Washington’s grand hotels have always been more than just places to sleep. They’ve been political backrooms, celebrity haunts, and landmarks in their own right. These posts explore the history of DC’s most storied hotels and the people who passed through their lobbies.
Walk into Hotel Lombardy and you feel a hotel from another era. Chinoiserie panels, a bar Oyster once called ‘a British manor in colonial Shanghai,’ and an attendant-operated elevator that hung on until 2011. The Foggy Bottom landmark started as apartments in 1929.
The 1918 apartment hotel at 2400 16th Street NW housed ten senators, hosted embassies, and unfurled the first Czechoslovak flag. Today it is The Envoy.
The Castle at 10 Post Office Road in Silver Spring is not a 19th-century folly. It is what a midnight furnace fire on April 24, 1922 left of the Forest Glen Trading Company, plus the granite a Pittsburgh oilman and the Seminary president bolted on top.
Three Willard brothers ran the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. The fourth, Caleb, ran a hotel just as big a block away. He just had the misfortune of calling it the Ebbitt House.
A 35-year-old architect built 164 feet of Moorish-fantasy hotel into a Dupont rowhouse block. Congress hated it so much it made a law.
From its 1914 opening to its 2023 closure, Hotel Harrington was DC’s longest-running hotel. Now KHP Capital plans to bring 436 11th St NW back to life.
The Whitelaw Hotel opened on 13th Street NW in 1919 as Washington’s first luxury hotel for Black patrons. Duke Ellington stayed there.
Before the Hay-Adams Hotel went up in 1928, the lot held the homes of John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, and the writer Henry Adams.
Take a break from the negative news and take a trip down memory lane with this cool photo of Peacock Alley in the Willard Hotel. Date unknown, but estimated to be from the 1920s.
