The Willard InterContinental Washington is a historic and expensive hotel located equidistant from the White House and the National Mall in Washington, DC. Among its facilities are numerous luxurious guest rooms, several restaurants, the famed Round Robin Bar, and voluminous function rooms. It is two blocks from the Metro Center station of the Washington Metro.

History

The hotel's site, 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, has accommodated guests since 1816, but the Willard was formally founded by Henry Willard when he bought the property in 1850. The present twelve-story structure, designed by famed hotel architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, opened in 1901. It was for many years the only hotel from which one could easily visit all of downtown Washington, and has consequently hosted innumerable dignitaries in its history.

The Willard family sold its share of the hotel in 1946, and due to mismanagement the hotel closed in 1968. A lengthy legal battle ensued, at the end of which the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation purchased the property with its partners the Oliver Carr Company and InterContinental Hotels & Resorts . Together they renovated and expanded the facilities, and the hotel reopened on August 20, 1986. In the late 1990s the hotel once again underwent significant restoration.

Famous guests

The first group of three Japanese ambassadors to the United States stayed at the Willard with seventy-four other delegates in 1860, where they observed that their hotel room was more luxurious than the U.S. Secretary of State's house.

From February 4 to February 27, 1861, the Peace Convention met at the Willard in a last-ditch attempt to avert the Civil War. Later that year, upon hearing a Union regiment singing "John Brown's Body" as they marched beneath her window, Julia Ward Howe wrote the patriotic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune.

On February 23, 1861, amid several assassination threats, detective Allan Pinkerton smuggled Abraham Lincoln into the Willard during the weeks before his inauguration; there Lincoln lived until his inauguration on March 4, holding meetings in the lobby and carrying on business from his room.

Many United States presidents have frequented the Willard, and every president since Franklin Pierce, including George W. Bush, has either slept in or attended an event at the hotel at least once. It was the habit of Ulysses S. Grant to drink brandy and smoke a cigar while relaxing in the lobby; folklore holds that this is the origin of the term "lobbying", as Grant was often approached by those seeking favors. Plans for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations took shape when he held meetings of the League to Enforce Peace in the hotel's lobby in 1916. Calvin Coolidge lived at the hotel for a month in 1923 while Warren G. Harding's widow vacated the White House.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in his hotel room at the Willard in 1963 in the days before his March on Washington.

Among the Willard's many other famous guests are P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, General Tom Thumb, Samuel Morse, the Duke of Windsor, Harry Houdini, and Mae West.

External link

• Official site