Anniversary Weekend in Washington, D.C.

Part I: A little history about the Willard Hotel

Over the long Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, Donna and I celebrated our anniversary by visiting the nation’s capital. It’s a great gift to have common interests – learning about history and art, exploring, and walking around places either familiar or strange.

 

We have stayed in D.C. for our anniversary before, and the weather is always freezing cold with a biting wind that comes off the Potomac River. Despite the conditions, each day was, as Marge Gunderson, the police investigator in the movie Fargo would say, a beautiful day.

We arrived on Saturday a little before noon and checked into the Willard Hotel, one of the great hotels in the city, and maybe of any city. Its history is rich and its location on Pennsylvania Avenue at 14^th Street, wedged next to the Treasury building, which itself sits next to the White House, is prime. Power exudes from these parts.

 

The Willard opened in the 1840s after a row of townhomes built in the 1810s was acquired and converted to a hotel by Henry and Joseph Willard, according to Wikipedia. They expanded the structure several times, vertically and horizontally, until the Willard family sold its share of the hotel in 1946. The hotel closed in 1968, the year of rioting in the city, until a group of developers took ownership and conducted a major renovation. It reopened in 1986 and is now operated by InterContinental Hotels Group. 

The hotel suffered a major fire in 1922, forcing the evacuation of Vice President Calvin Coolidge, several U.S. senators, composer John Philip Sousa, motion picture producer Adolph Zukor, newspaper publisher Harry Chandler, and others who were attending a gala.

Several presidents have stayed at the Willard, , including Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding, according to the National Park Service (the Willard is in the Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places).  Other notable guests have included Charles Dickens, Buffalo Bill Cody, and P.T. Barnum. 

Every president since Zachary Taylor has stayed overnight or attended events there. Under the threat of assassination, Abraham Lincoln was smuggled into the hotel when he came to Washington for his inauguration in 1861. He and his family stayed at the Willard for 10 days prior to his swearing-in. It was a favorite haunt of Ulysses S Grant, who is credited with coining the term “lobbyist,” for the favor-seekers who congregated in the hotel’s lobby, although that story has been discredited. Former president John Tyler led a failed final Peace Convention at the Willard to avert the Civil War.

 

The hotel, and especially its famous Round Robin bar, also has been a favorite of literary giants. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited Washin

gton in 1862, observed that “Willard’s Hotel could more justly be called the center of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department.” Walt Whitman included the Willard in his verses and Mark Twain wrote two books there in the early 1900s. Martin Luther King, Jr., finished his “I Have a Dream” speech while a guest there.

Though neither presidents, famous writers nor poo-bahs, Donna and I settled into our room and then ventured out into the cold to get lunch; We stopped at Old Ebbitt Grill, a block from the Willard. There was a wait for a table, so we found a couple stools at the end of the long beautiful bar. On the wall next to where we sat is a framed letter on Ebbitt’s letterhead written by Buffalo Bill Cody to a judge, providing his testimony about two horse thieves he had captured. Apparently, Buffalo Bill, when he wasn’t wetting his whistle at the Willard, was making himself comfortable at Ebbitt’s. Mounted on the wall directly above the framed letter was a stuffed walrus head. Perhaps Buffalo Bill shot it.

After lunch we headed to the White House. Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House is closed to vehicle traffic, and the wide pedestrian walkway is a frequent site for organized protests. When we arrived, a group of perhaps 60 Togolese were protesting, but not being lumped, as an African nation, into the category of “shithole countries,” as the current resident of the White House classified them at the start of the MLK weekend. Instead, they were protesting to raise awareness for the need for political reforms in their country.

 

Across from the White House is Lafayette Square, a large green. The square is populated by five statues – one in each corner of the square, and the largest, most prominent statue, in the middle of Lafayette Square, is, of course, of Andrew Jackson. His is the only statue to depict the subject on horseback, and surrounded by cannons. Go figure.

 

From Lafayette Square, we walked half a block to the Renwick Gallery to check out a curious exhibit of dioramas of murder scenes created by Frances Glessner Lee in the first half of the twentieth century. Originally created to train homicide detectives, the dollhouse-like creations are remarkably detailed. It would have been interesting to really spend some time exploring them, but there were enough people in the small exhibit room to make a sardine feel claustrophobic. We got out of there after a few minutes and wandered back to the White House.

 

We found a lively group of Iranian protesters demanding the U.S. to not interfere with their government. From there we returned to the Willard and had a drink in the Round Robin, and became acquainted with its beautiful round mahogany and marble bar and slightly curmudgeonly bartender.

Next up: Chapter II - Restaurants! Politicians! Museums!