The First Tycoon
AS HE FACED CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS in an eleventh-hour attempt to salvage his reputation, if not his fortune, Harry Wardman swayed nervously in the witness chair.
Even at 62, though slightly florid, the one-time kingpin of the Washington real-estate business had not lost the vitality and vigor that had compelled him so often to work 20-hour days. He had come down to Capitol Hill to set the record — or at least his end of it — straight, before a congressional panel with the imposing title of House Select Committee on Investigation of Real Estate Bondholders’ Reorganizations. As he fidgeted with a Panama hat balanced on one knee, Wardman recounted his version of how “gangsters, gunmen, and three-shell men” had pulled the rug out from under the real-estate empire he had built in the nation’s capital.
Five years earlier, on the evening of August 25, 1930, Wardman had been in New York City to sign some financial papers. He did not then realize, he told the committee, that he was surrendering all rights to control the vast array of properties he had assembled over more than 25 years of hard work — a business at one time valued in excess of $30 million. Wardman had redesigned the residential and commercial landscape of Washington, but he was left entirely out of the picture he had helped create by a single, apparently unwitting, stroke of the pen.
IT IS NOT TOO MUCH OF AN EXAGGERATION to say that Harry Wardman built Washington. He rode the crest of Coolidge Prosperity to fashion a fortune in the Washington building boom of the 1920s, but lost virtually all of it with the crash of the stock market in 1929. His was a household name in Washington 50 years ago, and his influence on the construction industry extended far beyond the nation’s capital. But today the legacy of Harry Wardman is largely forgotten, even among those who now live in the homes and apartment buildings he constructed.
“Wardman was Washington first major developer, and I don’t think anyone ever equaled him either in the scope of his building or in quality,” says architectural historian James Goode, curator of the Smithsonian Building and author of Capital Losses. “He brought the city out of the Victorian period, and changed the face Washington.”
For much of this century, as many as one in 10 Washingtonians lived under a Wardman roof. Two of his hotels — the Carlton (now the Sheraton-Carlton) and the Hay-Adams — still rank among the city’s foremost examples of rococo elegance. Some of Wardman’s apartment buildings, like the Dresden and the Northumberland, remain stately testaments to the grandeur of an earlier era in Washington. And Wardman’s stamp is indelibly impressed on subdivisions like Woodley Park and English Village, which still attract city dwellers oblivious to the history of the man who built them.
Wardman, a native of England, had come to America in 1889 at the age of 17. As the only son of Eli and Alice Wardman, owners of a dry-goods store in the textile town of Bradford, Yorkshire, he was determined not to follow in their footsteps and dreamed of an adventurous life in Australia. “I ran away from home,” Wardman recalled 35 years later, “without a word to anybody.”
But his plans were not the best laid: When Wardman arrived in London, he discovered the next boat for Australia wasn’t leaving for a month. “So I decided then and there on America,” he later said. “I spent almost all my money going to Liverpool. When I got there I found the old steamship Britannia was just pulling out for New York. I walked right on that old boat and rode free across the ocean and walked right off again, right on into New York.” (An embellished version of the stowaway story has it that Wardman simply got confused at the docks and boarded the wrong ship.) Wardman arrived with seven shillings in his pocket, and promptly landed a job at a New York department store.
From there the young Wardman went to Philadelphia, where he sold cloth at John Wanamaker’s and peddled pay-by-the-week industrial insurance on the side. By chance, he met for the first time Mary Hudson, a Bradford native who also had settled in Philadelphia, and the two soon were married. After several years in the dry-goods business, Wardman secured a position as timekeeper for a building contractor, and before long he had saved enough money for a kit of carpenter’s tools, mastered their use, and became an expert staircase builder.
