Great Moments in Washington Business: ‘Wardman Row’
THE SEVEN APARTMENT BUILDINGS along the 1400 block of R Street, N.W., are 75 years old now, but for those in the know, they’re still good for a laugh or two. Beginning at 1416 R Street and heading westward to 1440, the four-story brick buildings are named Walton, Arden, Ripley, Dudley, Marcella, Ashton, and Newlon.
Local architectural historians have jokingly dubbed them Washington’s first “vanity-plate” apartment buildings, because their first letters form the last name of the developer who built them in 1911 and 1912. Harry Wardman obviously planned it that way, but it wasn’t until recently that his ingenious play on names was rediscovered.
Today what has come to be known as “Wardman Row” is a bona fide historic-landmark, designated by the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board as “an important and perhaps unique example of Harry Wardman’s housing for the middle class.”
And so it should be. It isn’t too much of an exaggeration, after all, to say that Harry Wardman built Washington. For much of this century as many as one in 10 Washingtonians lived under a Wardman roof. For more than a decade he put up houses at the rate of better than one a day; in all, the Wardman organization constructed more than 5,000 homes (including many homes in Woodley Park), 250 apartment houses (including the Dresden, the Brighton, and the Northumberland), and scores of office and commercial buildings (including the Carlton and Hay-Adams hotels).
In 1924 Wardman appeared before a congressional committee to explain why he had been so successful in offering affordable housing to families of modest means. “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 Wardman 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.”
Soon after the crash of the stock market in 1929, however, Wardman’s $30 million real estate empire was on the brink of collapse. He had overextended his financial reach by building too much too quickly, and on the evening of August 25, 1930, he surrendered all rights to the properties he had assembled over more than 25 years of hard work.
Most of Wardman’s Washington still lives. And while he was the first to build vanity-plate apartment buildings, he wasn’t the last.
A series of seven apartment buildings along the 1400 block of Spring Road, N.W. — Cromwell, Aberdeen, Fernbrook, Rosedale, Isleworth, Traymore, and Zellwood — prove that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They were built in 1922 by Washington developer Morris Cafritz, Wardman’s chief rival.
This article originally appeared in the July 1987 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan