 94 degrees on July 27 and didn't break significantly until August 14. The physical heat punctuated the emotional heat of an intense presidential campaign between the populist Democratic firebrand, William Jennings Bryan, and the conservative midwestern Republican, William McKinley. The Democrats had chosen Bryan at their convention in early July after he gave his rousing speech against the gold standard, proclaiming "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

While gold-standard supporters and silver proponents duked it out in endless debates, the weather slowly began to take its toll. During the first days of August the heat seemed like just another typical summer hot spell. "IT'S TOO HOT TO BAKE BREAD this weather," advertised Prussian-born Charles Schneider on August 1, cheerfully volunteering that "We'll send you bread, rolls, biscuits, etc. fresh from the oven, every morning in time for breakfast if you wish." But within a few more days, no one was taking the subject lightheartedly.

View of Pennsylvania Avenue from the grounds of the Treasury Department on a hot summer day in 1897 (author's collection).

Wednesday, August 5, had been the hottest day of the year to that point, with the mercury reaching 96 degrees. "All nature was languid almost to prostration," The Washington Post reported. Men, women and children could be seen "gorging themselves with ice and unwholesome, cooling drinks." Pedestrians clung to the shady sides of streets, "wiping their perspiring brows, fanning themselves with hats, newspapers and other articles." Men congregated in barrooms, drinking beer under the artificial breeze of electric fans. The next day's heat grew more intense. By 1 pm on the 6th, "there were few thermometers at the street level which did not register 99 and 100 degrees," according to the Star.

Reporters began making daily treks to the Weather Bureau, located near the Capitol, where they begged the chief forecaster, Major Henry H.C. Dunwoody (1842-1933), for some hope of a respite. Every day Dunwoody, sweating as profusely as everybody else, gave the bad news. "There is no permanent relief from the heat in sight," he announced on August 7, wearing a wilted collar and crumpled cuffs, according to the Star. "There is not a cold wave anywhere in the country and the conditions do not promise anything of the sort."

Beyond staying out of the direct sun, experts advised wearing light clothing, avoiding cold drinks and stimulants, and taking frequent baths. "Too great an indulgence in cold drinks should be avoided as well as stimulants," the Star advised. "Persons who can eschew meat and coffee at breakfast and satisfy themselves with fruit and tea not too strong will find themselves better able to withstand the heat of the day. All stimulants should be declined... As little clothing should be worn as is consistent with appearances.... Above all things, keep the skin clean and the pores open. A bath in the morning, another before dinner and a third at bedtime will make life bearable even in weather as hot as we are having..."

One by one, ordinary Washingtonians began to succumb to heat stroke, and their stories in the newspapers served as ominous warnings to general populace. On the 9th, the Star wrote the sad story of Thomas Kelly, a 55-year-old Civil War veteran who had been suffering for several days. The previous evening, after enduring heat that reached 98 degrees or more, he felt listless and rather than eating supper he instead "made a quantity of ice water and drank it somewhat rapidly." He was soon seized with violent stomach cramps and died later that evening. "He Quaffed Ice Water" warned the newspaper's grim headline. Frightened readers were further reminded that "violent exercise, such as political arguments, scorching, rapid and long walking and filling up on iced things are the causes of the prostrations, sunstroke and deaths which are now being chronicled daily."

This advertisement for talcum powder ran in The Evening Star on August 8, 1896.

As with most of life's hardships, the poor suffered more than anyone else. Even the luxury of donning light summer clothing was largely beyond their reach. "Down in the alleys and up in the tenements women went about their hard domestic duties faint to the point of prostration, and babies and children panted for breath like animals" the Star reported. "To these poor plodders ice was an almost unknown luxury, and thin clothing a dream of wildest avarice, so they sought the nearest pumps and wore as few rags as the law would allow. It was among these miserable creatures that the heat was felt in the most merciless character, and when they crept out into the parks and reservations and sought surcease beneath the shade of the trees even the policemen failed to disturb them."

Pedestrians on Washington's sizzling streets began putting wet sponges under their hats, and "those who could procure them used wet cabbage leaves," according to the Post. Another popular source of relief was riding the open streetcars on the city's cable and electric routes. The Washington & Georgetown Railroad had begun running cable cars on 7th Street, 14th Street, and Pennsylvanian Avenue in 1890, and its largest rival, The Metropolitan Railroad, had started electric streetcar service on its lines in the mid 1890s. These modern cable and electric cars could run as fast as 10 or 11 miles per hour, and during the summer special cars were used that were completely open on the sides with rows of benches running across the width of the cars. These open cars offered at some fleeting relief from the still hot air. The Post reported on August 10 that large numbers of people "devoted hours to riding in the grip and electric cars, which, while in motion, made the passengers tolerably comfortable, but the moment the cars stopped to take on passengers, torrid waves of heat rolled up from the pavement in their faces, causing perspiration to start from every pore in their bodies and rendering them miserable. Nevertheless the cars were crowded until a late hour at night."

A typical "open" streetcar of the type used during the summer.  See also the photo of Pennsylvania Avenue above. (Source: Robert A. Truax collection, courtesy of Jerry A. McCoy.)

One of the heat wave's first victims had been a bricklayer named Charles J. Morrison who was riding an open car on the Eckington & Soldiers Home line around 6 pm on August 5, presumably on his way home from work. The hot day toiling in the sun must have been too much for him, because he "was overcome by heat, and fell from his seat. Morrison's head struck the cobble stones and he fell with his arm on the rail, so that the moving car passed over his wrist, crushing it," according to the Post. The injured man was taken away to the hospital, hopefully to survive the calamity.

Animals and crops suffered as much as humans. Maryland farmers found their cornstalks, which earlier in the season had shown promise of a bumper crop, to be withering in the fields. Cows, unable to find adequate pasturage, produced little milk, threatening a "milk famine." By August 8, four horses of the Eckington & Soldiers Home line (one of the few D.C. streetcar companies that still used horsepower) were overcome with heat exhaustion, and the company had to reduce the frequency of service to protect the horses. When the Emergency Hospital's faithful ambulance horse, Frank, fell ill from heat exhaustion that day, the outpouring of concern may have been greater than for any of the human victims he helped transport. Fortunately Frank recovered ("There was rejoicing when he improved," the Post reported), and he soon returned to service.

The prolonged physical stress from heat exposure could cause illness suddenly. While the elderly and inform were clearly vulnerable, so were younger and healthier individuals who didn't notice the heat's cumulative effect. Every day the newspapers ran stories of people collapsing and dying in the midst of their daily routines. Milkman Jeremiah Collins succumbed one day while he was making his rounds, as did Navy Yard mechanic John W. Stahl, who fell ill on the job and later died at his nearby home. On Monday the 10th, thirty-year-old Kate Fortune, who owned a restaurant on N Street, went out to do shopping in anticipation of a trip to the country later in the week. She fell ill on returning home and, despite the frantic ministrations of servants and doctors, died within a few hours. One of the saddest cases was that of John Maroney, a mechanic whose wife had given birth just two days earlier. On August 10 he got up early to go to work and cooked himself breakfast in the family's kitchen, sitting down to eat. His wife and newborn child were lying ill in an adjoining room. Several hours later Maroney's mother-in-law found him slumped over dead in the kitchen chair. Apparently he had been quite exhausted, and the extra heat of cooking breakfast resulted in fatal heat stroke.

Not everyone died, of course. Little ten-year-old Robert Croff was playing in Garfield Park when he collapsed, but he was taken by ambulance to nearby Providence Hospital and survived. John Leonhardt collapsed at the bar where he worked at Seventh and G Streets NW one afternoon and was taken to Emergency Hospital, where his temperature was found to be 109. "He was rubbed with ice and digitalis and strychnine administered," according to The Washington Post. "Under vigorous treatment the temperature gradually fell, until, by 3 o'clock, it had been reduced to 103, and last evening the patient was pronounced out of danger" (out of danger from the heat, anyway).

From The Evening Star, August 9, 1896.

Some people chose intoxication as a means of relief. Women, who, unlike men, couldn't go to saloons to drink beer, were nevertheless free to stop by the soda fountains at their local drugstores. A Washington Post reporter on August 9 observed women enter an unnamed drugstore on Pennsylvania Avenue and order "wine of cocoa" and calisaya, two tonics containing 15 to 20 percent alcohol. According to the soda fountain attendant, either drink if "properly taken" offered "artificial strength to combat the heat," but which were often consumed in excess, in which case they were "just as intoxicating as whisky and much more injurious." A wealth of information, this attendant went on to confide that some women also resorted to drinking cologne, which offered a 50 percent alcohol ratio. Men too would drop by the drugstore soda fountain, particularly on Sundays when the saloons were closed. Their favorite beverage was Jamaica ginger, another intoxicant as strong as whiskey. Whiskey drinkers would "come to us and buy 25 cents worth of Jamaica ginger, take it home and dilute it with ice water and sweeten it with sugar. By the time the bottle is empty they feel as if all the saloons in the city had been open and visited."

The newspapers continued to report the sad stories of the heat's victims through the 13th, when the mercury reached 95 degrees. But late that afternoon a torrential thunderstorm swept through the area, lowering the temperature to 76 degrees by 6pm. The heat wave had finally broken. The next day the Star ran a small article near the bottom of its front page entitled "Hot Wave Subsiding." Much more prominent in the news that day were rumors that McKinley might start campaigning around the country to match Bryan's efforts. The heat of the presidential campaign was still rising.


You can read more about the fascinating history of streetcars in Washington in my new book, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C., which will be released by The History Press on September 14, 2015.


I am indebted to my good friends at the New England Historical Society who wrote about the effect of the 1896 heat wave on New England and inspired me to research its impact on D.C. Additional sources included Kevin Ambrose, et al., Washington Weather: The Weather Sourcebook for the D.C. Area (2002); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capitol, 1800-1950 (1962); and numerous newspaper articles.

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Seventh Street these days is just another busy downtown thoroughfare, but it has a unique history as one of the city's first and longest-lived commercial boulevards. This 1870s image of Seventh Street facing north from F Street offers a glimpse of the ragtag shops, cafes, and small hotels that lined the street in those days. Today the Verizon Center stands on the right side of the street, and this block, at the heart of Penn Quarter, once again bustles with activity day and night.

Author's collection (click to enlarge).

In the first half of the 19th century, Washington City's commercial life first took root along Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. But Seventh Street was next in line to develop, for several important reasons. At the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street, right in the middle of the main Pennsylvania Avenue stretch, stood the great Center Market, which we chronicled back in 2010. The market served as an early magnet not just for farmers selling fresh meats and produce, but for merchants of all stripes who sold their wares in the adjoining blocks. They traveled down to the market from Maryland and Washington County via the Seventh Street Road (now Georgia Avenue). Heavy traffic along this road made it a natural draw for commercial businesses. On its southern end, Seventh Street extended to the Southwest Waterfront, a major receiving point for seafood, manufactured goods, and other materials shipped from points along the east coast. The economic importance of Seventh Street led city leaders in 1845 to choose the street as one of the first in the city to be paved with cobblestones.

The broad sidewalk and neatly fenced yard in the lower left of the 1870s photo mark the grounds of the stately Patent Office building, which had stood at the northernmost edge of downtown development when its first segment was built in 1836. In this view, G Street crosses immediately above the Patent Office grounds. The small two-story building on the northwest corner of Seventh and G serves as an oyster house. Neighborhood oyster houses like this one were found on many of Washington's corners in the 1870s and 1880s. Oysters from the Chesapeake Bay, plentiful and very inexpensive, served as staples for the working classes. John's Restaurant, located just two blocks south of here at Seventh and D, advertised in 1878, "To prevent squalls and bring peace and happiness to your family, carry home with you a box of those superior fried oysters from John's restaurant."

This stereoview shows the Patent Office in a view to the left of the scene above (Author's collection).

Just to the left of the oyster house stand a pair of four-story Federal-style townhouses. Miraculously these two buildings survive to this day; the Redline gastropub is located in one of them. The only other structure in this view that has survived is the prominent church on the left with its intricate, wrought-iron steeple. It is the Calvary Baptist Church, at 8th and H Streets NW, which we have also previously profiled. The original church, built in 1866, burnt down a year later but was rebuilt in 1869. In this view, the church dominates the landscape around it. Nowadays, it is tucked among many other tall buildings.

The small shops lining Seventh Street are full of activity, although the slow camera speed makes it hard to catch moving individuals. Many of the shops on the west side of the street, which gets the strongest sun, have large awnings that stretch across the entire sidewalk, a common feature on downtown streets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The awnings not only kept the sun at bay but also created a mall-like experience for pedestrians window-shopping along the street. Generally the owners of these shops lived in apartments above their stores.

H Street crosses in front of the building on the left side of the street marked "HOTEL." Above that point there are two more blocks of stores, reaching to K Street and Mount Vernon Square. Beyond that the buildings are more sparse and hard to make out, but commercial storefronts were beginning to appear at that time. Historian John Clagett Proctor (1867-1956) writes that before the Civil War there was only one structure—a bakeshop—on the west side of the street between Mount Vernon Square and Florida Avenue (then called Boundary Street or "the Boundary"). On the east side there was a brick kiln at the Boundary; Union troops used it for target practice during the Civil War. Closer down, at K Street, stood Burr's wood and coal yard before the war; frame storefronts replaced it in the 1860s. At the time of our photo, much of this neighborhood was being settled by German immigrants, who would open bakeries, restaurants, dry goods stores and furniture shops in the remaining decades of the 19th century.

The newer buildings would be larger, like the one in the lower right corner of the photo—a recently-built, four-story edifice with a fashionable scooped mansard roof covered in fish-scale shingles. We don't know who its tenants were, but there are clues. In addition to the enigmatic "Wood" (a name or a product?) on the sign at the top of a third story window, another sign advertising ice cream beckons on the sidewalk. The sturdy building remained on this corner for some 40 years; in the circa 1916 photo below it is seen advertising painless dentistry. The tall, stately Barrister Building to the right on F Street, a modern skyscraper dependent on elevators, was intended to house offices for patent attorneys. Designed by Appleton P. Clark and built in 1910, it remained on F Street until the block was cleared of buildings in the 1980s.

Source: Library of Congress.

The same corner today (photo by the author).

Turning back to the image from the 1870s, the one major element we haven't discussed yet is the presence of streetcar tracks. If the connections to Center Market and the Southwest waterfront had guaranteed the importance of Seventh Street in the early 19th century, the arrival of streetcars in 1862 ensured the thoroughfare's continued commercial pre-eminence throughout the rest of the century. The tracks shown in our photo may be the originals; they are simple metal rails for use by small, horse-drawn cars.

The Seventh Street car line was to be one of the most important north-south routes in the city. In 1890 it was converted to underground cable power, greatly increasing its capacity. The following year, the National Baseball Park was constructed at Seventh Street and Florida Avenue, and the Seventh Street cable car shuttled avid baseball fans to raucous games. The south-facing photo shown below (note the Patent Office in the background) from 1892 shows a packed three-car cable train headed out to the ballpark. The National Baseball Park was a predecessor to Griffith Stadium, the home of the Washington Senators and the Washington Grays for much of the 20th century (Howard University Hospital now stands on the site). Appropriately, Metro's bus route 74, which follows the old streetcar route, now terminates at Nationals Park at the other end of the line.

Source: Library of Congress.

The early 20th century saw a mushrooming of commercial business along Seventh Street. The stretch in our photo was home to a wide variety of businesses, including at least two department stores: King's Palace (previously profiled), which opened in 1878 and remained in business until the 1930s; and Goldenberg's, which Moses Goldenberg (1847-1926) opened in 1895 and which lasted for sixty years. The blocks from H Street to K Street would become known as Furniture Row because of all the furniture stores, including Grogan's, P.J. Nee, Rudden's, Mazor Masterpieces, and Marlo's. A Washington Post article from 1934 summed up Seventh Street as a "great and historic shopping district" that represented the "last word in modernity":

Here are department stores, furniture stores and jewelry stores that offer all that is desirable in attire and household equipment. Handsome window displays confront the passers-by, swift elevators await to carry them to the various departments inside, and genial, well-trained employees stand ready to supply their needs.

