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.
THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY The Breakup of AT&T By Steve Coll Atheneum. 400 pp. $18.95 THROUGHOUT MOST OF THIS CENTURY, it was the behemoth of American business: the largest corporation in the world, the purveyor of goods and services virtually no one could do without, and, for better or worse, a monopoly of mammoth dimensions. In its early
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
“WHEREAS THROUGH the good hand of God many well devoted persons have beene and dayly are mooved and stirred up to give and bestowe sundry guiftes legacies landes and Revennewes for the advancement of all good literature artes and Sciences in Harvard College in Cambridge . . .” So it began, in 1650, with this corporate charter.
MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN THE AD in a newspaper or magazine: “In today’s job market,” the headline says, “employers want more than the same old B.S.” In this case, though, “the same old B.S.” is a Bachelor of Science degree. It’s an attention-getter, all right — and just one salvo in a public-service media campaign being waged by the Advertising Council (the folks who brought
Under the Counter
“I don’t know where I’m going,” O. Roy Chalk once said. “I just know I’m going.” Chalk’s still going as he nears 80, this time into the off-site storage business. His latest venture, File-A-Way Storage, will utilize something he’s got plenty of: empty space.