Mayflower Hotel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about the hotel in Washington, DC. There are other historic hotels by the name of Mayflower, including the Mayflower Hotel on the Park in New York City (closed and demolished in 2004), the Mayflower Hotel in Beirut, and the Mayflower Park Hotel in Seattle.
The Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, known locally as simply The Mayflower, is a historic hotel in downtown Washington, DC located on Connecticut Avenue NW, two blocks north of Farragut Square (one block north of the Farragut North Metro station). It is the largest luxury hotel in the U.S. capital and a rival of the nearby Willard InterContinental and Hay-Adams Hotels.
The Mayflower was built by Allen E. Walker, the land developer behind Brookland and other residential neighborhoods of Washington. Nicknamed the "Grande Dame of Washington" at its opening in 1925, the hotel was said to contain more gold trim than any other building except the Library of Congress. An extensive renovation completed in 1998 uncovered decorative effects, including a skylight, which had been covered up to mask the hotel's opulence during the Great Depression.
Shortly after opening, the Mayflower hosted a ball for the presidential inauguration of Calvin Coolidge. Although Coolidge himself never arrived, the hotel has sponsored a ball every Inauguration Day since. Franklin D. Roosevelt worked on his famous "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" inaugural address while a guest. His successor Harry S. Truman resided there for the first 90 days of his presidential term while the White House was undergoing renovations, and declared his intention to run for the presidency in 1948 at a dinner there. The Mayflower's lounge, Town & Country, has long been a social center for Washington's elite. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was said to lunch there daily for over twenty years.