This was one of the street's last shining moments as a mercantile center. By the 1930s the trendiest new stores were no longer on Seventh; F Street had larger stores, like Woodies and Garfinkel's, and drew larger numbers of customers. The poshest shops were further west, on Connecticut Avenue. Serious decline began to set in on Seventh Street after World War II and continued for nearly half a century. By the 1980s, the entire block on the west side of the 1870s photo—between 6th, 7th, F, and G Streets—was cleared of buildings. Surface parking lots were everywhere. The construction of the MCI Center (now the Verizon Center) in the late 1990s on this empty square is widely seen as one of the chief catalysts that led to the rebirth of the street, now once again a popular downtown destination.

Facing north at Seventh and F Streets NW today (photo by the author).

You can read more about the fascinating history of streetcars in Washington in my new book, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C., which is being released today by The History Press.


All about the rise and fall (and imminent rebirth) or streetcars in the District. Chapters include:

1. The City of Magnificent Distances: Transit in Washington Before Streetcars, 1800–1862
2. Horses in the Mud: The Early Horse-Drawn Streetcar Era, 1862–1888
3. Close Quarters: Riding the Cars, 1862–1888
4. Hard Choices: Modernizing the Streetcar System, 1888–1897
5. Grid-Ironing the City: The Rise of Streetcar Suburbs, 1868–1899
6. Bigger Crowds and Bigger Cars: The New Century’s Challenges, 1900–1918
7. A Vast Amount of Harm: The Struggle to Maintain Equal Access, 1900–1920
8. Yesterday’s Technology: Competition with Automobiles and Buses, 1920–1940
9. War and Peace: The World War II Years and Afterward, 1940–1950
10. Endgame: Washington’s Streetcars Disappear, 1950–1962
11. Lost and Found: Nostalgia for the Streetcar Era, 1962–2015

You can hear me talk about streetcars with Rebecca Sheir on WAMU's Metro Connection or see me in person at one of these upcoming book talks:

• Saturday, Sep 26, 1:00pm - Georgetown Neighborhood Library Peabody Room (3rd floor)
• Tuesday, Oct 6, 6:30pm - Busboys and Poets Brookland (in partnership with Politics & Prose)
• Sunday, Oct 11, 5:00pm - Upshur Street Books
• Saturday, Oct 17,  Noon - National Capital Trolley Museum

Enjoy!


Sources for this article included Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: A History of the Capitol, 1800-1950 (1962); Alison K. Hoagland, "Seventh Street/Downtown" in Washington At Home, 2nd ed. (2010); John Clagett Proctor, Proctor's Washington (1949); and numerous newspaper articles.

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On Wednesday September 23, 2015, Pope Francis will visit the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, at 1725 Rhode Island Avenue NW, for a private prayer service. He will be the second pope to stop at St. Matthew's (Pope John Paul II said mass here in October 1979). Though much attention has been focused on the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which bills itself as "America's Catholic Church," St. Matthew's is the principal church of the local Catholic archdiocese and has far deeper roots in the city's history.

(Photo by the author.)

The church's origins stretch back to the 1830s, when Washington City was home to some 7,000 Catholics who had but two churches to attend, St. Patrick's (downtown at 10th and F Streets NW) and St. Peter's (at 2nd and C Streets SE on Capitol Hill). In 1837, Father John P. Donelan, an assistant at St. Patrick's, was put in charge of the effort to establish a third church for the burgeoning community. Donelan purchased a site for the new church on the northeast corner of 15th and H Streets NW, where the Southern Building now stands. In the late 1830s, this was a prime site for a church, being close to the White House and the fashionable residential section of town that was then developing around Lafayette Square.

Rev. John Philip Donelan (Source: Library of Congress).

St. Matthew's Church, an elegant Greek Revival structure typical of American church design, was designed by Georgetowner Matthias Duffey and constructed between 1838 and 1840. The stately Doric columns of the front portico echoed the design of St. John's Episcopal Church two blocks to the west as well as Arlington House across the Potomac. In time, the design came to be seen as uninspired, and something more grand and unique would be desired. The interior, though tastefully decorated was dark. "The interior is permeated at all times by a mysterious twilight that is not without its peculiar solemnity," The Washington Post would write in 1895.

The original St. Matthew's at 15th and H Streets NW (Source: Library of Congress).

The new church held its dedication ceremony on November 1. The grand occasion "drew together one of the largest and most respectable audiences ever congregated in this district, amongst whom [was] His Excellency the President [Martin Van Buren]," according to The National Intelligencer. It was apparently a very moving service. "The deep-toned organ, the spirit-stirring chaunts of the choir, the eloquence of the preacher [the Right Rev. Dr. Moriarty of Philadelphia], and the presence of those ministering spirits, the Sisters of Charity, with about forty of the little orphans, neatly and comfortably clad, was sufficient to interest the coldest heart...," The National Intelligencer observed.

Lorenzo Johnson, who surveyed all of the city's churches in 1855 and 1856, was particularly struck by the music at St. Matthew's: "But the music—the music! It would be difficult for an uninitiated hearer not to acknowledge that it formed a large share of the attraction," he wrote in The Churches and Pastors of Washington, D.C. 

The church served its congregation at this location for more than fifty years, witnessing the drama and uncertainties of the Civil War years, tolling its bell for the death of President Lincoln in 1865, and becoming engulfed in the rapid development of the city in the later 19th century. By the 1890s, the congregation had outgrown the staid old church, and a campaign began, under the Right Rev. Thomas Sim Lee (1842-1922), to find a location for and build a replacement. Once again, the decision was made to move to the west, to a fashionable residential area (Dupont Circle this time) where prominent parishioners lived in elegant, spacious homes. In 1892, Father Sim Lee selected a plot of land on Rhode Island Avenue from among several suggested sites.

In early 1893 architect Christopher Grant LaFarge (1862-1938) was chosen to design the new church. The son of noted Victorian painter and stained glass designer John LaFarge (1835-1910), Grant LaFarge was a rising church and institutional architect whose firm had recently won the competition for the design of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. He joined Father Sim Lee in a trip to Europe in December 1892 to gain inspiration for what was intended to be a commanding new structure unparalleled in Washington.

Postcard view of St. Matthew's Cathedral from the 1960s (author's collection).

LaFarge's design, an eclectic mix of Italian Renaissance, Byzantine, and Romanesque elements, was accepted by the church in 1893. Unlike the limestone and marble facades of many of the city's landmarks, St. Matthew's features a red brick finish trimmed with brownstone and terracotta. The copper-clad dome rises 190 feet above the ground and is perched on a stately octagonal, columned drum. The building's flat, sparsely decorated facade is deceiving; inside the ornamentation of the church's vast main hall is as elaborate and sumptuous as any in the world. Years of work by many artists, done painstakingly and incrementally, brought the building to it current state of magnificence.

Construction began in November 1893, and within two years the transept and chancel walls were up. A first mass was held in the unfinished building in June 1895. The stark interior featured bare brick walls and an ivory-stuccoed ceiling. The columned drum was apparently in place above the center of the transept, but the dome was still missing. Much work remained to be done, although even at this early stage, the church managed to have excellent acoustics. "The broad expanse of the lofty walls and solid arches seem to be resonant and to hold and strengthen the sound of both voices and organ without the accompanying echo that so often interferes with music in a building of great extent," the Post reported.

Old St. Matthew's Church after removal of the steeple, circa 1905. Note also that the slim stained glass windows along 15th Street were added at some time after the earlier photo was taken. (Source: Library of Congress).

The last regular mass in the old weather beaten church on 15th Street was held at the end of May 1895. The newspapers wrote doleful accounts about the end of "one of the most noteworthy of Washington's church edifices," a place "where some of the most noted men in public life have worshipped in their time, and where some of the most impressive pageants of marriage, as well as death, have taken place in the National Capital." The grand organ was moved to the new church, and "workmen are busily engaged in tearing out the upper pews and decorations of the interior and removing them to the new church." Old St. Matthew's was slated to be demolished within weeks and the property sold. "Being situated on one of the most desirable corners in the city, it has a high value, and the intention is to devote the proceeds of the sale of the property to the construction of the new St. Matthew's," the Post explained. But it would not turn out to be quite as easy as it sounded.

The old church stood empty for more than ten years, despite the fact that the neighborhood was rapidly developing and would reign as home to the city's most powerful banks and investment firms in the first decade of the 20th century. Construction on the new church screeched to a halt while the old one lingered on the market and rapidly decayed. By 1902 the wooden steeple superstructure was found to have rotted, and engineers decided it had to be taken down. In January 1903, The Washington Post reported that F.S. Sutherland, known as "the human fly," had won the contract to remove the steeple. In the days before hydraulic lifts, the only way to get as high as the St. Matthew's steeple was to climb it, and Sutherland had made a name for himself scaling steeples across the country using suction pad gloves of his own invention. Sutherland wanted desperately to be permitted to climb the Washington Monument and complete the repair job needed on its apex, but as he waited to hear about that project he took on the St. Matthew's job—despite having just spent several months in the hospital with a spinal injury from falling off a church steeple in Columbus, Ohio. For several days in January 1903 Sutherland delighted gawkers on 15th Street with his antics as he hung from a rope and gradually dismantled the old tower piece by piece.

Rubble from the recently demolished St. Matthew's Church is seen in front of the old Shoreham Hotel in this view from 1910 (Source: D.C. Library Commons).

Rev. Lee had taken out a substantial loan on the old building to begin work on the new one, and as it languished he perhaps grew impatient to be rid of it. According to press coverage in 1913 of a congressional hearing into the matter, Lee was offering the site at $21 per square foot, a reasonable price for the prime location at the time, but by 1909 had received no offers. He was then persuaded by his real estate agent to sell the site for $18 a foot, after which the agent supposedly turned around and resold the property twice, making exorbitant commissions in the process. In any event, the old church was finally torn down. Its historic bell was sold to millionaire John Roll McLean (1848-1916) for his Friendship estate in upper Northwest DC. The church's handsome stained glass windows went to Mary Foote Henderson (1841-1931), who presumably installed them somewhere in her castle on Meridian Hill. Soon the Southern Building, a prestigious office building designed by renowned architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912), rose on the corner of 15th and H. The marble and granite-clad building, reportedly the largest office structure south of Philadelphia, cost an eyebrow-raising $1.5 million.

Meanwhile, with the proceeds from the sale finally in hand, Father Lee restarted work on the new building. In April 1913, just a few months after the Congressional inquiry into the sale of the old church, the new St. Matthew's was consecrated in an elaborate ceremony attended by Rev. James Cardinal Gibbons (1834-1921) and other high Church officials. After circling the building several times in a cold wind, the dignitaries entered the church and gave a blessing to the large crowd of worshippers. A bright sun poured through the windows, The Evening Star noted, lighting the still sparsely decorated interior. Only a few pews had been delivered at that point, and chairs were used to make up the difference. Still there were hints of the rich decorations yet to come. The elegant marble altar, hand-carved in India, was a prime example.

Interior of St. Matthew's Cathedral (photo by the author).

Gradually over the ensuing decades the church's interior grew increasingly embellished with an astonishing assortment of sumptuous marble panels and inlays as well as colorful mosaics and murals, many of which were designed by Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936), who had decorated the dome of the Library of Congress. Blashfield's grand mosaics of St. Matthew and the Angels of the Crucifixion were installed above the main altar in 1917. Italian craftsmen created mosaics of the four apostles based on Blashfield's designs that were installed in the pendentives under the dome in 1926. Much of the decorative work in the side chapels was completed in the 1920s and 1930s, although it has continued to the present day.

Postcard view from the funeral ceremony for John F. Kennedy, November 25, 1963.

From the start, Rev. Lee and other leaders of St. Matthew's had planned the new church to be on a grand scale fitting for a cathedral. In October 1939, the church finally achieved that designation when the new Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. was created. The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle would henceforth be the site of many of the archdiocese's most important events and celebrations. In addition to the visits from Popes John Paul II and Francis, the cathedral was the site of President John F. Kennedy's funeral mass in November 1963.

The front entrance to the cathedral as it appears today (photo by the author).

The historic cathedral was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. By the 1990s, the oldest parts were over 100 years old, and as the roof began to leak and bits of plaster began to fall from the ceiling, it became clear that a major restoration was in order. Engineers found that mosaics were separating from the walls, and antiquated electrical wiring throughout the building posed a hazard. Under the guiding hand of Mary Oehrlein, one of the city's most experienced preservation architects, a thorough restoration began in 2000 and continued through 2003, including a new copper roof, cleaning and regilding of crosses and ornaments, and painstaking restoration of the numerous mosaics and murals throughout the church. Modern lighting and acoustics were installed throughout, resulting in one of the most stunning church interiors in the country and one of the most striking of Washington's great landmarks.


Sources for this article included Lorenzo D. Johnson, The Churches and Pastors of Washington, D.C. (1857); National Register of Historic Places nomination form for St. Matthew's Cathedral and Rectory (1974); Helene, Estelle, and Imogene Philibert, Saint Matthew's of Washington 1840-1940 (1940); Richard L. Schmidt and Cathey Meyer, A Landmark Restored: The Cathedral of St. Matthew The Apostle (2003); Richard Schmidt, et al., Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle: Its History, Art and Architecture (2008); Pamela Scott & Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); William W. Warner, At Peace With All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital, 1787-1860 (1994); Henry F. and Elsie Rathburn Withey, eds., Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (1956); and numerous newspaper articles.

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The Annual Conference on D.C. Historical Studies (Nov 12-15 at the D.C. Historical Society) presents the latest fascinating insights and provocative research on all things Washington. Presenters and audience members—historians and history fans—mix it up in a stimulating and entertaining series of discussions, book talks, films, and lectures. We hope you will join us!



As the nation concludes its commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the conference will consider the aftermath: the era known as Reconstruction. A number of conference presentations examine the legacy of the post-war years, drawing parallels to other tumultuous eras in the city’s past. In addition, the conference will consider:

• archaeology 
• archival treasure troves 
• civil rights 
• the “D.C. Sound” 
• education in the city’s early days 
• the challenges of gentrification 
• Home Rule and the Great Society 
• labor struggles 
• Latino community formation 
• Reconstruction 
• school desegregation 
• and much more

Making presentations will be professional scholars, graduate students, filmmakers, writers, and eyewitnesses.

The curtain rises Thursday evening, November 12, 6 pm, at the National Archives with the Curt C. and Else Silberman Foundation lecture and reception. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner, the acclaimed author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, addresses “Reconstruction and the Fragility of Democracy.” The lecture will take place at the William McGowan Auditorium, National Archives (Constitution Avenue entrance, between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW). The free lecture is followed by a catered reception. Attendees are required to register separately for the lecture.

The conference sessions begin on Friday morning, November 13, and continue through Saturday evening. Check-in opens at 9 am each day. All panels take place at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Carnegie Library at Mt. Vernon Square, 801 K Street, NW.

Friday’s conference opens with the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Lecture: “Scholarship, Leadership, and Incomparable Strength: Letitia Woods Brown, a Centennial Reflection,” by the distinguished Howard University Professor Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, author of the prize-winning Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C. The lecture focuses on the legacy of its namesake, a pioneering historian of African American Washington, during the centennial of her birth.

The conference offers 23 panels as well as several recent DC films. The History Network, a marketplace of D.C.-history-related ideas, organizations, publishers, and projects, is held on Friday, 12:30–2 pm. On Saturday six authors of new history works will present short book talks in a literary version of speed-dating. And the plenary session looks at the state of the field of D.C. History. Sunday brings a choice of intriguing neighborhood walking tours.

The conference schedule and complete information on sessions and presenters are available at this link. Fees are $30 for the conference ($20 for seniors and students) and $5 for each walking tour. Register now!


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The Toronto, at 2000 P Street NW just to the west of Dupont Circle, is one of many imposing late Victorian apartment buildings scattered around the District that serve as emblems of Washington's golden era of apartment living. But the Dupont Circle building also hides a scandalous incident deep in its past. In June 1908 the building partially collapsed while under construction, killing two construction workers. President Theodore Roosevelt urged the D.C. commissioners to investigate, leading to indictment of developer Thomas Henry Pickford (1862-1939) and temporary suspension of the municipal building inspector, noted architect Snowden Ashford (1866-1927). The accident ultimately sparked new D.C. building safety regulations.

Photo by the author.

Pickford was a native of Canada who spent time in Michigan as a young adult before moving to Washington, D.C., in the mid 1890s. He started out building inexpensive two-story houses in southeast D.C. and also put up small apartment houses, such as the two-story building at 11th and R Streets NW. Then in 1908 he purchased the lot on the southwest corner of 20th and P Streets NW for $28,800. He proposed his biggest project to date for that site, an eight-story building that was to contain 40 elegant suites of six or seven rooms each. Named after his hometown, Toronto, it would be one of the city's largest apartment buildings and would feature an "abundance of light afforded by the unusual number of windows," as The Washington Times observed.

Apartment living had been scorned by well-to-do Washingtonians through most of the 19th century, but by 1900 that attitude had changed dramatically. The idea of elegant and sophisticated apartment living had become fashionable, and developers responded with a proliferation of luxury apartment structures. Over 360 apartment buildings were constructed in the District in the first decade of the twentieth century. Pickford's elegant building just west of Dupont Circle promised to be a popular and highly profitable addition to that inventory.

Albert H. Beers (1859-1911), one of the city's foremost architects, designed the Toronto. Beers moved to Washington in about 1903 after many successful years in Bridgeport, Connecticut. While working here from 1905 to 1911 (when he died suddenly from pneumonia), Beers designed more Washington apartment buildings than any other architect. Forty-seven of them were for famed D.C. developer Harry Wardman (1872-1938), including the luxurious Dresden and Brighton (now the Churchill Hotel) in Kalorama, as well as the distinguished and well-preserved Northumberland on New Hampshire Avenue, which we previously profiled.

Architect's drawing of the planned six-story Toronto, as it appeared in the April 12, 1908 edition of The Washington Times.

While primarily a Wardman architect, Beers also undertook several projects for other developers. The Toronto was the only one he designed for Thomas Pickford. Laura L. Harris has called it one of Beers' "largest and most impressive structures." The seven-story building (one story less than originally proposed) features rich architectural detailing, including nine projecting metal bays and a heavy, dentilled cornice that caps the structure emphatically. Like the Northumberland, the Toronto originally had a frilly ornamental crest surmounting this cornice.

Construction of the gray-brick, stone, and steel-frame building began in April 1908 and progressed rapidly—perhaps too rapidly. In less than two months the building's steel frame was up and the first four concrete floors had been laid in. On June 9th, workmen were busy pouring concrete into wooden forms on the fifth floor and tamping them down to form 15-foot-square floor panels. Then, at about 10:30 in the morning, "With a mighty crash like the discharge of a big cannon and in a suffocating cloud of dust and debris," heavy beams and chunks of building material suddenly plummeted to the ground, as reported in the Evening Star. One of the floor panels on the northeast corner of the building had given way as it was being tamped down and had fallen through all four floors beneath it, pulling large hunks of concrete into a heap in the basement.

Two workers were instantly killed: Lemuel King, a steam pipe fitter, and Richard West, a laborer. Another five were seriously wounded. Still others barely escaped injury, clinging to girders and broken ledges as the floors of the building gave way around them. The brick walls at the building's corner were left cracked and bulging, threatening an even greater catastrophe as workers and firemen worked frantically to extricate those trapped in the wreckage. "The nerves of the workers were at a high tension, and occasionally when a piece of material tumbled down with a banging noise the rescuers would straighten up and involuntarily look for the great walls to crash upon them. Some of the workers would rush from the pit, only to return when their fears were allayed," the Star observed.

In a horrid scene, the face of Lemuel King could be seen poking out from where his lifeless body was trapped beneath a pile of debris. King had been working in the building with his two brothers, Edward and Ellsworth, all of them expert steamfitters under Edward's direction. Edward and Ellsworth searched in vain for Lemuel immediately after the crash and quickly feared the worst. They were the ones who identified him as he lay in the wreckage. His body was soon removed.

A coroner's inquest was hurriedly called. Subcontractors, mechanics, and laborers testified alongside D.C. officials. Everyone seemed to agree that the building had been put up too quickly, that the concrete on the lower floors was still "green," not having had time to cure sufficiently. Also at issue was how often the structure had been inspected. The building department was stretched too thin, the government officials complained, and an inspector had come by only a couple times a week instead of every day. Another point of contention was an informal deal supposedly worked out between Ashford, the chief D.C. inspector, and architect Beers. While Beers had submitted and received approval for a five-story building, he had subsequently reached an agreement with Ashford on what he would have to do structurally to add a sixth floor. (As mentioned, the building would ultimately have seven floors). Witnesses testified that the agreed-upon adjustments—some extra iron pilasters—were inadequate.

From The Evening Star, June 11, 1908.

The next day the front page of The Evening Star carried a bold headline: "Blame Must Be Fixed For Wreck Of Building." Below was the text of a message from President Theodore Roosevelt urging that a full investigation take place. The D.C. commissioners began intimating that they needed to reorganize Snowden Ashford's building department, while Ashford himself hurried home to Washington from Berkley Springs, West Virginia, where he had been on vacation. The next day the coroner's verdict came out, casting blame all around. At the top of their list was Ashford, who they found partially to blame for having approved the building plans. He was immediately suspended from his job until a grand jury could determine whether to indict him. Also fingered were Harry Blake, for improper construction of the iron work; brick contractor John Frank Bayne, for hasty construction and use of poor material; and developer Thomas Pickford, for negligence in not exercising effective oversight of his various contractors. Ashford immediately issued a statement grousing that the coroner's jury had accused "every one they possibly could in order that they might not miss the right person" and insisting that "I consider myself in no way to blame." In particular, Ashford denied having reached any private agreement with Beers (who oddly was not charged) about altering the building plans to accommodate the additional story.

From The Evening Star, June 12, 1908.

Thomas Pickford, on the other hand, was concerned chiefly about getting his building project back on schedule. He secured the services of Amos B. Barnes, a Philadelphia structural engineer, to design extra iron supports for the Toronto, and the acting building inspector quickly approved the revised plans. On June 20th, just eleven days after the accident, the collapsed part of the structure had been cleared away and work restarted. The Toronto, reinforced with additional interior steel supports, resumed its rapid trajectory to completion. Meanwhile, a grand jury was formed, and in late July it essentially agreed with Ashford that the collapse was not his fault (he was immediately reinstated as building inspector) and instead indicted Pickford alone, charging him with manslaughter. Pickford naturally also insisted on his innocence. He had always instructed his contractors to use only the best materials and methods, he told the press, and he believed that his plans to live on the top floor of the building were proof enough that he would not intentionally build an unsafe structure.

"This was purely a catastrophe which human foresight could not prevent, and which has happened under the most careful supervision of builders of the greatest reputation," Pickford told The Washington Post. "All I desire is simple justice. I hope the public will take into consideration the accidents of like character which have happened to other builders of unquestioned reputation, and for which no criminal responsibility was imputed..."

A circa 1920 view of the Toronto (source: Library of Congress).

Almost two years later, in March 1910, the court cleared Pickford of all charges, ruling he wasn't responsible for any poor work his contractors might have performed. Around this time the city's building code was amended to require the licensing of building contractors, a fundamental element of modern construction practice. Meanwhile the Toronto had been completed to seven stories, and Pickford was happily living, as he said he would, with his family on the top floor.

He didn't remain long in the Toronto, however. Soon he set his sights on a new marquee project. In 1915 he traded the Toronto to developer Charles Henry Butler in exchange for a lot on the southeast corner of 16th and I Streets NW, where he planned a new "family" hotel. Both the Star and the Post ran articles about the deal in their boosterish real estate sections, and neither one mentioned the accident that had occurred just seven years earlier.

Pickford's new hotel on 16th Street NW was to feature well-appointed apartment suites but would oddly not be equipped with kitchens. Instead there was to be a large, restaurant-style dining room on the ground floor.

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

The new building was called the Lafayette. Frank White, another Wardman designer, was its architect. Completed in 1916, the residential hotel was strikingly similar to the Toronto in its overall appearance and had a long and successful life. It finally closed and was torn down in 1971, when the site was acquired by the AFL-CIO for its new headquarters building.

Pickford moved his family into the Lafayette and stayed there for the rest of his life. In 1933, in the depths of the great Depression, Pickford bought back the insolvent Toronto, which had been put up for auction. With the Toronto, another hotel called the Carroll Arms, and the Lafayette all in his portfolio, he settled into a comfortable retirement. He died in May 1939 in Coronado, California, while visiting relatives.

Author's collection.

In 1954, 15 years after Pickford's death, well-known real estate developer and banker Leo M. Bernstein (1915-2008) purchased the Toronto. Bernstein's company thoroughly gutted and reconstructed the interior of the building, removing all the old apartments and reconfiguring the space for offices. The once elegant lobby was obliterated. Thankfully, the grande dame's exterior was left largely intact. After painting it an electric blue, the Bernstein Company reopened it as the Headquarters Building and marketed it as "the Capital's Newest, Largest and Finest Blue Office Building." Official dedication ceremonies for the repurposed structure took place in October 1955.

The entrance to the Toronto as it appears today (photo by the author).

A drugstore called Drug Plaza filled much of the first floor in the space now occupied by Second Story Books. D.C. Commissioner Samuel Spencer was on hand for the store's grand opening in July 1955. One of the building's early office tenants was popular radio station WOL. Other tenants have included the Opera Society of Washington, the Soundwaves recording studio, Public Citizen's Health Research Group, and the Women's Legal Defense Fund. The building has continued to house offices for sixty years, making its history as an office building slightly longer than its original apartment function. It is now managed by RB Properties.


Sources for this article included James M. Goode, Best Addresses (1988); Stephen A. Hansen, A History of Dupont Circle (2014); Laura L. Harris, The Apartment Buildings of Albert H. Beers 1905-1911 (1988); and numerous newspaper articles.

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In 1857, radical conservatives of the "Know Nothing" party in Washington, imbued with contempt for Roman Catholics, mounted an extraordinary attempt to forcibly prevent the naturalized citizens of Washington from voting in local elections. The result was the infamous Election Day Riot on June 1 at a polling station just south of Mount Vernon Square. The New York Times called it "one of the most daring insurrectionary riots of bloodshed and murder that ever disgraced a city." Six people were killed by a Marine detachment that was called in to quell the disturbance. While the troublemakers ultimately failed in their attempt to prevent voting by Catholic immigrants, the incident was deeply embarrassing for 19th century Washingtonians and gave them a tangible sense of the tragic consequences of religious intolerance in political affairs.

Marines firing on the mob at Northern Liberties Market, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, June 29, 1857. (Source: Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 24, 1922).

Upheaval overseas—including the Irish potato famine and the Revolution of 1848 in Germany—led to large numbers of Irish and German immigrants to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. These desperate people, willing to making the arduous journey to America in hopes of a better life, would enrich the country immeasurably in years to come, and many were happy to see them come. But to Anglo American "nativists," they were foreign transgressors bent on destroying American society as the Anglos knew it. The nativists pointed to the increasing numbers of destitute and homeless immigrants crowding the nation's cities—Washington's notorious Swampoodle was an example—as evidence that the newcomers were bringing the country down. They began organizing themselves in secret to resist the immigrants and all they stood for, especially their predominant religion, Roman Catholicism. Supposedly if a member of this secret group were asked anything about the organization, he was supposed to reply "I know nothing," and so they became known as the Know-Nothings. Secretly calling themselves the "Supreme Order of the Star Spangled Banner," the group foreshadowed the growth of the Ku Klux Klan later in the 19th century.

As elsewhere in the northeast, the Know-Nothings were ascendant in Washington for a brief period in the mid 1850s and found odd ways to express their xenophobia. One particularly infamous episode occurred in March 1854, when late one night a band of Know-Nothings stormed the shed next to the unfinished Washington Monument and seized a beautiful polished marble stone that had been donated to the Monument project by Pope Pius IX. Attacking the stone with hammers and chisels, they damaged and defaced it, then threw it into the Potomac. (The stone was later recovered and carved into an obelisk, now in the National Museum of American History.) To round off their mischief, the Know-Nothings subsequently maneuvered to gain legal control over the privately-organized Monument project and through their incompetence stopped any further construction work. The result of their actions was that the stub of the monument languished uncompleted for decades to come.

Mayor William B. Magruder, an Anti-Know Nothing. (Source: Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 16, 1913).

The political power of the Know-Nothings peaked in 1854, when their candidate, printer John T. Towers (1811-1857) was elected mayor of Washington. Towers reign was short; he declined to run for re-election in 1856, setting up a bitter confrontation between the Know-Nothings' subsequent candidate, businessman Silas H. Hill, and the opposition candidate, William B. Magruder (1810-1869). Magruder was supported by a coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and former Whigs known as the Anti-Know Nothing Party, and he carried the day by the slimmest of margins, winning 2,936 votes to Hill's 2, 904. Bitter over a narrow defeat they attributed to the votes of recently-naturalized Washingtonians, the Know-Nothings resolved to use force to ensure that they carried the mid-term elections in 1857 for other local government offices.

With election day set for March 1, tensions ran high. City officials assumed the Know-Nothings would find some way to try to terrorize voters, and their worst fears were soon realized. That morning members of a gang of pro Know-Nothing Baltimore street toughs known as the Plug Uglies boarded an early train for Washington and were soon on city streets looking for trouble. Afterwards it would be discovered that the Plug Uglies' train tickets were purchased with a 100-dollar bill that had been obtained at the Metropolitan Bank on 15th Street—but no one ever knew precisely who made the purchase.

The Baltimore Plug Uglies hooked up with two Washington gangs, the Chunkers and the Rip-Raps, to form a formidable mob of at least several dozen rowdies, perhaps many more. By around 9 am they were focusing their harassment on a line of Anti-Know Nothing voters stretching down the street from a polling station opposite the Northern Liberties Market at Mount Vernon Square. After some shoving and pushing that didn't have much effect, the group departed briefly, returning a short time later in larger numbers and armed to the teeth. "One man was armed with a large blacksmith's sledge; another with a horse pistol of large dimensions; a third carried a miscellaneous assortment of revolvers, bowie knives, billies, an iron bar; while a fourth carried, besides a side pocket filled with convenient stones, brickbats, &c., a large billet of oak wood of sufficient weight to fell an ox," The Daily Evening Star reported.

With cries of "Wade in, natives!" the rioters charged into the crowd and attacked anyone who looked like a recent immigrant. The newspaper reported that "A terrible scene now ensued, in which the entire crowd participated. Stone and pistols were rapidly discharged and men trampled to the earth, beaten, stamped on, and severely wounded." Police officers on the scene tried valiantly but were unable to contain the violence, and several of them were among the 20 or so victims of the attackers. "An Irishman was so dreadfully mutilated that his features were entirely undistinguishable, and his head and shoulders were covered with blood. The polls were torn down by this imported gang of Baltimore villains, the pavements were strewn with stones, clubs, and other missiles.... The buildings in the neighborhood were damaged, the doors and windows being broken in on all sides...."

