The Ritz it wasn’t, but for nearly fifty years the Ambassador had something no other Washington hotel could offer: an almost Olympic-size indoor swimming pool. It attracted the likes of Jack Kennedy, who sometimes swam there in his Senate days, and Florence Chadwick, who trained there for her record-breaking swims across the English Channel.
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.
IT’S AUGUST IN Washington, and the livin’ ain’t easy. Under the swelter of the noonday sun, the nation’s capital is moving in shimmering slow-mo. If you walk, you’ll wilt. The subway tunnels are steam baths. Most of the city’s taxicabs — those without air-conditioning — are hell on wheels. The smart folks have gotten out of town. Had it not been for Harry Zitelman, however, things might be even worse.
IT MAY NO LONGER be “Washington’s Finest Hotel,” but that hardly matters. Its ground floor is still home to Cartier, and after dark the glow of its cream-colored façade still lends a quiet elegance to the block of Connecticut Avenue above L Street. The Mayflower is, without question, the grande dame of the city’s grand hotels. Had it not
For 65 years the Occidental Restaurant attracted the rich, the famous, and, most of all, the powerful. Everybody who was anybody ate there, and its walls were lined with the proof: signed and framed photographs of its best-known patrons. By the 1950s more than 2,500 of them covered the walls.
Pity the poor soul who’s doing PR these days for John Coleman, the owner of Washington’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Must be something like trying to get toothpaste back in the tube. First came a front-page story in The Washington Post saying, in so many words, that Coleman’s creditors consider him a deadbeat deluxe. Then came another blast of bad ink in
This chart depicts O. Roy Chalk’s expensive — and expansive — plans for a research and development limited partnership centered around the machine-tool industry. It accompanied Chalk’s draft prospectus for DCTECH Research Center Partners, Ltd. Here’s what it means: General Partner. In the center of the chart is the general partner, DCTECH Research Centers, a wholly owned subsidiary of
UP ON MICHIGAN AVENUE, N.E., where Washington’s battered buses once rumbled into huge garages for a night of rest and rehabilitation, the machines, materiel, and manpower are quietly being readied. Inside these cavernous quarters, an impressive array of sleek state-of-the-art equipment — some of it said to be one of a kind — has been assembled, tested, and retested.
“There is as much chance of repealing the Eighteenth Amendment,” said its author, Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, “as there is for a hummingbird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail.”
Some sobering thoughts, wry toasts, and dry humor inspired by the golden anniversary of Repeal