Contemporary accounts differ, but sometime around the turn of the century the couple moved to Washington, settling in the modest Brookland neighborhood in Northeast near the Franciscan Monastery. Wardman went to work immediately as a carpenter, and one of his first jobs was helping to lay the floors of the Willard Hotel. He rode back and forth from his jobs on a bicycle, with his tools strapped to the handlebars. His reputation as an energetic and capable carpenter spread quickly, but even though Wardman had no trouble finding work, he wanted to be on his own.
Wardman heard that a local tailor, Henry Burglin, was planning to build a home, and he secured his first contracting job by submitting the low bid for construction of the house. Burglin was suitably impressed with Wardman’s handiwork and speed, and offered to help the young builder in obtaining financial backing. Joining forces with another Englishman, Wardman then built a modest row of frame houses at Ninth and Longfellow Streets, N.W., and moved into one of them, a practice he was to follow throughout his early career. Even though the homes then were considered “out in the country,” they sold as quickly as they were built, and the partners each pocketed $5,000.
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY WASHINGTON WAS A CITY of boarding houses, its hodgepodge residential development corresponding to the transient nature of the capital’s population. The existing housing market could not smoothly accommodate the influx of government workers beginning to pour into the city, and Wardman’s vision was simple: to offer these new Washingtonians small, affordable homes and apartments (they were sold at cost plus 10 percent), not all that different from the ones they had left behind. The Wardman formula worked — the demand for his new properties never slackened — and he quickly followed with other rows of houses, each one longer than its predecessor. Wardman’s foresight in tapping a new market largely ignored by other builders, coupled with his indefatigable nature and drive, brought soaring profits and new investors. He began to expand his real-estate operations by developing entire subdivisions.
The first decade of the twentieth century was the zenith of the luxury-apartment era in the United States, and Wardman began to shift his attention from the highly profitable row houses for the masses to projects of a grander scale. In the four years following his second marriage, to Lillian Glascox in 1908 (his first wife had died in 1900), Wardman built a number of elegant apartments in Washington’s more fashionable neighborhoods: the Dresden, at 2126 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.; the Brighton, in Kalorama; and the Northumberland, at 2039 New Hampshire Avenue, N.W. All were designed by architect Albert H. Beers, who had moved to Washington from Bridgeport, Connecticut, some time around 1904. By the time of his death in 1911, Beers had forged a considerable reputation around the city for his skills and artistry, and Wardman employed him for many of his projects.
The Northumberland, built in 1909-10, is one of the finest remaining examples of the Wardman/Beers collaboration. Its striking lobby, considered by some architectural historians as the most distinctive in the city, is eclectic in design and decoration. The Northumberland had its own restaurant, a full staff of servants, and quarters in the basement for chaffeurs. The building had fireproof construction throughout, mail chutes, and a wall safe in each apartment. But the Northumberland brought Wardman his first crop of construction-related headaches — there was great difficulty in sinking the building’s foundation — and when it was finished Wardman swore he was “through with that kind of thing” and reportedly vowed never again to include such fine workmanship and expensive materials in his buildings.
Imagination and innovation were Wardman trademarks. The Northumberland, for example, was one of the first apartment buildings in Washington with showers. He is credited as the first builder to make refrigerators standard equipment for apartments. And while other building owners refused families with children, Wardman openly welcomed them by building adjoining playgrounds.
But in spite of Wardman’s successes, other Washington developers had not yet fully accepted his unconventional approach to their business, and when he announced plans in 1916 to build an enormous new hotel on Connecticut Avenue north of Calvert Street, his most ambitious project to date was promptly dubbed “Wardman’s Folly.” His inspiration for the huge hotel complex was The Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, where he and his wife had vacationed. With its planned 1,200 rooms, the Wardman Park Hotel was to be by far the city’s largest, and much of establishment Washington snickered at the announcement.
“They thought it was a joke,” recalls Winfield Weitzel, a veteran real-estate executive and an assistant vice president of Weaver Brothers. “They thought the Wardman Park was ‘out of town,’ and it was a huge hotel on a huge acreage. They said it would never pay for itself.”
AS HAD SO OFTEN HAPPENED BEFORE, Harry Wardman was to have the last laugh — and the hotel was only part of his grandiose development scheme. Years earlier, he had purchased a large tract of land extending from the boundaries of Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo north to Klingle Road and the grounds of the Twin Oaks Estate. Completion of a streetcar connection across the Calvert Street bridge had made the semi-rural area accessible to Washington’s business district and a perfect prospect for Wardman-style developments.
The grand new hotel might indeed have become “Wardman’s Folly” had it not been for the tremendous growth in the federal bureaucracy following World War I, which brought thousands of new government workers and yet another housing squeeze to Washington. It soon became a big money-maker, and Wardman set his sights on developing the balance of the tract. He built a huge group of apartments, the Cathedral Mansions complex, and added buildings at 2700 and 2701 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. The surrounding side streets were filled with the Wardman-built homes of Woodley Park and English Village.
Wardman was steadily adding subsidiary companies to his burgeoning empire (one was a lumber mill designed to speed up construction projects), and in 1922 he turned to Wall Street for help in financing his new ventures. The Wardman Park became the cornerstone for his financial wheeling and dealing; that year, a $2 million bond issue was floated against it by New York investment houses.
By the mid-1920s, Wardman was widely regarded, even outside the nation’s capital, as one of the foremost housing experts in the country. “[Wardman’s] spectacular accomplishments of the last quarter century stand out even in an era of wonders,” the usually reserved New York Times said in 1925. “So many are his buildings in the city of his adoption that he may properly lay claim to having dominated its architectural life during the period of its greatest growth.” No one doubted that Wardman was Washington’s most prolific builder. For a full decade, he had been putting up homes at the rate of better than one per day; in all, the Wardman organization had constructed more than 5,000 homes, 250 apartment houses, and scores of office and commercial buildings.
He returned from London to build yet more hotels in Washington: the Carlton, Roosevelt, Annapolis, and Hay-Adams. But the Carlton undeniably was Wardman’s pet project. During his travels abroad, Wardman had been impressed by such exclusive and elegant lodging places as the Berkley and Claridge’s in London and Meurice’s in Paris, and he viewed the Carlton as a place where Washington’s uppermost crust might rub elbows in comparably regal surroundings. Wardman apparently resented the fact that two of Washington’s most snobbish private clubs had denied him membership on the grounds that he was “in trade.” As Gardiner Moore recalls, “The Chevy Chase Country Club wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and he was not accepted in the Metropolitan Club.” But Wardman was a master at the game of one-upmanship, and he was doubly determined to show the Washington establishment what a “tradesman” could create.
Wardman spared no extravagance in building and furnishing the Carlton. Its architect was Mihran Mesrobian, a Turkish-born Armenian who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Istanbul before coming to Washington in 1921. Three years after his arrival, Mesrobian joined Wardman’s firm, and he designed the Carlton in Italian Renaissance style. Wardman called in a noted interior decorator with the coincidental name of Harry Wurdeman, who furnished the building with expensive silks, plush antique velvets, hand-tufted rugs, and the like. Hardware for the doors was imported from France, and tile for the bathrooms was imported from Holland.
The Carlton cost $3.3 million to build — an enormous sum in those days — and it had only 250 rooms. When it opened on October 1, 1926,a beaming Wardman took some of his wealthy friends on a tour of the new establishment. One of them, a prominent real estate colleague, said, “Harry, this place’ll never be a success; it’s too little for a hotel and too big for a bordello.”
Wardman by this time was living in the elegant style typified by so many of his construction projects. His only daughter by his second marriage was educated in England and sent to a finishing school in France; she later married Count Giovanni Naselli, the Italian-born son of Count and Countess Naselli di Savona of Rome. Wardman frequently attended horse shows and built the fashionable Saddle Club near Rock Creek Park. He was an avid baseball fan and “no mean golfer,” according to a contemporary newspaper account, playing regularly as a member of both the Columbia and Burning Tree Golf Clubs. He was known as one of the city’s leading boxing fans, always hiring private cars to transport groups of friends to the big prize fights. And Wardman loved to preside over his special round table at the Carlton, dining with his friends on grouse and oysters.
