Lost Washington, D. C.

PREFACE

People forget so quickly," Librarian Jerry McCoy remarked to me one day when I was in the very early stages of my research for this book. It’s often difficult to remember specific facts even in the recent past (was that restaurant there on the corner ten years ago, or twenty?) much less imagine the city a century ago, but how wonderful it would be to bring some of these forgotten moments back to life.

I’ve always been fascinated by Washington’s rich history and have always wished that I could step into the shoes of a Washingtonian on downtown’s busy streets at the turn of the past century, with all of the horses, carriages and trolley cars, the shop fronts spilling their wares out in sidewalk displays and the broad awnings shading passersby from the noonday heat. For some years, I collected vintage postcards that offer colorful, fleeting glimpses of those times. Then, in 2009, I started researching and writing stories to try to bring to life some of the scenes in these postcards, and those stories first appeared in my blog, Streets of Washington (http://streetsofwashington.blogspot.com). That blog, in turn, became the starting point for this book.

There are many, many stories that could be included in such a book, and this selection represents only a taste of them. This is a book for Washington residents, people who know about life in the city now and want to read stories about what it was like back in the day—way back. It is meant to reflect the collective experience of Washington’s citizenry. Some of the stories touch on the city’s earliest days, but the emphasis is on the first decades of the twentieth century, when Washington City was quickly expanding to fill out the District of Columbia. My aim has been to cover a variety of landmarks—restaurants, theaters, hotels, office buildings and the like—that might be known or encountered in one way or another by a typical resident of the District, many of whom lived or worked downtown. These places were very well known and frequented in their day but are often forgotten now. The stories about them touch on the people who left their marks on these places, in terms of both architecture and the cultural life of the city.

The goal here is not to be comprehensive, either by location or type of landmark. Each of the stories is intended to be in-depth enough to give the reader a sense of intimacy with the subject and yet still remain brief and easily accessible. The stories are arranged by neighborhood so as to allow readers to keep their geographic bearings, but there isn’t room here to do full justice to any of these neighborhoods, and many, regretfully, are not covered at all. The stories I’ve chosen all seemed to me to represent some pivotal aspect of Washington life, and I hope they speak to you as they have to me.

This book would not have been possible without the assistance and encouragement of many people. The first place I always turn to for research assistance is the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library, located at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown. The staff there are always helpful and welcoming and have facilitated many exciting discoveries. I am particularly grateful to Jerry McCoy, who serves as Special Collections librarian there and has encouraged and assisted me from the first days when I began my blog on D.C. history.

Rebecca Miller, executive director, and Amanda McDonald, administrative manager, of the D.C. Preservation League, were also very generous in opening up their archives and providing assistance, as did Kim Williams, National Register coordinator, and Bruce Yarnall, operations and grants manager, of the D.C. Historic Preservation Office. I also received helpful assistance from J. Theodore Anderson, director of the National Presbyterian Church Library and Archives; Diana Kohn, president of Historic Takoma, Inc.; and from the Library of Congress. Hannah Cassilly and the staff of The History Press ensured that the book’s production would be first-rate.

I would especially like to thank James M. Goode for his thoughtful mentorship in exploring Washington’s architectural history, as well as his helpful suggestions for this book. Matthew Gilmore, who suggested that I undertake the book, deserves much credit for the beautiful map of historic sites. Frances White also went out of her way to give me sage advice and lots of much appreciated assistance. Lastly, and by far most importantly, I could never have undertaken this project without the unstinting support and enthusiastic encouragement of Susan Decker, to whom I dedicate this book with all my love.

Part I

GLIMPSES OF CAPITOL HILL

The Capitol Hill neighborhood held great promise when the new city of Washington was being developed in the 1790s. The area between the Capitol and the Anacostia waterfront was expected to be a prime location for development, and it was the focus of much attention. George Washington, a great landowner and speculator, decided to make a modest investment there, and many others did as well. However, it soon became clear that the city’s downtown was going to be to the west, between the Capitol and the White House, rather than to the east. Capitol Hill instead developed as a largely residential enclave with an early emphasis on housing for workers at the Navy Yard. The presence of the military has always had a strong influence on the character of the Hill, and its impact was seen most vividly during the Civil War, when the area was flooded with wounded who were cared for at Providence Hospital and other makeshift facilities.

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S TOWNHOUSES

George Washington had an abiding interest in real estate and was intimately involved in the development of the new capital city in the 1790s. The city had been slow to develop in its first decade, and in 1798, prominent local landholders, including Thomas Law, convinced Washington to invest directly in city property by purchasing a pair of lots close to the Capitol grounds on North Capitol Street. A pair of substantial townhouses at this location would be excellent investments, it was argued, as they could be rented out to congressmen who would be moving to Washington with the federal government in 1800. Washington commissioned his good friend Dr. William Thornton—architect of the Capitol—to oversee construction of these townhouses. To perform the work, he hired George Blagden, superintendent of the masons working on the Capitol building. In one of many letters to Thornton, Washington described the start of the project, at which point he already was thinking of design enhancements:

Enclosed is a check on the Bank of Alexa for five hundred dollars, to enable Mr Blagden by your draught, to proceed in laying in materials for carrying on my buildings in the Federal City.

