Who'd Want to Live There?

Abdo has expanded his closely held private company from three people with $887,000 a year in sales to one that employs 55 and expects more than $200 million in sales by next year. He made millions of dollars around Logan Circle, seeing coffee shops in the place of crack houses two or three years before most anyone else did. That caught the mayor's attention.

Today, Abdo and Williams smoke cigars together on Abdo's patio. Abdo tried to get the mayor into fly-fishing, taking him shopping at Orvis with the mayor's security detail in tow. The mayor, who, Abdo says, has a thing for kitchen gadgets, once persuaded Abdo to buy a set of glass bowls at Williams Sonoma. Williams goes to Abdo's weekend farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia where he rides an air-conditioned tractor, cutting grass.

Abdo and his wife, Mai, 3-year-old daughter Sophie and 21-month-old son Griffin live in a three-story brick house off Massachusetts Avenue NW that was once the home of the former ambassador from Ghana. It is assessed at $4.2 million. Vernon Jordan lives across the street. Torched bluestone lines the pool out back. A 1939 Steinway sits in the living room. The kitchen has a Viking stove, two Viking dishwashers and a double Viking refrigerator. Inside, Abdo lines up plastic containers of crab meat the way other people might stack yogurt.

"We're minimalists," Abdo said jokingly as he served grilled steaks, vegetables and peach pie with vanilla ice cream on a recent evening in his perfectly manicured back yard.

'7-Year-Old Capitalist'

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Jim Abdo seemingly picked a terrible time to come to Washington to develop real estate. In 1992, the District had just chalked up 443 killings, helping it maintain a reputation as the nation's murder capital. Two years earlier, Marion Barry had been caught on tape smoking crack.

But Abdo had a few things going for him, the first being a thirst for money. The third child of a Palestinian immigrant who worked as a tool designer and a mother who taught English and social studies before staying home to raise four children, Abdo grew up in Kent, Ohio. As a 7-year-old he saw the homeowners on his paper route as prospects for a variety of services. Snow "meant dollar signs to me," Abdo said.

Abdo put himself through the College of Wooster, studying sociology, and graduated in 1982. He followed a girlfriend to Hilton Head, S.C., where he opened a pizza parlor with a $10,000 loan that his father co-signed. For 3 1/2 months, he said, he slept on a cot in the back supply room, but in four years he had five restaurants.

By 1992, he was tiring of the restaurants, sold some of them and moved to Washington with $350,000 to start a new chapter in his life.

"I'm Jim Abdo, the little 7-year-old capitalist who has to make money," he said.

He began slowly, buying a rowhouse in Georgetown, helping a contractor restore it, and selling it. Next, he bought a trashed house in Dupont Circle and turned it into condos.

At the time, most developers wouldn't go east of 16th Street. To Abdo, the Victorian houses and rowhouses in and around Logan Circle, a gathering spot for prostitutes and drug dealers, seemed like a gold mine.

His strategy was to gut the houses, save historic elements. and put in high-ceilinged condos, apartments and lofts. He installed Sub-Zero refrigerators and Wolf stoves, bathroom fixtures from the Georgetown store Waterworks, and honed limestone from Italy. That lured buyers, which lured retailers, which lured more buyers.