Soon everyone except the Plug Uglies and their allies had scattered from the scene. Police took a few of the ringleaders into custody, but the violence had effectively shut down the voting, and the remaining rioters started looking for trouble at other city polling stations. At around 11am they attacked a station at 11th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, firing more revolver shots and leaving several more would-be voters wounded.

President James Buchanan dithered about slavery but acted decisively to call out the Marines in Washington on March 1, 1857 (author's collection).

Mayor Magruder soon turned to President James Buchanan for help, imploring him to send out a detachment of U.S. Marines to restore order. Buchanan quickly complied. Around mid-day, two companies of marines—115 officers and men—marched out of their barracks on 8th Street SE and headed to City Hall on Judiciary Square to receive Mayor Magruder's instructions. All along the way they were accosted by rioters "hooting and yelling, threatening and insulting them at every step," according to the Star. By this time the rioters had obtained a small brass cannon (some accounts say it came from an Anacostia firehouse) and began marching their prize up 7th Street to the Northern Liberties Market where the polling station was still shut down. Brandishing their revolvers and clubs, they vowed to defend themselves with their cannon and threatened to kill all of the marines called out to disarm them.

Magruder sent the marines to Mount Vernon Square to disarm the Plug Uglies and reopen the polling station. By the time they arrived, the rioters had set up their cannon and were threatening to fire it at the soldiers. The gun was loaded with "about half a pound of powder, sixty or seventy rifle cartridges (tied in a handkerchief), eight large stones, and several pounds of shot," according to a later grand jury report, and could have inflicted catastrophic harm on the marines if it had been fired. But Brigadier General Archibald Henderson (1783-1859), Commandant and "grand old man" of the Marine Corps, was on hand to intervene and save lives. Henderson was not formally commanding the small detachment and was unarmed, save for a cotton umbrella. He stepped up directly in front of the small cannon, bracing it with his body so that it could not be aimed at the Marine contingent, and admonished the demonstrators not to fire. As he did so, the Marines advanced, and the rioters fled from the gun.

General Henderson urging the rioters not to fire (Source: Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 24, 1922).

The Plug Uglies didn't give up without a fight, of course. They fired their revolvers as they withdrew,  and the "pistol shots now rattled around like hailstones," in the words of the Star. One shot hit one of the Marines in the jaw, seriously wounding him. With one of their own down, the young marines, many of whom were raw recruits, finally responded by shooting into the crowd. (A later inquest found that neither Henderson nor any of the officers in charge ordered the troops to fire.) The wild volley of the marines sent bullets flying in all directions, and the worst casualties of the day resulted, including several of the day's recorded deaths. Francis M. Deems, a clerk in the General Land Office, was viewing the riots from a second story window with a co-worker, Col. William F. Wilson. Deems was killed, while Wilson was shot in the arm. Other fatalities included Archibald Dalrymple, a brakeman from the Washington Branch Railroad; constable D. H. Alston; Ramy Neal, an African American waiter at Walker & Schadd's restaurant; and Christian Lindig, 16-year-old German immigrant.

The show of force by the Marines dispersed the crowds in a mad scene of chaos and bloodshed. The Plug Uglies headed back to the train station, where many were arrested. Reinforcements who were heading down to Washington from Baltimore turned back when they heard that government troops had been called out to fight them. The Election Day Riot was finally over. In the following days, there would be much soul-searching in the press about what happened, and much justifying of the action of the Marines. The standard line was that the disturbances were caused by outside elements (implying that Washingtonians on their own would never be so violent) and that the threat they posed was so overwhelming that the only possible response was to call out Federal troops.

Mount Vernon Square, home to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., as it appears today (photo by the author).

The Election Day Riot had a profound psychological impact on Washingtonians of its day, something akin to the terror of 9/11. "In the name of all that is dear to us as Americans how long is this state of things to be tolerated?" beseeched the Evening Star on the day of the riot, reacting as much to the affront to democracy as to the violence that had ensued. Both democracy and the rule of law needed to be protected from terror, yet it was not soon achieved. The following year, a Senate Committee concluded that Washington had become a lawless place. "Riot and bloodshed are of daily occurrence. Innocent and unoffending persons are shot, stabbed, and otherwise shamefully maltreated, and not infrequently the offender is not even arrested."

The lawlessness of 1857 certainly began to turn supporters away from the Know-Nothings, who soon disintegrated politically as the divide over slavery quickly overshadowed all other issues. If it had not been for the Civil War, the memory of the Know-Nothings perhaps would not have been so quickly forgotten. In any event, firsthand witnesses of the 1857 riot couldn't help but feel uneasy about the possibility of terror and violence in future local elections. According to historian George Rothwell Brown, many were not unwilling to give up their local voting rights in 1874 when Congress abolished the city's elected offices and established the commissioner-based government that would continue for much of the next century. It's impossible to know for sure how people felt, but there's little doubt that the Know-Nothings' xenophobia, religious intolerance, and contempt for democracy had a terrible impact on Washington.


Sources included George Rothwell Brown, Washington: A Not Too Serious History (1930); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington A History of the Capitol, 1800-1950 (1962); Tom Lewis, Washington: A History of Our National City (2015); Arthur Meier Schlesinger, "The Significance of Immigration in American History" in American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1921); Rachel A. Sheldon, Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (2013); Washington Topham, "Northern Liberty Market" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 24 (1922); and numerous newspaper articles.

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This undated image, from an old stereoview, shows how relatively barren the newly landscaped Capitol grounds looked in the mid 1870s. Capitol Hill had been quite a mess during the war years, and an effort was underway to beautify it, just as much of the rest of the city (especially in the northwest) was being modernized with graded and paved streets, shade trees, and sewer lines.

Author's collection.

In the 1850s and 1860s the Capitol building had been dramatically expanded with large new House and Senate wings and a grandiose iron dome. Once finished, it nearly filled the entire length of the square between A Street north and A Street south. Soon there were proposals to close these A Street segments and expand the Capitol grounds to B Street north and south. Of course, as with all District matters, there were many in Congress who were opposed to such a "frivolous" expenditure, so it took until 1872 for the funds to be approved. Then in 1874, Frederick Law Olmsted was commissioned to design the landscape for the newly expanded grounds. What you see in this view are early elements of Olmsted's design, which would include gracefully curving paths on the left and right, low ornamental retaining walls, elegant Victorian lampposts, and other stately fixtures.

Two large red granite planters, designed by Olmsted and his protégé Thomas Wisedell, are in place on either side of East Capitol Street, which runs into the distance in the center of the view. The planter on the left is largely finished, while the one on the right is still incomplete. Three ornate lighted piers are also visible. Overall, the newly graded Capitol grounds in the lower half of the photo appear barren, flat, and empty. Olmsted's artful arrangements of trees and shrubs, ordered to appear as natural as possible, have not yet been planted.

Stereoview of Greenough's George Washington taken shortly before the statue was transferred to the Smithsonian. The caption erroneously attributes the sculpture to Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. (Author's collection.)

In the lower center several carriages and teams of horses are parked around Horatio Greenough's controversial statue of George Washington, completed in 1840. Greenough was perhaps the most prominent American sculptor in the early 19th century, and Congress commissioned him to create a monumental seated statue of George Washington on the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, in 1832. Greenough based his twenty-ton neoclassical statue on images of a famous lost statue of Zeus carved by Phidias in 430 BC. Though expertly executed in white Carrara marble, the resulting figure, with sandaled feet and loosely draped in classical garb, was awkward. It looked to many observers like Washington was getting ready to take a bath. Nevertheless the statue stood at this spot outside the Capitol for more than half a century, from just before the Civil War until 1908, when it was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution. (The statue is now in the National Museum of American History.)

First Street runs horizontally across the center of the photo. It has recently been graded down about eight feet to make the Capitol Grounds level. As a result, the buildings on the other side of the street now stand behind a low berm. Trees have been planted at even intervals along the street, although they are all too young to even clearly show branches in this hazy view.

A Metropolitan Railroad streetcar poses in front of the Capitol sometime before the tracks were rerouted around the Capitol grounds (author's collection).

Visible as a blur turning the corner at East Capitol and 1st Streets is a moving horse-drawn streetcar of the Metropolitan Railroad. Chartered in 1864, the Metropolitan was the second streetcar company to operate in Washington, running along a zigzag route that began here on East Capitol Street and worked its way across the city along D street, F Street, and H Street NW. The line originally followed A Street right up to the Capitol building, but with the expansion of the Capitol grounds the route was modified to have the cars turn north on 1st Street, as this one is doing. The slow speed of the camera meant that this and the other moving carriages, wagons, and people are all blurred.

A sea of low buildings on Capitol Hill recedes into the distance from 1st Street. Many of these would be replaced in coming years with row houses. Just out of view on the left side stands the Old Brick Capitol, which was built as a temporary meeting place for Congress after the British burned the Capitol in 1814 and which was used as a prison during the Civil War. It was converted to a boardinghouse after the war and would finally be torn down in 1932 to make way for the new Supreme Court building.

Another view east from the Capitol, taken in the early 1880s, showing the complete Duff Green's Row. Click to enlarge. (Author's collection.)

The tall white buildings on the right side of the photo are one end of what was known as Carroll Row or Duff Green's Row, a set of five large townhouses originally built by Daniel Carroll of Duddington around 1800. Carroll was the original owner of the land that became Capitol Hill, and he had donated the land for the Capitol Building to the federal government. Like other early speculators, he built townhouses as investments in the fledgling city, hoping to make money from senators and congressmen who needed a place to stay close to the Capitol. Boardinghouses became one of the most important businesses on Capitol Hill in its early days, and the Carroll Row boardinghouses were among the most prominent. The first presidential inaugural ball, for James Madison in 1809, was held in the large house on the north end of the row. In the 1830s, Duff Green, a Jacksonian Democrat and publisher of the United States Telegraph, purchased the row, which became known as Duff Green's Row. The middle row house was operated by a Mrs. Ann Sprigg in the 1840s and 1850s, and Abraham Lincoln stayed at Mrs. Sprigg's boardinghouse while he served as a congressman from Illinois from 1847 to 1849. Duff Green's Row served many other purposes, including as home to the city's first local bank, as a sanctuary for escaped slaves, and as a prison for suspected spies during the Civil War. It would finally be torn down in 1887 in preparation for construction of the Library of Congress.

Contemporary aerial view of the U.S. Capitol and grounds. 1st Street is along the right side of the photo. (Source: Architect of the Capitol).

Today, the view from the Capitol is very different, with mature landscaping around the grounds, the new Capitol Visitors Center beneath the pavement, and the Library of Congress Jefferson Building and Supreme Court occupying the blocks on the other side of 1st Street. Frederick Law Olmsted's red granite planters and ornamental piers, not even fully installed in the old stereoview, still stand and serve as a link to the quieter days of the late 19th century.


Sources for this article included William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol (2001); John DeFerrari, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C. (2015); James M. Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington's Destroyed Buildings (2003) and Washington Sculpture: A Cultural History of Outdoor Sculpture in the Nation's Capital (2008); Paul Herron, The Story of Capitol Hill (1963); LeRoy O. King, Jr., 100 Years of Capital Traction (1972); Kenneth J. Winkle, Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, D.C. (2013); and newspaper articles.

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For Victorian decorative exuberance—some would call it excess—few buildings in Washington could compare with the Portland Flats apartment house, which stood on a slender triangular lot just south of Thomas Circle from 1880 to 1962. The Portland was the city's first luxury apartment house, the equivalent in its time to the Watergate, as historian James Goode has suggested, and the closest Washington has come to having its own Flatiron Building. Its rise and fall mirrored the fluctuating prosperity of the Thomas Circle neighborhood as well as the changing tastes of Washington's most affluent residents.

The Portland, circa 1924 (author's collection).

As late as the 1870s, Washington, like most other American cities, had few apartment buildings. This despite the fact that there was a sizable market for rental accommodations here—most congressmen, senators, and many other government officials stayed in Washington for only part of the year. While the wealthier rented out houses in the nicer residential areas of the city, others had to make do with boarding houses and residential hotels, which offered limited privacy and often poor service.

"Among the thousand and one boardinghouses in Washington, from the semi-hotel to the two-story brick home with its stuffy parlor, there is a not a French flat," The Washington Post observed in April 1880. "Mr. Edward Weston, a retired capitalist of Yonkers, N.Y., proposes to erect here the first house of this style ever built at the Capitol." The term "French flat"—apparently an allusion to the long tradition of fine apartment living in Paris—referred to what we think of today as a luxury apartment home, complete with all the latest amenities. The Post went on to detail plans for the new building, noting that Weston hoped to have the structure completed by the next Congressional session and would "spare no pains in its construction, and will pay particular attention to interior decorations."

Weston, a retired banker and railroad investor, had in the 1870s decided to spend part of his time in Washington, and he hired the city's most prominent architect, Adolf Cluss (1825-1905), to design a townhouse on K Street as his residence. Pleased with how this project turned out, Weston turned again to Cluss to design his new speculative venture, the building on Thomas Circle that he would call the Portland. Though Weston was confident that apartment living would be a success in Washington, he hedged his bet by building the Portland in two phases.

A sketch of the Portland and Thomas Circle, circa 1885 (Source: Stilson Hutchins and Joseph West Moore, The National Capital Past and Present).

Construction of the first phase began in 1880 and was completed the following year. "The Portland French flat, at the corner of Fourteenth street and Vermont avenue, will be a finished work some time next week, and a work of beauty it will be," the Post proclaimed in April 1881. Arranged much like a hotel, the building featured three large public dining rooms on the ground floor (one intended primarily for women, as was the custom at the time), a drug store at the apex, an elegant lobby and parlor for receiving guests, and two large apartments flanking a narrow courtyard in the rear.

The larger apartments, on the first through fourth floors, each included three bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, bathroom, kitchen, servants' room, pantry and storage closets, all with 10-foot ceilings. The wood trim was of cherry, oak, ash, and white heart-pine, all hand oiled and rubbed. Most of the rooms featured "cheerful open fireplaces," which didn't actually work but were included because it was thought that fireplaces gave rooms a home-like feel. (The building was heated by gas, through an elaborate system separately metered for each apartment.) The parlors had the most elaborately decorated fireplaces, with "rich ebony mantles, ornamental tile borders and hearths, and are surmounted by beveled mirrors." The public corridors throughout the building were arched and tiled in marble.

An early 1900s aerial postcard view (author's collection).

The Portland featured prominent rowhouse-like bays that extended the full height of the building and opened up the apartments to light from many angles. The slender size of the lot meant that all the apartments (there would ultimately be 39 when the second phase was completed) had plenty of natural light and circulation without the need for extensive light wells or interior courtyards. Amenities included two hydraulic elevators (an Otis elevator in the rear and a Whittier machine in the front), which were essential for a building of this size. Dedicated telephone lines ran from each apartment to a superintendent's office in the basement, and dumb waiters also extended to the laundries, kitchens, and storage rooms in the basement. Pneumatic doorbells at each apartment meant one didn't have to rap unceremoniously on apartment doors.

The six-story, pressed red-brick structure was very much in keeping with Adolf Cluss's architectural style, which was then at the height of its popularity. The German-born Cluss, known as the "Red Architect" both for his reliance on red brick as well as his political leanings, had previously designed the Calvary Baptist Church (1865), the old Masonic Temple (1868), the Franklin School (1869); and the Smithsonian's original National Museum building, which was going up at the same time as the Portland. Like the National Museum, the façade of the Portland was richly embellished with decorative carvings, glazed brick accents, elaborate belt courses and balconies, and an unusually gaudy fifth floor cornice that appeared almost to drip with ornamentation. The building's lavish embellishment was "on a scale seldom matched locally or anywhere else in the country," according to historian Richard Longstreth. With its extraordinary corner tower and cupola, topped by a tall sharp finial, the building looked to many observers like a fantastic ship that had sailed up to Thomas Circle and moored ostentatiously at its southern end, proud as a peacock.