I saw a building in Philadelphia of about the same dimensions in front and elevation that are to be given to my two houses—which pleased me.—It consisted also of two houses united, Doors in the Center, a Pediment in the Roof and dormer windows on each side of it in front, Sky lights in the rear.—

If this is not incongruous with the Rules of Architecture, I should be glad to have my two houses executed in this style.—

Let me request the favor of you to know of Mr Blagden what the additional cost will be.¹

In a later letter, he described the houses more fully:

Although my house, or houses (for they may be one or two as occasion requires) are I believe, upon a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol, yet they fall short of your wishes…The house are three flush stories of Brick, besides Garret rooms;—and in the judgement of those better acquainted in these matters than I am, capable of accommodating between twenty and thirty boarders.—The buildings are not costly, but elegantly plain and the whole cost, at pretty near guess, may be between 15 and 16 thousand dollars.²

Once work began on the houses in December 1798, Washington took a keen interest in their construction, often inspecting progress on the work with Dr. Thornton at his side. Although the houses were unfinished at the time of Washington’s death a year later, they were finished by his nephew and heir, Supreme Court justice Bushrod Washington, who apparently had a woman named Mrs. Frost operate them as a Congressional boardinghouse, as George Washington had envisioned. Several prominent early legislators stayed there, including Speaker of the House Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina and William Crawford of Georgia.

Postcard view of George Washington’s townhouses from 1908, when they were the Hotel Burton. Author’s collection.

The next climactic event for the townhouses, as well as the city in general, was the invasion of the British in August 1814, when the Capitol, White House and other public buildings were burned to the ground in a catastrophe that was deeply humiliating for the fledgling city. In the midst of the chaos, the Washington townhouses were burned down as well, though they might not have been deliberately set alight. Anthony Pitch has suggested that the fire could have been accidental, if strong winds from the burning Capitol had carried hot embers to the houses and caught them on fire.³ On the other hand, there were reasons that the British could have been provoked into burning these structures. In the process of trying to protect official documents in advance of the invasion, Congressional clerks had stashed the records of several committees in the house commonly called General Washington’s, according to a later report.⁴ If the British knew this, it would certainly have been reason enough to torch the buildings. Whatever the cause, the houses went up in flames.

The ruins were then sold in 1817 by George C. Washington, grandnephew of the president. Peter Morte gained ownership and incorporated the remaining walls into a rebuilt house that he opened as a boardinghouse.

By about 1840 or so, the house came into the possession of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes (1798–1877), a colorful explorer and prominent figure during the Civil War. Wilkes led a famous expedition to explore parts of the Pacific from 1838 to 1841. During the Civil War, he took controversial actions—such as blockading the port of St. Georges in Bermuda and boarding a British ship there—that could have provoked the British to side with the Confederacy. Wilkes had a reputation for being arrogant and capricious, was a harsh disciplinarian at sea and may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

Civil War photo of Admiral Charles Wilkes, who may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab. Library of Congress.

At the time Wilkes owned Washington’s townhouses, the immediate neighborhood was growing into a beehive of activity. In 1848, North Capitol Street was graded, lowering it ten feet in front of the houses, and Wilkes responded by building a stone wall to protect his property. Then in 1851, the street was graded again, lowering it another fifteen feet. All of this work had been precipitated by the project beginning in 1850 to enlarge the Capitol building. Massive marble blocks, shipped into town by rail, had to be drawn down North Capitol Street to the building site, and grading of the road became a necessity to accommodate this traffic. As a result, the Wilkes house ended up perched precariously on the tuft of an artificial hill until about 1870, when Wilkes had two stories added underneath the original building to extend it to street level. At this point, the former twin three-story townhouses had evolved into a sizable, five-story building, more a full-fledged hotel than a boardinghouse, and that is what they soon became.

In about 1876, the building was acquired by Nelson J. Hillman, who operated it as a hotel called Hillman House until at least 1896. It was subsequently renamed the Kenmore Hotel, and as such it achieved its greatest notoriety. In the wee hours of May 15, 1901, what the Washington Post called the most mysterious murder that has occurred in Washington within a quarter of a century took place there.⁵ A twenty-one-year-old Census Bureau clerk, James Seymour Ayres, was shot to death in a fourth-floor room of the Kenmore. His assailant had apparently used Ayres’s own revolver against him and then left it behind at the scene of the crime. Neighbors in the hotel heard the shots, and some even heard groans and cries for help, but none ventured out of his or her room to see what had happened. A neighbor in an adjacent building looked out and saw a shadowy female figure in stocking feet silently escape from Ayres’s window, descend two flights down the fire escape and slip back into another hotel window. No clear