The Gilded Age, from the 1870's until the 1910's, was a unique period in Washington’s history. The city attracted many
nouveaux riches
who were drawn by the fact that upper-class Washington society in those
days was wide open to anyone with lots of money, a circumstance not
found in other major Eastern cities. Of all the wealthy people who moved
to Washington to exert power and influence in the Gilded Age, one of
the most powerful and influential was a woman, Mary Foote Henderson (1846-1931), who turned her City Beautiful dreams into reality along upper 16th Street.
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| Mary Foote Henderson, from The Washington Times, Dec. 23, 1904. |
Born to a prominent New York family, Mary learned the social graces at
several exclusive finishing schools, became fluent in French, and
developed an abiding taste for the arts at a very young age. Her father,
Elisha Foote (1809-1883), was a prominent judge who later became
Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. Mary came to Washington at the
invitation of her uncle, a Connecticut senator, who introduced her to
Washington's important single men, including the distinguished Senator John Brooks Henderson
(1826-1913) of Missouri, who was 20 years her senior. Henderson was
famous for having co-sponsored the 13th Amendment to the Constitution
banning slavery. In the spring of 1868, he and six other Republican
senators defied their party as well as public sentiment by voting
against conviction of Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial. Mary
Foote was in the gallery looking on as he cast his momentous vote, which
effectively doomed him to a single term in the Senate. Once the drama
of the impeachment was over, in June 1868 John and Mary were married. It
was said that the whole Senate attended the wedding.
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| John Brooks Henderson (Source: Library of Congress) |
When Henderson's Senate term expired the following year, the couple
moved back to Missouri, where Henderson made much of his fortune from
local Missouri bonds which he bought cheaply and then redeemed at full
value, benefiting from a favorable court ruling. Meanwhile Mary built up
her social credentials, founding the St. Louis School of Design and
becoming known as an excellent hostess. She was the author of
Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving in 1877 and
Diet for the Sick, A Treatise on the Values of Foods in 1885.
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| Boundary Castle. Source: D.C. Public Library Commons on Flickr. |
A turning point came when the Hendersons decided to move back to
Washington in 1887. They purchased several house lots along 16th Street
on a steep hill just north of Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue), an
area just beyond the original limits of Washington City that was still
semi-rural in those days. The Hendersons began constructing a massive
mansion of Seneca sandstone on top of their hill. The house, designed by
Massachusetts architect Eugene C. Gardner (1836-1915), was in the
fashionable Romanesque Revival style and was supposedly modeled after a
castle Mrs. Henderson had seen in the Rhine country. Boundary Castle, as
they called it, was a sprawling brownstone pile very much in keeping
with the wistful, Romantic aesthetics of the late Victorian age.
Completed in 1888, the castle's sprawl was extended to the west with a
huge service wing, designed by Washington architect T. Franklin
Schneider, in 1892. The new wing featured crenelated battlements that
made it look very castle-like. The main house didn't originally have
such battlements, but in 1902 it was remodeled to add them in,
completing the structure's medieval-fantasy appearance.
The Hendersons' first formal dinner, held in February 1890, drew a rave review from
The Washington Post,
which marveled at Mrs. Henderson's elegant attire—her Felix gown of old
rose velvet trimmed in gold—as well as the lavish furnishings of her
castle: the "mellow" Moorish entrance hall, plush-lined picture gallery
used as a ballroom, and grand oak-paneled dining room hung with oak-leaf
embroidered tapestries. An invitation to dine with the Hendersons
immediately became a highly sought-after status symbol.