"When the Portland was projected by Mr. Edward Weston he was laughed at, and it was said the people of Washington would never come to living in 'tenement' houses," a real estate broker told the Post many years later. But the Portland was, in fact, a tremendous success, leading Weston to complete the second phase of the building, which matched the original except that the bays did not extend to the sixth floor, in 1884. That part too quickly filled up. Washington's affluent part-year residents loved the convenience of the building's location and services, the opportunity to mix with others of the same social set, and the ability to leave their apartments safely in the hands of the building superintendent when they left the city to spend their summers in more temperate climes. "The Portland is now a regular gold mine to its owner," the Post reported in 1888. By then the Russian minister was living in the building, as were more than half a dozen senators and congressmen. Competing luxury apartment houses began springing up all around the city as envious developers sought to making a killing in apartment buildings.

A mold-damaged photo of the Portland, circa 1916 (Source: Library of Congress).

The Portland had a long run as a prime residential palace in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though its implied fantasy of carefree, luxury living was bound to be punctured now and then, as happened in October 1901. On the 15th of that month The Evening Star ran a front page story about the sad case of 35-year-old Grace Lee Parmenter, wife of Navy Lt. Henry Parmenter, who had leapt to her death that morning from the fourth-floor window of the couple's apartment at the Portland.

The window was in the library, in a recess between two bays, so no one on 14th Street saw Mrs. Parmenter as she prepared to jump. She and her husband had eaten breakfast that morning with friends who lived nearby before he headed off to work at the Navy Department and she returned to the apartment. After sending her maid to get her own morning meal, Mrs. Parmenter was left alone. Suddenly, passersby were shocked and startled as the body of a woman plummeted to the sidewalk, barely missing a child who was walking by at the time. Amazingly, Mrs. Parmenter survived a couple of hours after the fall, long enough to be carried back up to her apartment and to recognize her husband, who rushed back home to be at her side. According to the family physician, she had been under treatment for "melancholia." Her funeral was held a few days later in the parlor of the Portland.

By the 1920s, there were many newer alternatives to the Portland, and its fussy Victorian décor was increasingly looking quaint and old fashioned. Nevertheless, diplomats and government officials continued to live there. On May 1, 1922, a fire in the apartment of Senator Kenneth McKellar (1869-1957) of Tennessee led to a chaotic scene on Fourteenth Street as firemen and "several thousand" spectators swarmed the street to battle the blaze and watch the unfolding drama.

The scene of the fire, May 1, 1922, with a fire department water tower in the street (Source: Library of Congress).

The fire spread quickly from McKellar's fifth floor apartment to the floor above and the roof, although the lower floors—the bulk of the building—were spared from the flames. A passerby on the street noticed fire on the fourth floor and called in the first of four alarms. Firemen arrived to find dense smoke engulfing the top two floors of the building, making them fear the blaze was worse than it actually was. Much equipment was rushed to the scene, including a recently acquired water tower, which was set up in the middle of Fourteenth Street. Fifteen streams of water were trained on the building, dousing the flames quickly and efficiently. The fifth floor was wrecked, and the sixth was also damaged by the fire, while all the lower floors suffered from the vast amounts of water that poured down to the basement.

Firefighters escort a resident down the fire escape (Source: Library of Congress).

A dramatic highlight was the successful rescue of Mrs. Lynn Glover, an invalid who was in her bed in apartment 42, directly below McKellar's apartment. Firemen carried her down in the elevator and brought her out to the street. Margaret Cummins, another sick resident, waited patiently until she could find room with the firemen and their gear to ride the elevator to the lobby. In the end, no one was seriously injured, although the building suffered nearly as much from the rescue operation as the fire itself. The Baltimore Sun noted, drily and without comment, that "Confusion resulting from the fire caused several firemen and newspaper men to dash headlong into a large mirror, 20 feet wide by 40 feet long, thinking it was the entrance into the cafe of the hotel."

At more than 40 years old, the hotel had seen better days. The original owners, all descendants and relatives of Edward Weston, sold the building in 1923 to prominent Washington developer Harry Wardman (1872-1938) for $450,000 (It had cost $150,000 to build). The sale began a long period of decline and changing ownership. Around 1926, new owners converted it from residential apartments to a more conventional hotel. The property reached probably its highest value when it was sold in 1928 for $600,000, just a year before the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression. New owners at that time undertook extensive remodeling, converting most of the once-elegant ground floor to retail space and adding extra baths to the apartment units.

In 1932, raconteur Theodore Gatchel noted that the Portland Hotel was "anything but beautiful to look at, but interesting because it was the first apartment building in Washington." By that time few people had any appreciation for its eccentric appearance. Around 1940 the building was converted to office space, and undoubtedly many of the old interior spaces were wrecked, although little change was made to the exterior. When the property changed hands yet again in 1953, the $600,000 sale price also included additional properties, such as a separate apartment house called the Hermitage, on the same block.

The Portland, circa 1960.

By 1962 the building was in the hands of an investment company called Parkwood, Inc. They had no immediate plans to build anything in its place, but, as was common at the time, they decided to tear down the old building anyway and replace it with a surface parking lot. Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt noted wistfully the passing of the city's "first" apartment house, which he considered a "charming period piece," at least on its exterior. "Inside, let's face it, it's a slum as well as a labyrinth and totally unsuitable as an office building," he wrote. Admiring the exterior decoration, Eckardt nevertheless was critical of the "inevitable dome" crowning the building's corner tower, "which somehow can't decide how to stop. It goes on to pierce the sky with a silly pinnacle reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm's helmet."

Demolition of the Portland in the summer of 1962 (Source: D.C. Preservation League).

Despite the criticism, Eckardt clearly thought the building should be saved, though he didn't say so explicitly in his article. Historic preservation was only beginning to gain traction in the early 1960s, with few Washingtonians yet questioning the judgement of developers who argued they had no choice but to tear down old buildings. The Evening Star's Myra MacPherson watched in August as the wrecking crew's crane operator, Louis Hanbury, an ex-boxer, guided massive steel jaws to bite off brick, steel, plaster, and printed wallpaper from the helpless Portland. Over near Lafayette Park, the same thing was happening to the beautiful Rochambeau Hotel, a once-elegant Beaux Arts structure that was being reduced to rubble. Next to it had stood the original Army and Navy Club, which had also come down earlier that same year. Considering it would be another 17 years before the District had an effective historic preservation law in place, it's a wonder that anything at all survived those bleak years.

The site of the Portland as it appears today (photo by the author).

Sources for this article included American Architect and Building News, Vol XV, April 12, 1884; Theodore Dodge Gatchel, Rambling Through Washington (1932); James M. Goode, Best Addresses (1st edition, 1988) and Capital Losses (2nd edition, 2003); Stilson Hutchins and Joseph West Moore, The National Capital Past and Present (1885); Richard Longstreth, "Adolf Cluss, the World, and Washington" in Adolf Cluss: Architect From Germany to America (2005); John Clagett Proctor, Washington Past and Present: A History (1930); and numerous newspaper articles.

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In 1888, the Eckington & Soldiers Home Railway became the first electric streetcar system to go into operation in the District of Columbia. It relied on overhead wires to receive its power, but that technology was soon outlawed in the downtown area. The company faced a huge challenge developing a viable alternate power source, a challenge that contributed substantially to its ultimate bankruptcy.

An experimental "surface contact" streetcar of the Eckington line (Source: Library of Congress).

The following story about the Eckington line has been adapted from my recently published book, Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, DC. A version of this story first appeared on the Greater Greater Washington blog.

Eckington was perhaps the first "true" streetcar suburb in the District in the sense that it was designed from the start as a streetcar destination. It originally had been the estate of Joseph Gales Jr. (1786—1860), publisher of the National Intelligencer newspaper and one of the city's early mayors. He had named it Eckington after his birthplace in England.

Real estate investor Colonel George Truesdell (1842—1921) bought the Eckington tract in 1887 with the idea of building a modern bedroom suburb on it. Truesdell laid out his new subdivision as an idyllic suburban community with large house lots, stunning views of the city and desirable modern amenities—including paved streets, stone sidewalks and electric streetlights—that more established District neighborhoods still didn't have.

Col. George Truesdell (Source: Library of Congress).

In 1888, Truesdell obtained a Congressional charter for a streetcar company specifically to serve his pretty new suburb. The line would include an electric station to power the railway as well as the brilliant streetlights to light up Eckington at night. Poles went into the center of the roadway to carry the overhead wires for the streetcars. It was an ideal arrangement.

The railway's original route started downtown at Mount Vernon Square, at the intersection of Seventh Street (the main commercial corridor of the day) and New York Avenue. It ran northeast from there to Third Street, then turned north, passing through the heart of the new development, and continued into the countryside along Fourth Street until it finally ended at the southern entrance to the Soldiers Home grounds, a popular spot for Sunday outings.

The route of the Eckington line superimposed on a modern map (Map by Matthew B. Gilmore).

The Eckington line was not only the first mechanized streetcar line in Washington, but it was also the city's first electric trolley line—the word trolley referring to a streetcar that gathers electric power from overhead lines through a pole on the roof of the car. Streetcars had been around in Washington since the Civil War, but they were all horse-drawn, and by the 1880s the need for a new power source to turn streetcars into "rapid transit" vehicles was clear. Trolleys were one answer.

For many Washingtonians, the revolutionary new Eckington trolley was a marvel to behold. But for other observers, notably Crosby S. Noyes (1825—1908), editor of The Evening Star, it was the incarnation of evil.

When plans for the Eckington project first became public in August 1888, the Star lashed out with a fierce editorial: "The reform of abolishing overhead wires in the District seems to be progressing backward," it warned. "[N]ow the Commissioners add a new species of overhead wire to the existing network by permitting the Eckington railway to construct an overhead electric system." They should instead be working to "secure to the city the benefits of rapid transit without aggravating the evil of overhead wires," the Star insisted.

Spurred to action, Congress soon passed a series of laws that required all DC streetcar companies to convert from horsepower to some form of mechanized power by July 1893. They simultaneously banned the use of overhead wires in the downtown area after that date.

The edict undoubtedly was frustrating for Truesdell. After the successful inauguration of Richmond's trolley system early in 1888, it was universally understood that trolleys using overhead wires were the cheapest and most efficient way to power streetcar systems. Trolley systems were already being planned and built in cities all over the country, but they were now banned in the District.

For several days after the new line opened in October 1888, crowds formed along New York Avenue, not only to see the streetcars zipping along without horses but also to see the street lit up at night by the electric lights mounted on the iron poles in the center of the roadway.

Opening day of the Eckington & Soldiers Home Railway (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.).

Truesdell soon set about expanding his new railway to serve a wider clientele. Extensions were first built on the northern ends of the lines, one heading north along North Capitol Street and the other extending from the Soldiers Home to the Catholic University of America, which had just been established in 1887, and the adjoining new village of Brookland. With luck, the new destinations would soon fill with streetcar riders.

Truesdell had always wanted to extend the line on its southern end farther into the downtown area, but that meant coming up with an alternate power source because of the ban on overhead wires downtown. Truesdell was determined to find a propulsion technology that wouldn't break the bank. He, like other railway directors, was convinced that using underground electrical power was not economical, and he did everything he could to find an alternative that would not require digging expensive underground electrical conduits and lining them with electrical power rails.

One option was to set electrical contacts right in the pavement between the tracks on the roadway, which was certainly a much less expensive approach than digging underground conduits. Each streetcar would get power momentarily from one of these contact plates as the car passed over, propelling it on to the next plate.

The company experimented with such a system in late 1890 on a stretch of test track along North Capital Street north of Boundary Street. However, the "surface contact" system they tried was a bust. The contact plates in the street were supposed to be electrified only when a streetcar was directly over them, but there was no practical way to ensure that they did not stay charged when they were in the open. It was soon obvious that the railroad couldn't deploy a system that might randomly electrocute people or horses stepping on the plates, and the experiment had to be abandoned.

Next, when in late 1890 the company began building its downtown extension, it tried using battery-powered cars. The extension ran south from New York Avenue along Fifth Street Northwest and then turned east on G Street and continued to the Treasury Department, bringing the Eckington line into the heart of the downtown commercial district. With this southern extension in place, the company could offer a twenty-five-minute ride all the way from Brookland down to the Treasury Department, although it required a transfer at New York Avenue from a trolley-powered to a battery-powered car.

For the new southern extension, the company bought the latest Robinson electric cars, elegant carriages finished in mahogany with gold trim that had three sets of wheels intended to facilitate going around curves. Pretty as they may have been, the Robinson cars were too pokey, and recharging their batteries was slow and expensive. In 1893, after just two years, the company gave up on batteries.

The railway soldiered on, its fight for overhead wires soon degenerating into a game of chicken with the Star and the DC commissioners. Exasperated that an overhead trolley system could not be installed to replace the failed battery cars, the railway converted its downtown extension to horsecars, ignoring the fact that horsecars were supposed to have been phased out by that time.

More horsecar lines were added in 1894 while the original overhead trolley line along New York Avenue and to the north continued to operate. The company's directors figured that people would be so fed up with these outmoded cars that Congress would give in and allow them to install an overhead trolley system.

The Evening Star editors were doubly upset about this turn of events. Not only were horsecars back, but the Eckington company had also missed a revised July 1, 1895 deadline for taking down the poles and overhead wires on New York Avenue, which the newspaper referred to as "obnoxious obstructions."

This double-decker streetcar saw brief service on the Eckington line (Photo courtesy of the National Capital Trolley Museum).

After the Star redoubled its public complaints, the company tried a new tack. The overhead wire system on New York Avenue was removed, and that portion of the Eckington line began running…yes, more horsecars!

The Washington Post commented that switching to horses

will mean a considerable increase in the expense to the company, which already has its stables full of horses that are not in condition for use, and it will give the residents on the line a poorer service. But the company is taking a rather grim satisfaction in the matter, as they are already losing money on their horse service, and they think that the additional loss will be a sort of investment as an object lesson to the public on the benefit of rapid transit, trolley or otherwise.

As it turned out, the public was the one giving the lesson. "Eckington is at present a very much disgusted community," the Post reported. Customers stayed away from the balky, outmoded horsecar service, which they found insulting. Ridership plummeted as rapidly as expenses soared. A year later, the overextended company was bankrupt.

A last desperate effort went into making the Eckington line viable. In early 1896, the company hosted the demonstration of a streetcar powered by compressed air, which it gambled would be both publicly acceptable and economically viable. The compressed air system used the pressure of air from canisters stored underneath the passenger seats to push pistons that turned the car's wheels. The compressed air was heated with steam to increase its force as it moved out of the canisters.

This double-decker streetcar saw brief service on the Eckington line. Photo courtesy of the National Capital Trolley Museum.

However, the public did not care for the compressed air cars, finding them smoky, dusty and smelly. The cars also tended to be slow on uphill grades. The compressed air experiment, on which the hopes of the company had been pinned, was quickly abandoned.

Read more about DC's streetcars in Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C.

At this point, the bankrupt line had already been purchased by a group of investors led by financier Oscar T. Crosby (1861—1947). In 1898, the Crosby syndicate also gained control of most of the other street railway lines in the District and began operating them under one holding company, called the Washington Traction and Electric Company. In compliance with the Congressional edict, the new conglomerate finally began installing underground electrical conduit systems on the portions of the former Eckington line that were within the downtown area. The struggle to find an alternative to underground conduits had failed.


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The Meridian Hill Hotel for Women, completed in 1942, seems at first glance to be a rather ordinary building. Located at 2601 16th Street NW, the hotel has served for the last 47 years as a Howard University dormitory, but before that it had a starring role as the first building constructed by the federal government during World War II to provide housing for female wartime workers, known as Government Girls.

Meridian Hill Hall as it appears today (photo by the author).

