The Magnificent Raleigh Hotel

Along with the Willard, which is so similar in appearance that many people confuse the two, the Raleigh was one of the largest and grandest hotels in Washington in the first part of the twentieth century. It held a commanding position on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the Old Post Office Building and was famous as a Mecca for patrons of the performing arts. Its loss in 1964 was as devastating culturally as it was architecturally.

The site of the Raleigh had been a hostelry going back at least to 1815, when the Fountain Inn opened there. After that, a city post office was on the site. Then Azariah Fuller's Irving Hotel, a larger, four-story structure, took its place in 1848 and was later renovated as the Kirkwood House, which became famous as the hotel where Vice President Andrew Johnson was staying on the night of April 14, 1865, and where he was supposed to be assassinated by George Atzerodt. Atzerodt instead got drunk and let Johnson live on to assume the presidency.

Mr. Mullett's Bank Building: 150 Years on Pennsylvania Avenue

The intersection of 7th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., used to be the heart of Washington's commercial district, and the Central National Bank Building has presided over the comings and goings there for well over a century. The building dates to circa 1860, when it was built as a five-story Renaissance Revival hotel, one of the largest in the city at the time and the second in that block, after Brown's Marble Hotel. The hotel was originally called Seaton House and then renamed the St. Marc in 1871.  In 1887 the Central National Bank bought the building for $105,000 and commissioned architect Alfred B. Mullett to renovate it for banking purposes. The bank's officers clearly wanted a distinctive new look that would appropriately call attention to their institution. Mullett, perhaps Washington's most prominent architect at the time, responded with a striking new brownstone façade and the two distinctive towers that continue to draw attention to the building to this day.

Mullett (1834-1890) was an interesting and rather controversial figure. His architectural training seemed inauspicious. He started as an apprentice in the Cincinnati, Ohio, office of architect Isaiah Rogers and, after serving in the Union Army, came to Washington to work under Rogers in the office of the supervising architect of the Treasury Department. After Rogers left in 1865, Mullett got himself promoted as supervising architect, an enormously powerful position that essentially gave him primary control over all major federal building projects that were to occur in the post-war years. While practicing several styles, he clearly favored the grand, Second Empire vocabulary and is perhaps best known for his State, War, and Navy Building (now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, one of the most exuberant Victorian gingerbread confections to be found anywhere in the country, a building so ornately decorated you have to admire its sheer, unbridled extravagance. Mullett also designed a number of other large, ornate public buildings in cities throughout the United States.

The Franklin Square Hotel

The Franklin Square Hotel was a notable landmark on the northwest corner of 14th and K Streets, N.W. for many years. Designed by John B. Brady and completed in 1891, it took the place of a mansion that had been home to Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln and Johnson. Originally opened as the Cochran Hotel, it cost $160,000 to build. The Washington Post, a reliable booster for all major real estate developments in those days, offered this review at the time of its opening:

Towering heavenward seven stories at the northwest corner of Fourteenth and K Streets is a model modern structure constructed of Hummelstown brownstone and pressed brick, inscribed Cochran, and designed for the purposes of a first-class hotel.... Acting under the instructions of the owner, no expense was spared to make the Cochran the model hotel structure of the Capital of the nation, and while equaled by few it is surpassed by none in this country, so well has the contractor fulfilled his instructions since assuming control....