When guests visit Eileen Ritter’s condo, she ushers them into the imperial Chinese envoy’s bedroom and sitting room. Of course, Wu Ting-fang, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary from the Qing dynasty, vacated the premises back in 1909, when he retired from a distinguished diplomatic career. And the Qing dynasty itself collapsed in 1912, ending China’s 2,000-year history of imperial rule.
Wu’s diplomatic residence in Adams Morgan, however, designed at the turn of the 20th century by noted architect Waddy Wood, still stands, and the 13 condo owners who live in the Tudor Revival building are pleased to remember its history with a thick brass plaque by the front door and architectural drawings that hang in the wide, handsome lobby.
Ritter’s husband, Michael Mooney, has a humorous take on living in such a storied building: “We definitely miss the staff, but otherwise it’s charming.”
Embassy buildings — whether ambassadorial residences or chanceries (offices) — change hands with surprising frequency, sometimes being sold to other countries. The Qing legation building, on 19th Street NW near the Washington Hilton, is among the many that have been converted for private use. The former Brazilian legation owned an 1885 Queen Anne Victorian near Dupont Circle that is now a private dwelling. The residence of an early-20th-century Persian envoy is now corporate apartments in Dupont Circle. The Kalorama chancery of the Central African Republic was purchased for $1.1 million in May by a Northwest Washington couple who will make it their home. And the former Italian embassy and chancery on 16th Street NW near Meridian Hill Park should eventually become condos called the Flats at Il Palazzo.
One of the reasons diplomatic residences and chanceries lend themselves to becoming homes is, of course, that most of them were residences to begin with. Embassy Row, the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue NW from Scott Circle to Wisconsin Avenue, developed out of Millionaires’ Row, mansion after mansion built by the nation’s wealthy industrialists, who flocked to the capital between about 1890 and 1930.
Everett House, the magnificent 1914 Sheridan Circle residence of Turkey’s ambassador, was designed by the noted George Oakley Totten Jr., having been commissioned by an Ohio industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing beer and soda bottles. The Latvian Embassy, also on Sheridan Circle — and, like the Qing legation, designed by Waddy Wood — was built for Alice Pike Barney, a painter, socialite and daughter of a wealthy Cincinnati distiller. Just west of Dupont Circle, the grand-looking Indonesian Embassy was the Second Empire-style childhood home of mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, of Hope Diamond fame. Other examples, some as magnificent and some quite a bit less so, are sprinkled heavily through the Kalorama and Dupont Circle areas and beyond.
Dozens of these mansions remain, and on Massachusetts Avenue alone, nine properties, four of them embassy buildings, are on the National Register of Historic Places.
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