Willard Hotel
The Willard Hotel (also: Willard InterContinental Washington ) is a luxury hotel in Washington, DC It is adjacent to the White House at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW .
history
The now twelve-storey building in the Beaux-Arts style was designed by the architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh and opened in 1901. It was hailed as the city's first skyscraper . Previous buildings, which had served as a hotel since 1818, had been sold and rebuilt several times. In 1847 Henry A. and Edwin Willard initially rented the property and founded the Willard Hotel in it, in 1853 the brothers Henry and Joseph Clapp Willard (father of the politician Joseph Edward Willard ) acquired the building. Their descendants ran the hotel until it was sold in 1946; in the meantime T. Coleman du Pont was also involved. In 1968 the hotel was stopped by the owners at the time, and the building became dilapidated. After the InterContinental Hotels Group bought into a new owner holding company and started the renovation as a future operator (costs USD 73 million), the hotel was able to reopen in 1986.
Guests
In the Willard Hotel or in its predecessors many stayed US presidents : James Buchanan , Calvin Coolidge (1923), Millard Fillmore , Ulysses S. Grant (1873), Warren G. Harding , Abraham Lincoln (1853/1861), Franklin Pierce ( 1853), William Howard Taft , Zachary Taylor and Woodrow Wilson . The inaugurations for the presidencies of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton were held here.
Many other celebrities were guests, including PT Barnum , Buffalo Bill , Charles Dickens (1842), Emily Dickinson , David Lloyd George , Harry Houdini , Gypsy Rose Lee , Jenny Lind (1851), Samuel Morse (1890), Joe Paterno and Gloria Swanson . In 1859 the leading politicians of the North celebrated here - like the South at a farewell ball for Lord Francis Napier (1819–1898) for the last time before the outbreak of the Civil War . During the war, the hotel then served as the headquarters of the Union Army . Nathaniel Hawthorne , who was writing for The Atlantic magazine at the time , noted:
"This hotel, in fact, may be much more justly called the center of Washington and the Union than either the Capitol, the White House or the State Department."
"In fact, the hotel is much more likely to be called the [political] center of Washington and the Union than the Capitol , the White House, or the State Department ."
Walt Whitman mentioned the hotel in a poem. Julia Ward Howe wrote the text for “ The Battle Hymn of the Republic ” in the Willard in November 1861. Mark Twain is said to have written two of his works (including 1848) in the Willard. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his " I Have a Dream " speech here in 1963 . Steven Spielberg filmed in various rooms of the hotel in summer 2001 for the film Minority Report ; some scenes from The Return of the First Avenger (2014) were also shot here.
Web links
- National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places
- History of the hotel
- Lynette Clemetson, Finding US history in a Washington hotel , The New York Times, January 4, 2006
Individual evidence
- ^ The Willard Hotel in the 19th Century , The streets of Washington
- ↑ Lynette Clemetson, Finding US history in a Washington hotel , The New York Times, January 4, 2006
- ↑ The worldwide guide to movie locations
Coordinates: 38 ° 53 '47.2 " N , 77 ° 1' 56.5" W.