Word: willard
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...JOHN WILLARD Cambridge, Mass...
...Americana. In February 1861, representatives of North and South met there to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement of their differences. Later that year, after a visit to the front in Virginia where she heard Union soldiers singing John Brown's Body, Julia Ward Howe returned to the Willard and wrote out the lines of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. After the Union defeat at the first Bull Run, Willard's put on 30 extra bootblacks to scrape the red Virginia clay from the boots of returning officers. Walt Whitman watched the scene in the barroom...
Like the Plumbing. The original Willard's City Hotel was the work of two canny Vermonters, Henry and Joseph Willard. In 1850 Washington was a rough, provincial town of muddy streets and boarding houses. Henry Willard took over a row of small houses at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Within a decade, he made his hostelry the city's social and political clubhouse -partly because there was nothing better, partly because of the Lucullan table he set. At an 1859 banquet for the departing British ambassador, Willard's offered up pheasants, venison, prairie hens, Virginia hams, lobsters...
...turn of the century, Joseph Willard's son had the old five-story building torn down and replaced with a twelve-floor, 450-room French Second Empire structure. With its gilt and marble fixtures, the new Willard was a more refined version of the old. When Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice would light up a cigarette in the main dining room, waiters would hurriedly put a screen around her table...
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, now 84, fondly recalls the Willard's cotillions. But over the years the tradition, like the plumbing, began to corrode. Newer and better hotels opened. The automobile made it unnecessary to be a five-minute walk from the offices of power. The riots that flared last spring in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination and the disruptions caused by the Poor People's Campaign virtually emptied the Willard of tourists. Last week the management, having lost $1,250,000 since 1965 and unable to meet its bills, abruptly shut down what Sandburg...