With able-bodied men in short supply, federal agencies turned to women to perform the countless clerical tasks that were needed to support the herculean war effort. According to Cindy Gueli, whose fascinating new book, Lipstick Brigade: The Untold True Story of Washington's World War II Government Girls, chronicles the many trials and travails of these valiant workers, nearly 200,000 came to Washington during World War II. Most were eager to leave behind the wearying straits of the Great Depression and join the excitement in the Nation's Capital as it consumed itself in the war effort. As Gueli says, some were naïve, idealistic, and carefree; others were hard-working and ambitious. Nearly all had at least one thing in common: they faced a daunting challenge in finding a place to stay in a city that had been overcrowded even before the war began. At the war's height, nearly 1,000 newcomers arrived every day. Where would they all live?


During World War I, the government had been slow to build dormitories for workers. One of the largest projects was not finished until 1919, long after the war was over. Because a much faster response was needed, the Defense Homes Corporation (DHC) was chartered in 1940 to build war-related housing wherever the open market could not provide it. In September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, the DHC purchased the large undeveloped lot located at 16th and Euclid Streets NW, (just across from Meridian Hill Park) from the French government, which had intended in the 1930s to build a new embassy there but had moved to Kalorama Heights instead. The DHC quickly drew up plans to build a $1.5 million dormitory on the site that it said would house 600 female government workers. Officials promised the hotel would charge rent at "rates within the reach of Government workers."

Built by the New York firm of John W. Harris Associates, the eight-story building was designed by prominent Washington architect Louis Justement (1891-1968). Though of Belgian descent and born in New York City, Justement went to school in Washington (George Washington University) and became an ardent supporter of the city, contributing to hundreds of projects in the D.C. area. A Modernist with a bent for sweeping urban renewal, Justement would later collaborate with fellow architect Chloethiel Woodard Smith on an early plan for the radical redevelopment of Southwest in the 1950s and 60s. By the 1940s he had already completed successful public housing projects in Silver Spring (the Falkland Apartments) and Anacostia (Fort Dupont Houses) and had developed a reputation as an expert on large-scale residential projects.

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

For the Meridian Hill Hotel, Justement adopted elements of the popular International Style to create a streamlined and futuristic structure. Like the nearby Diplomat Apartments (2420 16th Street NW), completed in 1940, the Meridian Hill Hotel features sleek, horizontal ribbons of windows, a trademark of the International Style. Brown bricks in the piers between the windows contrast vividly with the blond brick of the overall façade to accentuate the window ribbons. The building's stark appearance from a distance contrasts with the subtle decorative flourishes that are evident on close inspection: alternating raised bricks frame the windows, horizontal accent lines are molded into the concrete, and rows of polychrome concrete fleurs-de-lis underline the corner windows.

Corner window showing decorative detail (photo by the author).

The sprawling, 644-room hotel, ultimately designed to accommodate 800 rather than 600 occupants, opened on July 15, 1942. Its new government girl tenants were packed tightly into small apartments with shared bathrooms. Nevertheless, Manager Fordyce C. Minnick was at pains to explain that the Meridian Hill Hotel was a hotel, not just a dormitory. Though government owned, it was privately operated and featured a raft of hotel-like amenities, including a rooftop solarium, swimming pool in the basement, gymnasium, full-service dining room, soda fountain, drugstore, and even a swank beauty salon. Such luxuries were unheard of in the cramped boardinghouses that most government girls had to put up with.

In fact, the almost-ritzy hotel suffered a mini-scandal when it first opened. "Despite the hue and cry, in and outside the Government, for housing to accommodate Washington's mounting army of war workers, the Government is completing with public funds a hotel—a sort of super-exclusive establishment—at Sixteenth and Euclid streets NW, which is so restricted that only a small percentage of women workers will be able to live in it," proclaimed The Evening Star. Rents ranged from $8.25 to $9.50 a week, and applicants had to have an annual income of $1,800. Only a fifth of all female federal workers could meet that requirement. "This hotel will not solve the housing problem here one iota," the District's rent administrator, Robert F. Cogswell, told the Star.

Women who didn't get into the Meridian Hill Hotel often stayed at crowded boardinghouses, such as this one (author's collection).

Government officials responded rather unhelpfully that the Meridian Hill Hotel had always been intended to be a "class" hotel, unlike the barracks-style dormitories being planned for Arlington and other nearby sites. Eleanor Roosevelt quickly weighed in, saying she thought workers with lower salaries should be allowed in if they wanted it. She defended the hotel's amenities, arguing, for example, that the basement swimming pool was "very simple" and a nice thing to have given Washington's weather.

The hotel lobby (Source: Library of Congress).

Unspoken but nevertheless understood by everyone was that, regardless of income, African American women would not be allowed to stay at the Meridian Hill Hotel. Washington in 1942 remained strictly segregated in many far-reaching ways, including housing. The DHC would soon build separate dormitories for African American men (the George W. Carver Hall, at 211 Elm Street NW) and women (the Lucy Diggs Slowe Hall at 1919 Third Street NW), both attractive art moderne structures.

Under pressure from the bad publicity, the Meridian Hill's managers soon lowered their rates, and the hotel filled up quickly with young women who were delighted to be there. "When I got to Washington in May I couldn't find anywhere to stay the first night. I sat up in the bus station all night eating chocolate bars," Jan Hildebrande of Dallas told The Washington Times-Herald. "This place seems like heaven after the other rooms I've had."

A brochure for the hotel, showing the typical arrangement of bedrooms, bathrooms, and showers. Click to enlarge. (Source: Shannon & Luchs Archives, American University Archives, via Cindy Gueli).

Of course, the hotel was far from luxurious in many ways and, despite Manager Minnick's protestations, it was run much like a dormitory. Men were not allowed above the first floor. In addition to shared showers and bathtubs, tenants had to line up in the lobby for a fleeting chance to use one of just two telephones for the entire building. The War Production Board, struggling with a severe shortage in telephone capacity, would not allow any more. By October a phone booth had been installed on each floor, but long lines remained a way of life for the hotel's tenants.

The mostly single government girls quickly settled into their wartime home, which, according to Gueli, was nicknamed "Purity Palace" by locals. When not working long hours in dingy federal offices, the women sunned themselves on the veranda facing Meridian Hill Park, sung around the piano in the pink and green lobby, or met boyfriends in the first-floor lounge. Free wartime concerts in Meridian Hill Park were always popular, and some residents could even hear them through their open windows.

Matchcover from the Meridian Hill Hotel (author's collection).

Dinner in the grand first floor dining room could be had for 65 cents. A typical meal consisted of chicken liver and giblets, potatoes, peas, a hot roll, jam, coffee, and dessert, although other choices were available as well. The dining room and cafeteria were open to the public and were widely considered to be excellent. According to The Washington Post, New York broiled steak was on the menu every day, even when beef was in short supply.

The government soon decided it should get out of the housing business. The war was far from over when it put 18 properties on the market, including the Meridian Hill Hotel, in January 1944. Other properties offered for sale included Carver Hall and Lucy Diggs Slowe Hall, the two dormitories for African Americans, which would eventually be turned over to Howard University. Other projects being sold included Naylor Gardens in Southeast, McLean Gardens in upper Northwest, and the Fairlington development in Virginia.

The Meridian Hill Hotel, which had cost $1,815,000 to build, was the only property in the D.C. area to draw offers high enough for the DHC to consider. It took several years for the DHC to divest itself of its assets, including an initial sale of the Meridian Hill Hotel that fell through. A 1947 re-offer drew 23 bids, and the building was finally sold to a pair of New York investors for $2,750,000. A year later they raised the rent for new tenants by 30 percent.

The post-war years saw a continuation of the hotel's dormitory-like style. The average age of the hotel's residents began to increase as war workers moved on and were replaced with other women. The hotel welcomed transient residents who paid by the day, and became a favorite of airline stewardesses. In 1948, the Hot Shoppes restaurant chain took over the hotel's food service operations, turning the dining room into one of its first cafeterias.

Postcard photo of the hotel in the 1950s (author's collection).

By the 1950s, the hotel's management seems to have felt some pressure to relent on its strict female-only rules, at least in a small way. While individual apartments remained off limits to men, the basement pool had a pioneering male visitor in May 1954, when the hotel's management invited a Washington Post reporter to be the First Man in the Pool (and of course to write it up in the paper, complete with a photo of himself  surrounded by smiling women in bathing suits). It's unclear whether the disused pool became more popular after male guests were allowed.

Women's hotels had been in Washington at least since the Grace Dodge Hotel opened in 1921, but they were in decline by the 1960s. The Meridian Hill Hotel's cramped rooms and shared bathroom facilities made it increasingly unattractive to tenants. At the same time, the neighborhood grew less fashionable and less secure. During the riots following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, extensive looting and burning occurred only a few blocks away on 14th Street. Less than a year later, the hotel went out of business, and the building was sold to Howard University, which reopened it as Meridian Hill Hall and used it for student housing for the next four decades.

As time went by and the building aged, Howard struggled to keep it well maintained. A March 2010 article in the university's student newspaper, The Hilltop, noted problems with rodents and mechanical breakdowns, including a lack of hot water after a gauge failed. "Living in Meridian, I feel like I'm being cheated," one resident told the newspaper's reporter. "I feel like I'm in an abusive relationship and I can't leave."

The building's entrance (photo by the author).

When Wayne I.A. Frederick became president of Howard in 2014, he noted that some of the university's assets, like Meridian Hill Hall, could be redeveloped as a source of much needed income. That same year residents moved to newer dormitories on Howard's main campus, and the bidding process began to renovate the Meridian Hill property. In December 2015, Howard signed a contract with Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners to lease the property for 99 years and convert the building into a luxury rental apartment house. As far as has been announced, Jair Lynch does not seek to tear down the building, which is a protected contributing structure within the Meridian Hill Historic District. It will be interesting to see how Jair Lynch preserves and reinvigorates this remarkable building to serve hopefully many new generations of Washingtonians, both male and female.


I am indebted to Dr. Cindy Gueli as well as the staff of the Washingtoniana Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library for their invaluable assistance in researching this article. Sources for this article included David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (1988); Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (1962); Cindy Gueli, Lipstick Brigade: The Untold True Story of Washington's World War II Government Girls (2015); Louis Justement, New Cities For Old (1946); Stephen R. McKevitt, Meridian Hill: A History (2014); John Clagett Proctor, Proctor's Washington (1949); Hasan Uddin-Khan, International Style: Modernist Architecture From 1925-1965 (2009); Meridian Hill Historic District HPRB nomination (2013); Paul K. Williams, Washington, D.C.: The World War II Years (2004); and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

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Tudor Place, the ancestral home of the Peter family, sits proudly on the heights above Georgetown, at 31st Street, just north of Q Street. One of the city's oldest residences, it is currently celebrating its 200th anniversary, a fitting moment to look back over the history of this unique homestead. More than just a late Federal-style architectural gem, the house and its elegant gardens reflect one man's determination to preserve the legacy of his extraordinary family for future generations.

Photo by the author.

Around the beginning of the 19th century, developers and wealthy landowners began building several "great houses" on the high ridge above the port of Georgetown. The ridge was a perfect spot, removed as it was from the busy waterfront and offering commanding views of the river and the new capital city emerging just to the east. The land had originally been part of a 795-acre patent given to Col. Ninian Beall (1625-1717) in 1703. Among the great country estates that would be built on this ridge, four remain, including the elegant Dumbarton House (c. 1799), which we previously profiled; the unrelated Dumbarton Oaks (c. 1800), now a sprawling research and museum complex owned by Harvard University; Evermay (1801), the estate of an eccentric merchant named Samuel Davidson (1747-1810); and Tudor Place, which wasn't finished until 1816.

Georgetown shipping merchant Francis Lowndes had started work on a house on the Tudor Place site in about 1795, but by the time he sold the property in 1805 he had built only two small structures, which were likely intended to be the final building's east and west wings. The new owners, Thomas Peter (1769-1834) and his wife Martha Custis Peter (1777-1854), had strong ties to Georgetown and George Washington. Thomas Peter was the son of Robert Peter, Georgetown's first mayor and a prosperous landholder. Martha was one of Martha Washington's granddaughters.

Martha Custis is portrayed at age seven in this portrait by English painter Robert Edge Pine (photo courtesy of George Washington’s Mount Vernon).

The young couple had previously lived in a townhouse on K Street just east of Rock Creek, where they had hosted George Washington on the last night that he stayed in Washington before his death in 1799. (Sadly, the historic Peter townhouse was torn down in 1961 so that K Street could be widened into a highway.) Once Martha Peter had secured her substantial inheritance from George Washington, the couple purchased the Lowndes property and began planning a great estate house to compete with the likes of Mount Vernon and Arlington House. They asked their good friend, Dr. William Thornton (1759-1828), the original architect of the U.S. Capitol, to design a large structure to connect and unify the two small existing buildings.

A preliminary design for Tudor Place by William Thornton (source: Library of Congress).

The temple portico on the south side of Tudor Place (photo by the author).

The house's north façade and main entrance (photo by the author).

The resulting mansion, widely considered to be Thornton's masterpiece, is as stylish and eccentric as it is majestic and imposing. Embracing the fashionable Federal style of the early 1800s, Thornton eschewed the stodgy brick look of earlier Georgian mansions, opting for a stuccoed exterior that from a distance looks like limestone. He focused his energies on the house's sunlit south façade rather than the north side, which he left a rather blank-looking surface ("plain as a pikestaff," as one of Mr. Peter's descendants called it), despite the fact that the main entrance is on the north. In sharp contrast, the south façade's immense first-floor windows bathe the house's entertainment rooms in light. In the early 1800s they must have offered impressive views of Georgetown and the Potomac. An old family legend has it that Martha Peter and her dear friend Anna Thornton, the wife of the architect, watched from a window in the west hyphen (the section between the west wing and the central building) as Washington's most prominent buildings burned in August 1814 at the hands of British invaders. Though it is unlikely they could see much if they had watched from this window, Anna Thornton did seek refuge with Martha at Tudor Place during the British attack.

Photo of the saloon by Jack E. Boucher (Source: Library of Congress).

Once the house was finished, it offered an unparalleled setting for entertainment. The centerpiece was the stately temple portico, a circular columned pavilion set halfway into the south façade, adding neoclassical elegance and light as well as a geometric playfulness to the design. The portico opens out from a formal reception room, known as a saloon, with a drawing room and parlor adjoining on either side. One imagines many distinguished Federalist guests being entertained in these handsome rooms.

One of the high points in Tudor Place's early history was the visit by the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) as part of the Revolutionary War hero's celebrated tour of the United States in 1824. The elderly Lafayette was welcomed as an old family friend; he recalled seeing Martha Peter as a child at Mount Vernon decades earlier. Meanwhile, Captain William G. Williams (1801-1846), a U.S. Army officer accompanying Lafayette, was smitten with one of the Peters' daughters, America. The two would later marry.

Hannah Pope was born enslaved at Tudor Place in 1828 and sold in 1845 so she could marry Alfred Pope, who was owned by another Georgetown businessmen. The couple were freed in the early 1850s (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

As one might imagine, enslaved African Americans were a part of Tudor Place’s story from the beginning, performing much of the hard labor of cooking, cleaning, and tending the grounds that were critical to sustaining the grand estate. The current Tudor Place Foundation has been working to bring the stories of these previously forgotten individuals back to life. Research conducted by historian Mary Beth Corrigan identifies dozens of slaves inherited by Martha Peter in the early 19th century. Many were sold and likely ended up on plantations in the deep South. A number of those that remained served the Peter family faithfully for years and were referred to affectionately in family correspondence.