HARRY WARDMAN WAS AT THE PINNACLE OF HIS CAREER, but though he did not know it, his empire was on the verge of collapsing around him. He had overextended his financial reach by building too much too quickly, and in the bull market of 1927 his associates began negotiating with the Chicago-based investment banking firm of Halsey, Stuart & Company, Inc., on a refinancing deal for his heavily mortgaged empire. The following year, with financial difficulties mounting, management of the Wardman Park Hotel and Annex, along with nine other Washington properties, was transferred to United Realties, Inc., of Davenport, Iowa, then one of the largest hotel operators in the nation.
That year Wardman also signed the refinancing papers with Halsey, Stuart, and the firm sold some $13.5 million of bonds out of an authorized insurance of $16 million. In the ensuing year Wardman struggled to retain his holdings, but from a financial standpoint, his empire was coming apart at the seams. In the face of a fallen stock market, Wardman’s company simply was unable to meet its obligations and the bond issue went into default. In August 1930, Wardman signed over all of his holdings — with a total appraised value approaching $30 million — to the Hotels Management and Securities Corporation, an operating company set up and controlled by the investment bankers.
Wardman summoned reporters into his half-deserted offices the next morning. “I am not the only builder who has seen his fortune built in 30 years of work taken from him in this depression,” he told them. “I can quit, but I don’t want to. I still have 500 lots and I’m going to build houses.” Wardman told the assembled reporters of plans for a $4 million medical center to be built on the site of the old British Embassy (his last major project, the current British Embassy, had been completed earlier in the year).
So Wardman went back to doing what he did best: building homes by the hundreds for middle-class Washingtonians. In the middle of his efforts to engineer a real estate comeback, a special congressional committee began investigating mortgage refinancing issues, and started delving into the deals that had left Wardman only a spectator in the Washington hotel and apartment business.
When Wardman was called to testify on June 4, 1935, committee chairman Adolph J. Sabath asked him to give the panel his side of the story. “I would love to give it to you,” Wardman told Sabath, “but I don’t know it. I had nothing to do with financing until I went to sign the papers in New York. . . . I knew we were paying this big income tax and therefore I thought we must be making money. I did not understand books, which were a bore to me. To read any of those legal documents bored me — that was not my end of the business.”
Ironically, Wardman had appeared before a congressional rent committee 12 years earlier, in 1924. It was a happier time for Wardman — and for all of Washington. Americans were singing “We’re In the Money,” not “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Wardman was at the top of his profession, but he described himself in characteristically immodest terms. “Yes, I’m a junk dealer,” he told the committee. “I buy old buildings, rags of buildings, bones and bottles of discarded houses, and turn them into habitable, homelike dwellings and apartments.” Laughter echoed through the committee room when he added, “Why, I have found out there is so much money lying around loose in Washington that I can pick it up off the streets.”
The laughter was gone by the mid-1930s, but Wardman was determined not to give up. Through his D.C. Developing Company and Harry Wardman, Inc., he had completed a 900-house subdivision in the Ft. Stevens area of Georgia Avenue, north of Brightwood. By 1938, he was developing Avondale Grove, on Queens Chapel Road near Woodridge. But he was attempting to direct his real estate office from a bed in Homeopathic Hospital, which he had entered with cancer in December 1937. His office now was housed in a single room at 1512 K Street, N.W., just across the street from the five-story marble and sandstone Carlton headquarters that once had been teeming with an army of architects, salesmen, clerks, and bookkeepers. The lingering disease of the back had sapped Wardman’s strength, however, and three specialists called in by his personal physician were unable to help. He died at his Massachusetts Avenue home on March 18, 1938.
This article originally appeared in the May/June 1981 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan