EMBASSY ROW: THEN AND NOW

By Deryl Davis

Visitors to Washington, DC, cannot help but be struck by the beauty and grandeur of the Capitol, the White House and the city’s great monuments. But beyond these national symbols stand others that remind us of the world outside our borders. These are the 180+ foreign chanceries and residences that have collectively come to be known as “Embassy Row,” centered on the segment of Massachusetts Avenue that runs northwest from Dupont Circle to just beyond the US Naval Observatory.

When President John Adams and his wife, Abigail, arrived in Washington in November 1800, they found a small city still under construction, with few amenities and streets primarily composed of mud. Britain’s minister (as ambassadors were then known), had already departed, judging the new capital unsuitable. Of the other three countries with representation in the young country, only Spain had a minister in Washington. His French and Dutch colleagues came later, loathe to leave better quarters in Philadelphia and New York. As Hope Ridings Miller observes in Embassy Row: The Life and Times of Diplomatic Washington, foreign diplomats in the early 19th century regarded Washington as a “hardship post” where housing, food and entertainment were inadequate and the summers insufferable. “In general,” Miller writes, “’civilized’ living according to European standards was nonexistent.” Many foreign ministers could not wait to be called home.

Foreign diplomats have been present in Washington almost from the city’s beginning. Created out of the Residence Act of 1790 and initially designed by French architect Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, Washington did not welcome Congress or the US president for another nine years.

As the decades rolled by, however, more nations sent ministers to the US capital, recognizing the young republic’s growing power and influence. Still, many diplomats considered Washington a provincial and unprepossessing place, even when the Civil War brought an influx of over 100,000 inhabitants and a boom in construction. The English writer Anthony Trollope, who visited Washington during these years, described the city as “most ungainly and most unsatisfactory,” as well as “most presumptuous in its pretentions.” Whether or not Trollope spoke with the prejudicial leanings of a former colonizer, he had a particular critique of the grand boulevard that would become synonymous with Embassy Row, calling Massachusetts Avenue “beyond the fields, in an uncultivated, undrained wilderness.”

While other streets in the nation’s capital, closer to the White House or the Capitol itself, might be full when the legislature was in session, Trollope added caustically that “I do not think … Congress makes much difference to Massachusetts Avenue.”

Arguably, the first diplomatic enclave embodying the modern idea of an “Embassy Row” appeared on 16th Street NW, around Meridian Hill, in the early 1900s. This followed the country’s first formal acceptance of foreign ambassadors, rather than the lower-ranking ministers, in the 1890s. Ambassadors could meet directly with the president and were expected, in turn, to host US diplomats in their Washington homes and chanceries.

In 1889, only two foreign governments—the British and the German—owned their own chanceries or embassies. That soon changed with the establishment of formal ambassadorial relations and the vision of one powerful woman, Mary Foote Henderson, wife of Missouri Sen. John B. Henderson, who co-authored the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery.

Retiring to Washington after Henderson’s political career, the husband and wife built a large mansion of Seneca sandstone on Meridian Hill in 1888, which they called “Boundary Castle.” Looking downhill two miles to the White House, just beyond the city’s boundary line (Florida Avenue), Mary Foote Henderson envisioned first a new location for the executive mansion, and when that was rejected, an exclusive enclave for the artists, diplomats and magnates who would be her neighbors.

Partially unpaved before 1900, 16th Street was to be the anchor of this special enclave, which Henderson described as “something like the Champs Elysees … central, straight, broad and long … On the way down its seven-mile length to the portals of the White House each section of the thoroughfare will be a dream of beauty: long, impressive vistas; beautiful villas, artistic homes—not only for American citizens, but [for] diplomats.”

Between 1906 and the stock market crash of 1929, Henderson and her favorite architect, George Oakley Totten Jr., built nearly a dozen mansions on and around Meridian Hill for use as foreign embassies or diplomatic missions. Although Henderson never realized her dream of relocating the presidential mansion to a more expansive site on Meridian Hill, the area did become a hub for diplomats, artists, industrialists and ambitious socialites like herself. Embassies continued to relocate there, so that by the 1930s, the best purpose-built sites had been taken.

Foreign legations seeking to expand or to acquire their first home began to look elsewhere. For many, Massachusetts Avenue offered the perfect alternative.

By the end of the 19th century, Massachusetts Avenue north of Dupont Circle had undergone an almost magical transformation from Trollope’s “uncultivated, undrained wilderness” into a setting for the grand mansions of Gilded Age magnates. Drawn by the power and allure of the nation’s capital, these captains of industry built homes appropriate to their status as the nouveau riche. Among the first to claim a spot along “Millionaire’s Row”—as Massachusetts Avenue came to be know—was Irishman Thomas Walsh, who made his fortune in the gold and silver mines of Colorado. Walsh’s stunning beaux arts mansion at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue, just off Dupont Circle, was completed in 1903. His $835,000 dream house boasted more than 50 rooms and was reputedly the most expensive private residence ever built in Washington. Upon Walsh’s death in 1910, the elegant mansion passed to his daughter and, ultimately, to the government of Indonesia, which has used it as an embassy since 1952.

Other wealthy denizens employed Totten to design their own beaux arts mansions nearby. These include 2315 Massachusetts Avenue and 1606 23rd Street NW. Yet many of these magnates lost their fortunes in the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. No longer able to afford such lavish accommodations, they or their heirs sold their large, sumptuous residences, and they gradually became embassies.

Eventually, the moniker “Millionaire’s Row” gave way to the more familiar “Embassy Row” we know today.

Yet not all foreign governments chose to locate their emissaries in pre-existing buildings, however magnificent. In the late 1920s, the British government decided to build its own embassy compound beside the US Naval Observatory. Completed in 1931 to a stately country house design by British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, the residence and original chancery formed the first purposebuilt diplomatic compound on the new Embassy Row. In late 1931, Norway and Japan followed suit, and by the early 1960s, dozens of embassies—many strikingly resonant of distinct national identities and cultures—had sprouted along Massachusetts Avenue and its environs. The rapid expansion of chanceries and embassies from 16th Street to Massachusetts Avenue and beyond was not without its consequences. Affordable space was scarce, and concerns arose over the location of multiple foreign missions within quiet residential neighborhoods. In the late 1960s, the State Department responded by creating the city’s first dedicated diplomatic enclave: the 47-acre International Chancery Center (ICC) in northwest Washington. Today, the ICC is home to 16 diplomatic missions including the nearly 40,000-sq-foot Chinese Embassy, designed by renowned architect I. M. Pei.

Yet within half a century, Washington would again face a scarcity of space for the growing foreign diplomatic corps. A possible solution arose in 2011, when the 113-acre Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Georgia Avenue closed, and the State Department acquired 32 acres of that site for use as a future diplomatic enclave. Known as the Foreign Missions Center, it will eventually host up to 15 embassies and as many as 2,000 staffers, though at press time, the Embassy of Libya is the only active diplomatic mission on site. 