The Peters had three daughters, Columbia (1797-1820), America (1803-1842), and Britannia (1815-1911). It was the remarkable Britannia Wellington Peter who inherited Tudor Place upon the death of her mother and who saw the mansion through the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th. Like her sister America, who had just passed away, Britannia in December 1842 married a distinguished Navy officer, Commodore Beverley Kennon. Kennon was 22 years her senior and had recently lost his first wife. Sadly, Britannia would have less than two years to spend with him. As chief of the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Equipment, Kennon was on board the formidable warship U.S.S. Princeton in June 1844 when it was showing off its massive new "Peacemaker" cannon for dignitaries on the Potomac River. The poorly designed gun exploded on its second firing, killing Kennon and at least five others and leaving the 29-year-old Britannia a widow with a limited income and a small child to raise.

Drawing of the 1844 explosion aboard the Princeton (source: Library of Congress).

Britannia soldiered on, caring for her daughter, Martha "Markie" Custis Kennon, and for the grand Tudor Place estate she inherited in 1854. She was a first cousin of Mary Custis, of Arlington House, and had served as a bridesmaid for Mary Custis' wedding to a dashing young Army officer, Lt. Robert E. Lee, in 1831. Her family ties to the South portended trouble as the Civil War neared. Financial difficulties had led her in the late 1850s to briefly rent out Tudor Place to a Southern congressman. After the outbreak of hostilities, Britannia's tenant fled south, and Britannia feared that Tudor Place would be seized by the Union Army for use as a temporary hospital, as other large buildings had been. Tensions were high in Georgetown and Washington, two border towns with divided loyalties that retained deep ties to the South. Britannia responded by hurrying home to reclaim possession of her mansion. She maintained the peace and earned some needed income by offering lodging for several Union officers, with the stipulation that they didn't discuss the war in her presence.

Britannia and Markie Kennon (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

One day In 1862 Britannia was standing at the gate of her property when a young African American man happened along and asked if she needed help. Reportedly, she liked his looks and hired him on the spot, gaining a faithful gardener who would work at Tudor Place for the next 44 years. The man was John Luckett (1841-1906), and he had been born a slave in Virginia. The Union Army had taken him and other former slaves from their previous owners and conscripted them into service, but Luckett escaped and found his way to Georgetown. He eventually settled on Capitol Hill and walked to work at Tudor Place every day.

John Luckett (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

Despite continuing financial straits, which may have contributed to her decision to sell off some of her land at one point to fund house repairs, Britannia managed to preserve the grand house and its historic furnishings into the 20th century. She became a well-known fixture in Georgetown, graciously allowing a stream of curious visitors to inspect her unparalleled collection of George Washington memorabilia.

In 1867, Britannia's daughter, Markie, married a cousin, Dr. Armistead Peter (1840-1902), thus bringing the Peter family name back to the estate. In 1914, their son, Armistead Peter, Jr. (1870-1960), undertook a thorough renovation and modernization of the mansion, improving plumbing, electricity, and telephone service but keeping the essential character of the estate unchanged. Elements of the 1914 restoration can still be seen in the fixtures of the house's kitchen and bathrooms.

Armistead Peter 3rd and wife Caroline on their wedding day in 1919 (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

But it was Armistead Peter's son, Armistead Peter 3rd (1896-1983), who was ultimately responsible for Tudor Place being preserved as a house museum. Armistead devoted much of his life to researching and preserving his beloved homestead, which had "seen the pageant of American history," as he put it. Eager to restore both the building and its grounds, in 1933 he re-planted the formal box knot garden on the north side of the mansion based on an early 1800s drawing he discovered that depicted its original geometric design laid out by Thomas and Martha Custis Peter. With his wife Caroline, Armistead established a foundation in 1962 to manage and preserve the estate in perpetuity, and he granted an historic easement to the federal government in 1966 to ensure it would never be redeveloped. In 1969, he wrote a definitive history of the house that details, room by room, all that he knew about its appearance and construction.

In a 1980 interview with The Washington Star, Armistead regretted that it would not be economically feasible for his daughter to maintain the estate as her residence. Tudor Place was the only Federal-era "great house" in Washington that had survived to that point under the ownership of a single family, and Armistead wanted above all that it remain a home—a commemoration of the the family that lived in it—rather than a conventional museum of styles and artifacts from the past. To that end, he carefully specified how the grounds and each room should appear, retaining as much as possible the distinctive imprint of the Peter family.

In 1988, Tudor Place opened to the public as a museum, having undergone five years of conservation after Armistead's death. Since that time, a number of intensive restoration and research projects have been undertaken. Recent examples include re-stuccoing of the house's exterior in 2007, restoration of the exquisite curly maple pocket doors adjoining the saloon in 2010, and replacement of the temple portico's roof by Wagner Roofing in 2012.

Replacement of the Temple Portico roof in 2012 (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

Restoration of pocket doors adjacent to the Saloon in 2010 (photo courtesy of Tudor Place).

As it celebrates its 200th anniversary, Tudor Place has planned several special events, including one upcoming on April 30 where visitors can tour a reproduction of George Washington's headquarters tent from the Revolutionary War. While its mission undoubtedly is broader now than what Armistead Peter 3rd envisioned, Tudor Place continues to offer visitors unique and powerful ways to connect with the rich history of the Peter family, Georgetown, and the nation.


I am indebted to Leslie Buhler, former Director of Tudor Place Historic House and Garden, for showing me the house and answering my many questions. I also received invaluable assistance from Mandy Katz, Communications Director, and Frances White. Additional sources included James Goode, Capital Houses: Historic Residences of Washington D.C. and Its Environs, 1735-1965 (2015); Jan Cigliano, Private Washington: Residences in the Nation's Capital (1998); Mary Beth Corrigan, "Enslaved and Free African-Americans in Early Nineteenth Century Georgetown" (2013); Deering Davis, Stephen Dorsey, and Ralph Hall, Georgetown Houses of the Federal Period (1944); Harold Eberlein and Cortlandt Hubbard, Historic Houses of George-town & Washington City (1958); Grace Dunlop Ecker, A Portrait of Old George Town (1951); Cordelia Jackson, "Tudor Place" in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 25 (1923); Hope Ridings Miller, Great Houses of Washington, D.C. (1969); G. Martin Moeller, Jr., AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C. (2012); Derry Moore and Henry Mitchell, Washington: Houses of the Capital (1982); Mary Mitchell, Divided Town (1968); Canden Schwantes, Wicked Georgetown: Scoundrels, Sinners and Spies (2013); Pamela Scott & Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (1993); Armistead Peter III, Tudor Place (1969); George Alfred Townsend, Washington, Outside and Inside (1874); Tudor Place Foundation, Tudor Place Historic House and Garden (2005); Chuck Wagner and Sheila Wagner, Preserving Washington History: 100 Years of Wagner Artistry (2014); Kerry Walters, Explosion on the Potomac (2013); The National Register of Historic Places nomination (1971) and Historic American Buildings Survey documentation (1999) for Tudor Place; as well as numerous newspaper articles.

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Ninth Street downtown was one of the city's liveliest entertainment zones in the early years of the 20th century, full of theaters like the Gayety Burlesque, which we've previously profiled, and a colorful array of exotic restaurants, bars, and diners. "Everything that ever happened in this city happened there. When you came to town you had to strut up and down Ninth Street or you hadn't lived," boxing promoter Goldie Ahearn later recalled. But by the World War II years, this had all begun to change. The theaters and restaurants were still there, but they tended toward the seedy. Many of their patrons were the city's alienated loners, the gamblers and late-night drinkers, the soldiers and sailors at loose ends who sooner or later ended up causing some kind of trouble. "There are eight million stories in the naked city..." says the narrator of the classic 1948 film noir about New York City. In the case of Washington, this sad story, as told breathlessly by the city's newspapers, is one of them.

The Jo Del Restaurant at 719 9th Street NW (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Greek restaurants were once commonplace on 9th Street. Some, like the Athens Restaurant at 804 9th Street were prominent and long-lived, but others, including the small storefront at 719 9th Street, were less reputable. As a Greek coffee house in 1946 it was busted by the vice squad for illegal gambling. Four years later, reincarnated as the "Acropolis Club," it was shut down again for the same reason. By the late 1950s, the joint had been renamed the Jo Del Grill (or Jo Del Tavern), and this is the place that George P. Kaldes purchased in 1957. Kaldes, a 33-year-old World War II Army veteran of Greek descent, had cashed in a life insurance policy and put up all of his personal savings to gain full ownership of the Jo Del, and in the months after doing so he had been proud that the little place was beginning to show a modest profit.

All that came to an end in the early morning hours of Friday, December 27, 1957. Around 2 am, police were summoned to a ghastly scene; two men lay dead in pools of blood on the floor and another—a blind man—was gravely wounded. Owner Kaldes was one of the dead, and he lay closest to the front door. The Evening Star's photographer managed to photograph his body through the open door, à la Weegee, before the coroner took it away. The other dead man was Kenny Fisher, a young guitar player, part of a country music combo that provided the tavern's entertainment. The group's pianist, Bernard "B.J." Mainer, was the seriously wounded blind man.

Wounded pianist B.J. Mainer is wheeled out of the Jo Del. The photo has been retouched by The Evening Star to make it more clear when reproduced in print (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

A third musician, drummer Tom Sherwood, tried to explain to the Star what had happened. Two men had come into the bar earlier that night and started drinking. One was in his forties, and Kaldes apparently knew him, calling him "Jack." This was Henry Clay Overton, an ex-con with a lengthy criminal record who often used the alias Jack Owens. With him was burly 22-year-old Wayne Carpenter, who was supposedly Jack's son (he was actually a neighbor that Overton had taken under his wing).

The two sat down and began drinking from a bottle of whiskey. The gregarious Overton was full of life and went around talking to other patrons. His young protégé Carpenter wanted to play the drums, and drummer Sherwood reluctantly allowed him to do so, though he seemed to know nothing about drumming. At another point owner Kaldes told bartender Harry Reed that it was okay to give Overton a second bottle of whisky, and he did. By 1:45 am, Overton and Carpenter had been drinking heavily and were the only customers left in the bar other than George Metz, an egg salesman who was Kaldes' good friend. Kaldes was looking to close up for the night.

Jo Del proprietor George P. Kaldes (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

At this point Overton apparently got into a loud argument with Kaldes over his bill. The charge for the two bottles of Canadian whisky was about $20, but Overton wouldn't pay more than $10. A fistfight broke out on the sidewalk between Overton and Kaldes' friend Metz, who punched him in the face and likely broke his nose. According to Metz, the wounded and drunken Overton told him, "I'll get you. We're going to get a couple of guns and blow your brains out. You and that big Greek inside too," and then he and Carpenter left. Metz asked Kaldes if he wanted him to stick around in case the angry pair returned, but Kaldes wasn't worried about it and told Metz to go home. It was a fateful decision that undoubtedly saved Metz's life.

About 15 minutes later, after Metz had left and when Kaldes was about to lock the front door for the night, Overton and Carpenter returned, armed with a .45 automatic pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. That's when Overton opened up, firing at least 11 times with the .45. With bullets flying, the restaurant staff scrambled for cover. Sherwood managed to duck behind the bar with Sue Harrington, the lone waitress on duty, but Kaldes, Fisher, and the blind pianist Mainer were all shot. The bartender, Harry Reed, escaped into the basement.

Guitarist Kenny Fisher (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Mainer was rushed to Emergency Hospital; he had been shot in the back and was paralyzed from the waist down. Drummer Sherwood, waitress Harrington, and bartender Reed, uninjured but all clearly traumatized by the incident, gave their faltering accounts to the police and the newspapers. "I'm still scared. It was all so clear to me," Sherwood told The Washington Post. "He [Overton] got the guy on my right and the blind man on my left. I don't know how he missed me."

But the drama had not yet ended. Overton and Carpenter, believing they had just killed three men, jumped into Overton's Ford and started driving north. It's not clear why they headed in this direction since they lived to the south, in Charles County, Maryland, where Overton owned a small barber shop in a strip mall. In any event, they managed to get themselves lost in a leafy residential neighborhood in upper Northwest, just off of 16th Street near the Maryland line. That's when they came across a young couple sitting in a parked convertible and decided it was time to switch cars.

Mugshot of Henry Clay Overton that appeared in the Star (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post)

Doris Mattingly was sitting on the passenger side of the car. The pretty 19-year-old had graduated from Coolidge High School just the previous year. Earlier that evening she had met her boyfriend, 21-year-old Pfc. Larry Lee Monteith, at the Hayloft Restaurant on H Street downtown. Monteith was a member of the Old Guard at Fort Myer, Virginia, and had proudly stood watch over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was also part-time manager at the Hayloft and was scheduled to take over full-time when his enlistment ended. Monteith had driven Mattingly home to her parents' home in his new Chevrolet convertible, and the two were sitting in the parked car when Carpenter came up on one side and reportedly said "Open up. We're police." Monteith was skeptical and asked for identification. Carpenter showed him the .45, and Overton came up on the other side cradling the sawed-off shotgun. Monteith was ordered to move into the back with Overton while Carpenter drove, with Doris Mattingly at his side. The captors and their hostages then took off towards Virginia.

They drove for several hours. The fugitives laughed and bragged that they had killed three men, but Doris sensed that the young man driving the car was in over his head, swept up by the recklessness of the older man, who had a bloodied face and seemed very drunk. "I think the younger boy acted like he was sorry this thing took place," she told the newspapers. "It seemed to me that he was like a young guy that got into wrong company." Overton, meanwhile, sitting in back with his finger on the shotgun's trigger, ran hot and cold. "One time he would tell me I was sweet and the next time he would be waving the shotgun in my face," Doris recalled. She would later testify that he claimed, "I've just killed three people and one or 10 more won't make any difference." Young Carpenter apparently tried to control Overton's aggressiveness as best he could.

Carpenter must have felt sorry for taking Mattingly. After they had passed Richmond, Overton fell asleep in the back seat, and Carpenter decided to pull over and let Mattingly out by the side of the highway. When Overton later woke up, he was more concerned about switching to a new car than the fact that the young woman had been allowed to escape. Pulling the car over again, the killers ordered Monteith to get in the trunk and then took off in search of a new car. From the trunk Monteith heard one of them yell out to another driver, "Stop your car or we'll blow your brains out." The other car pulled over, Overton and Carpenter got into it, and they continued on their way south, abandoning Monteith's car with Monteith still locked in its trunk. Fortunately, it was a convertible, and Monteith was able to cut his way out of the trunk with a penknife through the fabric of the convertible top.

Doris Mattingly answers questions in a Richmond, Virginia police station (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Overton and Carpenter's new hostage was Arsonia G. Allman, aged 55, a hairdresser from Richmond, Virginia. They drove with her in her brand new two-toned Buick Special as far as Cheraw, South Carolina, where they stopped and tied her to a tree before continuing their escape. Like Mattingly and Monteith, Allman was not physically hurt; she told police that one of the desperadoes talked about knowing a good place to hide out in Texas.

Larry Lee Monteith, shortly after the incident (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

By Saturday, the newspapers were reporting that a nationwide hunt was on for the killer-kidnappers. The FBI printed 100,000 "Wanted" flyers and distributed them to post offices and police stations across the country. Pharmacies were alerted as well; Overton was diabetic and would be needing daily insulin injections. The FBI notice was even broadcast during some of Saturday's football games, leading to a number of false alerts. The best lead was from a truck stop waitress in Charleston, South Carolina who recognized the pair of men who had had breakfast Saturday morning at her diner from their pictures. Several of the restaurant's patrons agreed. The police focused the search on SOuth Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Front page of The Evening Star, December 28, 1957.

The end came for Overton on Sunday night on a stretch of highway near Wrens, Georgia. Overton was still driving the Buick he and Carpenter had stolen from Arsonia Allman Friday night, although he had changed its license plates. Georgia Highway Patrol officers spotted the stolen car traveling north on Route 1. They gave chase, and Overton tried to outrun them, reaching speeds as high as 110 mph. He apparently lost control of the car and crashed head on into another vehicle traveling the opposite direction. The two cars burst into flames, and both drivers were killed instantly. Overton's final innocent victim was Charley Wray, 42, a North Carolina carpenter who was on his way to his government construction job at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the nation's promising new space program was just getting underway.

