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Wardman's World
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Wardman's career took off like a rocket because of the deep housing shortages after the Civil War and World War I. The son of English textile workers, Wardman was only 17 when he came to New York alone. He moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a floorwalker in a department store. After arriving in Washington in 1893, he worked as a skilled carpenter, specializing in staircases.
By 1925, he had worked his way up to being one of the District's most successful developers. He claimed he housed 10 percent of the District's population, and by the beginning of the Depression he had amassed a fortune of $30 million, historian James M. Goode said.
Wardman "bought and sold land at a furious pace, sometimes keeping property for only a day but always selling at a profit," say the exhibit materials. "According to the 'Real Estate Market' report of The Washington Post, Wardman's transactions for the week of June 11, 1905, totaled $300,000." That's about $6.2 million in today's dollars.
But Wardman lost most of his fortune when the crash came in 1929. He was able to keep building on a smaller scale afterward because he had put some of his land in his wife's name and because his reputation kept him alive in the business community, writes Goode in "Best Addresses," a history of D.C. apartment buildings. He "was on the way to making a complete financial recovery when he died of cancer in 1938," Goode writes.
The value of the Wardman name, though, has continued through the years, say the curators and local real estate agents.
"I can't say that his name adds a particular dollar amount, but it does add a certain amount of panache," says Brooke DeCamp Myers, broker-owner of City Houses in Dupont Circle. "The name Wardman has always denoted a certain type of architecture and a certain level of detail on the interior."
The big problem now, some real estate agents say, is that some homeowners may try to sell properties as Wardmans when they really aren't.
"Sometimes an owner says they were told by a previous owner that the house is a Wardman. We try to track it down." And if it isn't? "Sometimes, you just have to say 'I'm sorry, but it isn't,' " Myers said.
