Washington's A-List, Cast in Wax

Madame Tussauds to Open Museum in Downtown D.C.

The old Woodies building will house the wax museum. (By Tom Allen -- The Washington Post)

Bill and Hillary are returning to Washington this fall and will be sharing their digs with Beyonce, Duke Ellington and Brangelina.

Madame Tussauds is opening a new wax museum this October at the old Woodward & Lothrop department store that will include likenesses of presidents, celebrities and other newsmakers.

"We're coming to Washington," said Janine DiGioacchino, general manager of Madame Tussauds in New York. "Bill Clinton is back in town. Who would have thought? And with his wife, Hillary. It's literally going to be every A-lister."

The $16 million project, now in design, is slated to include replicas of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; interactive experiences involving the history of Washington; and a replica of the Oval Office, where visitors can have their picture taken. President Abraham Lincoln is the designated "greeter," so his likeness is likely to be the first visitors see upon entering.

The admission fee is expected to be around $25 per person, DiGioacchino said. Construction is set to begin April 1; the museum will fill 27,000 square feet in the 500,000-square-foot building.

Tussauds Group operates six museums around the world, as well as theme parks, hotels and a castle in Europe. The private company was purchased for $1.5 billion in May 2005 by Dubai International Capital. Tussauds Group recently bought the London Eye, a giant observatory and popular visitor attraction in that city.

The entrance to the local museum will be at the corner of 10th and F streets NW, and the center will occupy the first and lower levels of the 10-story building. The 1927 building is a historic landmark and once housed the flagship store in the Woodies chain. The store closed around the time the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1994. Douglas Development, owned by Douglas and Norman Jemal, bought the building in the late 1990s for $28 million and added two stories during a renovation that was completed in 2004.

The building includes more than 300,000 square feet of office space and nearly 200,000 square feet for retailers such as Swedish clothing retailer H&M and Zara, a Spanish clothing chain.

Tussauds, which has museums in New York, London, Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Hong Kong and most recently Shanghai, chose Washington over Chicago.

"We pursued [Tussauds] because we felt they were the best tenant for that space," said Norman Jemal, vice president and secretary of Douglas Development. "It's not like there are a thousand Tussauds. I just can't imagine something we could have put in the lower level that would generate this amount of traffic and excitement."

It's not the first wax museum to hit Washington. The National Wax Museum for many years graced the corner of Fifth and K streets NW, according to Leo Bernstein, who owned a real estate company and the building where the museum was housed.

"We leased it to some people who had a wax museum for 10 to 15 years," Bernstein said. "The neighborhood went down a bit so they finally closed it and it moved down to Southwest, on Fourth Street near the railroad tracks."

Starting in 1975, the National Wax Museum was housed in a building that had served as a turning station for trolley cars at Fourth and E streets SW. It was three blocks from the National Mall and the Smithsonian museums and held a gift shop, cafeteria and featured performing dolphins. In 1982, the Wax Museum became a popular nightclub that hosted hundreds of major acts, including Culture Club, Tina Turner, the Eurythmics, Count Basie and the Pointer Sisters. It closed in 1984.

Staff researcher Rena Kirsch contributed to this report.