Wayne Carpenter was still at large. He hadn't been in the car with Overton, and police suspected he was somewhere in the Miami, Florida, area. They found a matchbook and newspaper from Florida (as well as the shotgun that had been used in the killings) in the wreckage of Arsonia Allman's car. Sure enough, Carpenter was quietly apprehended a day later by Pvt. Larry Wald, an alert rookie cop on the streets of West Palm Beach. Suspicious about a young man with a four-day growth of beard, Wald stopped and questioned Carpenter and quickly surmised who he was. "I guess you know you're pretty popular down here," Wald remarked. "Yes, I guess so and I'm glad it's over," Carpenter reportedly responded.

The Washington Post and Evening Star offered glimpses into the trauma and sorrow afflicting the families of Overton and Carpenter's victims. Kaldes and Fisher were both married with young families; Kaldes had four small children, Fisher three. Fisher's widow, Martha was stunned and scared when the Post's reporter interviewed her the day after the murders. She still hadn't told the children what had happened. She talked about how Fisher loved to sing and play the guitar. He had suffered from rheumatic fever as a 12-year-old, and a doctor had told him that playing the guitar would strengthen his hands, and he had been playing ever since. He had given his 4-year-old son, Kenny Jr., a guitar for Christmas, and the boy had been looking forward to learning how to play like his father.

This photo of Kenny Fisher's family appeared in the Star on December 28, 1957 (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Pandora Kaldes, widow of the restaurant owner, was too distraught to speak to reporters and had been given sedatives to deal with the shock. Her sister told how George Kaldes had been turning the corner on his new restaurant venture. He had bought out his partner just the previous week and had called home about 7pm on the night of the murders to say that business was picking up. It was the last the family ever heard from him.

Pandora's brother reopened the Jo Del on Tuesday, January 7, 1958, a little more than a week after the incident. It was a grim scene; bullet holes still scarred the walls, and patrons were likely there more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. Pandora Kaldes did not have the stomach for it. Just five days later, she put the place up for sale, posting a classified ad: "Night Club—Due to death of owner, business for sale at sacrifice," against the advice of her brothers. She wanted nothing more to do with it. (Sadly, the planned sale apparently did not go well. An August 1958 classified notice in the Post announced that a U.S. Marshal's auction was to be held of the restaurant's fixtures and furnishings to pay debts. Everything from walnut booths, Formica tables, and bentwood chairs to a Carrier upright deep freeze, Silex coffee brewer, and Chrysler air conditioner went on the auction block.)

Matchcover from the Jo Del Restaurant (author's collection).

Meanwhile B.J. Mainer, the blind pianist, languished in Emergency Hospital. He had been born blind, but it had never slowed him down. Raised in North Carolina, he had learned the piano at an early age and had moved to D.C. in 1952. He got a job as a piano tuner for the Kitt Music Company and joined a country music group called the Cameron Valley Boys that played every Sunday on radio station WFAX. For six years he played in restaurants up and down 8th Street SE (known in those days simply as "The Street") and was universally liked there. Just three weeks before the shootings, he had decided to take the gig at the Jo-Del Tavern where his buddy, Kenny Fisher, had started playing. Asked about what he planned when he got out of the hospital, Mainer said he was thinking of opening a music store. "One thing for sure—I've got to stay out of the honky-tonks," he said. "I've got a lot of friends there, but if I live through this one I just don't want to push my luck."

Bernard J. Mainer (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

His older sister, Fay Mainer Rogers, who had also been born blind, traveled from Japan to visit her wounded brother in the hospital, and was photographed there by the Star. She brought him a cigarette case and matching lighter from Japan and asked if B.J. was able to eat any sweets, since he loved candy. Unfortunately, the wounded pianist was eating very little. He remained in critical condition as doctors tried to figure out how to help him. One of the bullets had hit his kidney, stomach, and spleen. He underwent several operations, including one in late February in which his heart stopped after he was given anesthesia. Finally, on March 7, more than two months after the shootings, he passed away.

Fay Rogers visits her brother at Emergency Hospital (Source: DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post).

Prosecutors quickly added a third count to the murder charges against Wayne Carpenter. His first trial was in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, for kidnapping and auto theft. Doris Mattingly testified that Carpenter had protected her from Overton's drunken advances. "Don't let him kill me," she said she asked Carpenter, and he supposedly responded that Overton "will have to kill me first." Monteith's testimony was very different; he said Carpenter had pointed the .45 pistol at his chest after Mattingly had been released and that he feared for his life at that moment. He claimed it was Overton who had stopped Carpenter, saying "This boy is all right and we're not going to hurt him." When Carpenter finally took the stand in his own defense he argued that Overton had put him up to the kidnappings and "had a shotgun pointed at me the whole time." The jury took just 78 minutes to find Carpenter guilty on four counts of kidnapping and auto theft. Carpenter was sentenced in early May to the maximum two concurrent life terms in prison.

Carpenter's lawyer began building a case that he was temporarily insane during the actual killings. Carpenter asked to be evaluated psychologically before standing trial in the District for the murders. Everyone agreed that Overton had done most of the shooting; he was the one holding the .45 pistol, which he fired at least 11 times. Carpenter had been armed with the shotgun and had fired it once. Carpenter spent four months of his prison term at St. Elizabeths undergoing evaluation before doctors said he was competent to stand trial. But prosecutors had lost their enthusiasm for the case, given the fact that Carpenter was already serving concurrent life sentences. According to press accounts, they agreed to allow him to plead guilty to a single count of manslaughter, which he did in May 1960.

Carpenter spent prison time in several federal penitentiaries, including a stint at Alcatraz from 1961 until it closed in 1963. After serving fifteen years, he was paroled in May 1973. Having trained in prison as a welder, he moved to California, where public records show that he married Doris Mattingly in September, just three months after getting out of prison. (Mattingly remarried in 1977.) When Carpenter's release was announced in the newspapers, B. J. Mainer's mother, Louise—still living in the small apartment in Southeast that she had shared with her blind son—poured out her sorrow to a Post reporter. Fifteen years had only sharpened her personal conviction that Carpenter was the chief culprit in the killing of her son. "It seems like just yesterday," she said. "He served a very short sentence."

Henry Clay Overton, however, was the man most people blamed for the tragedy. Back in January 1958, when the shock of the incident was still fresh in everyone's minds, the Washington Post ran a seven-part series on Overton's life, painting a picture of him as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character, kind and gentle as a neighborhood barber when he was sober but violent and short-tempered after he had been drinking. One of ten children born to a southern Virginia tobacco farmer, Overton had first been committed to reform school at age 16, charged with being drunk and disorderly. In 1931, shortly after getting out, he stabbed another young man at a party after he had been drinking and arguing (the man recovered from his wounds). He spent another three years in the state penitentiary for that attack. After behaving well in prison and being released, he soon got into trouble again, convicted of housebreaking and burglary in 1935. He served more time, got out, and repeated the whole cycle again in 1938. Convicted again of housebreaking, he served time in Lorton, where he learned how to be a barber. When he was paroled in 1940, the board noted that he "has a lot of good qualities if he can leave liquor alone." He couldn't. He was soon arrested again for disorderly conduct and violating his parole.

Overton married in 1943, between prison terms, and managed to buy a farm in Axton, Virginia. His next run-in with the law was for operating an illegal still on the farm, and he served more time in the Atlanta federal penitentiary, where he again behaved well and honed his skills as a barber. In the early 1950s he opened his barber shop in Charles County, near the District, and seemed to settle down. He was well-liked, and parents would bring their small children to have their hair cut by the friendly barber who had a way with kids.

The site of the Jo Del Restaurant today. None of the historic structures in this block have survived (photo by the author).

The Post's reporter tried to sort out whose fault it was that things had gone horribly wrong. Was it that Overton was ruined as a young man by the juvenile justice system? Should he have been institutionalized less—or maybe more, to keep him off the streets? Could his alcoholism have been treated more effectively? One factor that the Post reporter of 1958 didn't consider was the fact that Overton had ready access to firearms. A recent survey by The New York Times of incidents in which four or more people were wounded or killed found that many were "sparked by minor, often drunken grievances—forgettable if guns had not been at hand." Whatever Overton's weaknesses and trouble with alcohol, he could never have instigated the Jo Del Tavern killings if he hadn't been able to grab a couple of guns that fateful December night almost 60 years ago, when Washington looked very different but was really much the same as the city of today.

I am indebted to Michele Casto and Tawnya Jordan of the Washingtoniana Room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library for their invaluable assistance in identifying and reproducing photographs from the Washington Star collection. Aside from publicly available civil and military records, the chief source for this article was the extensive press coverage the incident received in The Evening Star and The Washington Post.

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If it weren't for the majestic, columned façade of the Treasury Department, this photograph would be unrecognizable as a view of 15th Street downtown. The virtually deserted cobblestone street, the large shade trees, and the horse-drawn wagon stopped at the side of the road evoke a much quieter era. And so it was before the Civil War. But the horse-drawn wagon is actually a unique urban artifact—a rarely photographed pre-war omnibus, the first mass transit vehicle the city ever saw.

Detail of a circa 1860 stereoview of the Treasury Department (Author's collection).

What we now think of as a city bus—a road vehicle traveling a set route and carrying multiple passengers for a low fare—first appeared in the 1820s in London and Paris. In short order they were dubbed “omnibuses,” from a term originally coined by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and derived from the Latin word meaning “for everyone.” It wasn’t until the 20th century that “omnibus” would be shortened to just “bus.”

Abraham Brower, a New York businessman, is generally credited with introducing omnibuses to America when he opened his first public coach line along Broadway in New York City in 1827. As for Washington, the first omnibuses began operating in early 1830, traveling along Pennsylvania Avenue from Georgetown to the Capitol. What you see here is one such omnibus. If you look closely, you may be able to make out the word "Capitol" across the top front of the carriage and "Georgetown" along the side.

An omnibus seated twelve inside and two outside, including the driver, whom we see here perched on top. The fare was six and one-quarter cents or five tickets for a quarter. With such a small capacity, omnibuses frequently filled up, and often one could see an overflow passenger precariously balanced on the flimsy rear step and clinging to the back door handle for dear life as the vehicle rattled along the city's rutted, unpaved streets. Omnibuses were often individually named for famous people or events, and some had elegant paintings of sailing ships or early steam-powered vessels on their sides. Keeping them clean must have been a constant battle. They were cramped, dirty, hard to get in and out of, and ran unreliably.

Drawing of a typical D.C. omnibus (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.)

Omnibus drivers could become quite reckless as they vied with each other for customers. The city council took up a bill in 1850 to “prohibit racing and several other improper and dangerous practices, which generally result from the rivalry of different lines,” according to The National Intelligencer. Eventually omnibus drivers were subjected to a five-dollar fine for “passing ahead of or in front of, or in any other way to annoy the passengers or drivers of any other omnibus.” But this was only after an alarming incident had occurred on the very stretch of 15th Street shown in this photo. As recounted in The Evening Star in June 1855:

A respectable citizen tells us that in the afternoon of the day before yesterday the driver of the Georgetown omnibus, No. 25, at a point on Fifteenth street, opposite the Treasury Department, drove up to the side of the lead-horse of a three-horse stage, and commenced beating that horse most unmercifully, causing in the melee the running off of both teams, a wheel horse of each to fall, both being dragged some distance. The omnibus was crowded with ladies, who left it. The conduct of the driver was most reprehensible, and endangered the lives not only of the horses, but of the passengers—men, women, and children—in both vehicles.

By this time the city's omnibuses were under the control of Gilbert Vanderwerken (1810-1894), the city's first transit mogul, who was known as the "omnibus king." Born in Waterford, New York, Vanderwerken left home at age 17 to be an apprentice to a stagecoach builder in Newark, New Jersey. He opened his own coach-building business in Newark around 1830 but went bankrupt during the financial depression of 1837. He moved to Washington in the late 1840s and invested in an omnibus company known as the Union Line. In 1851 he gained full control of the company, which by that time was one of two consolidated omnibus companies operating in the city. In 1855 he and his partner, John E. Reeside, bought out the other line, known as the Citizens Line, and merged the two into a single D.C. omnibus monopoly.

Despite his investment in omnibuses, Vanderwerken was likely the first to try to bring streetcars to the District. Streetcars represented a clear technological advance. Horses could pull a much heavier load on a streetcar riding on steel rails than on a wooden-wheeled wagon. Riders enjoyed a smoother ride and more commodious seating. An ambitious businessman, Vanderwerken first petitioned Congress for a street railway from Georgetown to Capitol Hill in December 1852, but Congress was slow to act. It would be ten more years before the exigencies of the Civil War spurred Congressional authorization of the District's first street railway. The first line to be constructed, in 1862, followed the same route as the Georgetown-Capitol omnibus line, which by that time extended beyond the Capitol to the Navy Yard.

Streetcar in the distance and original tracks on Pennsylvania Avenue. Tracks like these were also laid in the cobblestones on 15th Street alongside the Treasury. (Author's collection).

Though not specified in the law establishing the new company, buying out Vanderwerken’s competing omnibus line seems to have been one of the requirements for getting the new streetcar operation underway. Vanderwerken agreed to sell horses, cars, and other company property for $28,500 and leased his stables and other real estate for $2,500 per year. The railway company would eventually purchase Vanderwerken’s strategically located stables in Georgetown, which they converted into a car barn and maintenance facility (now Georgetown Park), as well as his Navy Yard stables.

Once the new streetcar lines began operating, passengers could transfer to the old Vanderwerken omnibuses to complete their trips on routes still under construction. In October 1862, with all three of its planned lines nearly finished, the company’s directors decided to donate 20 of the old omnibuses to the army for use as ambulances. They were much needed to transport wounded soldiers, who by that time were pouring into Washington from nearby battlefields in Maryland and Virginia. Perhaps the omnibus in our photo was one of the ones that was destined for war service.

The full stereoview

As seen here, the Treasury Building's massive Ionic colonnade was one of the first sections of the structure to be completed, in the early 1840s. At the time this photo was taken, the building's north façade, facing Pennsylvania Avenue, had not yet been started. Instead, the old State Department building is still standing. Though mostly obscured by the large tree in the foreground, the staircase and first floor windows of the building can be seen immediately behind the omnibus. This building, one of four distinguished, federal-style structures designed by architect George Hadfield (1763-1826) as the Executive Branch's first office buildings, would be torn down in 1866 when work to complete the north wing of the Treasury Building began.

Photo by the author.

A view of 15th Street from the same angle today reveals another notable difference: the Washington Monument now looms beyond the Treasury Building. Construction of the monument had halted in 1854 due to lack of funds, and the segment that had been completed was not tall enough to be visible from this spot in 1860. Construction resumed in 1877 and wasn't completed until the 1880s.

A streetcar encounters pedestrians, delivery wagons, and two herdics in this scene in front of the Patent Office circa 1890. (Author's collection).

As for omnibuses, their deliberate elimination in 1862 proved to be short-lived. In 1875, regularly scheduled horse-drawn coaches were reintroduced to compete with streetcars. Some were very similar in design to pre-war omnibuses, but by the 1880s an improved design known as a "herdic" after its inventor, Peter H. Herdic, made its appearance. Herdics saw service into the early 1900s. Modern motorized bus service began in 1921.


Portions of this article previously appeared in Capital Streetcars: Early Mass Transit in Washington, D.C. Additional sources included John Steele Gordon, Washington's Monument And the Fascinating History of the Obelisk (2016); Leroy O. King Jr., 100 Years of Capital Traction: The Story of Streetcars in the Nation’s Capital (1972); John Anderson Miller, Fares, Please! A Popular History of Trolleys, Horsecars, Streetcars, Buses, Elevateds, and Subways (1960); Pamela Scott, Fortress of Finance: The United States Treasury Building (2010); and numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

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