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| The dining room (Source: The Washington Times, March 13, 1904). |
Ensconced in her intimidating palace, Mary Henderson proceeded to exert
her influence on the character of her immediate neighborhood as well as
on Washington society at large. There had been talk by 1898 of the need
to expand the White House to meet the needs of the contemporary
presidency. Late that year, Mary began promoting on Capitol Hill an
alternate plan for a grand new Executive Mansion to be built on the
crest of Meridian Hill (i.e., directly across the street from her
house). Collaborating with architect Paul J. Pelz (1841-1918), one of
the designers of the Library of Congress, Henderson envisioned a massive
temple-like complex with sprawling terraces and columned arcades that
The New York Times
called a “pretentious structure.” The proposal was politely tabled. Two
years later, Henderson made another attempt, this time based on a
proposal by Franklin W. Smith
(1826-1911). Smith's Executive Mansion was similar to Pelz's but
instead straddled 16th Street, which passed through it under an enormous
arch. It too was set aside.
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| Postcard view of Boundary Castle, circa 1908. |
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| The same view today (Photo by the author). |
Undaunted by these defeats, Henderson began re-making the
rough-and-ready Meridian Hill neighborhood into a grand European-style
enclave of exotic
chateaux. The Hendersons bought up properties
all along 16th Street and began erecting lavish palaces to be rented or
sold to high government officials and diplomats. The first were along
the west side of 16th in the blocks north of Boundary Castle, including
the Venetian-style "Pink Palace" (1906) at the corner of 16th and
Euclid, which was rented to Oscar Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt's
Secretary of Commerce and Labor as well as a new Embassy of France
(1907), just south of the intersection with Kalorama Road, done in a
supremely Parisian-looking Beaux-Arts style. Several additional large
residences were constructed over the next few years in the same block as
the Pink Palace. These imposing palaces would be occupied by the
Danish, Swedish and Polish embassies. In Henderson's eclectic vein, each
of these would be designed in a different architectural style and lined
up neatly in a row, like postage stamps in an album.
These houses, as well as more to come in the future along 15th Street,
were all designed by Mary Henderson's favorite architect, George Oakley Totten, Jr.
(1866-1939), who had handled the renovations to Boundary Castle in
1902. Totten was a prolific Washington architect who also designed a
number of lavish diplomatic residences in other parts of the city. In
1915, he built his own Arts-and-Crafts-style house on the east side of
16th Street in the block above Euclid Street.
Neighborhood real estate development was not Mrs. Henderson's only
interest by any means. She also became an impassioned evangelist of
healthy living. Writing in her 1904 book,
The Aristocracy of Health,
she rhapsodized almost maniacally about her vision of the human body
reaching an ideal state “when blood-corpuscles are no longer
disintegrated, spiculated, and pale, but round, red, and rich
laden;…when the body-machine is no longer oppressed with the clinkers of
surplus material; when reserve forces are no longer wasted or
dissipated by avoidable devitalizing expenditures...” This bizarre
vision stood in contrast to what she saw as the deplorable contemporary
state of humankind: “The violation of hygienic laws has been so general
and long-prevailing that human degeneracy has come to be accepted as the
appointed lot of humanity. Human life is but an apology, a makeshift, a
compromise…”
By the time her screed on healthy living was published, Mrs. Henderson
was famous for her elegant dinners featuring strictly vegetarian cuisine
and no alcohol. A 1905 fete included a fruit soup, mock salmon in
hollandaise sauce, broiled slices of pine-nut Protose (Protose was a
meat substitute made of peanut butter, wheat gluten, and corn starch,
among other things), unfermented Catawba wine, iced fruit, and Kellogg
Gelatine for dessert. As reported in the
Post, the printed menu
cards for this dinner included "figures corresponding to each item on
the bill of fare, showing the number, kind, and proportion of the food
units, or 'calories,' contained in each dish." Like all meals prepared
by Mrs. Henderson's accomplished English chef, it was said that the
uninitiated couldn't tell that they weren't eating meat or fish.
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| Boundary Castle seen from the north, circa 1921 (Source: Library of Congress). |
In May 1906, Mary famously decided to dispose of the plentiful and
expensive stocks of fine wine that Mr. Henderson had accumulated over
the years in the cellar of Boundary Castle. Her butler was a member of
the Independent Order of Rechabites, a Christian temperance society, and
he had asked for the use of the castle grounds for an assembly of his
group. With Mrs. Henderson's acquiescence, members of the butler's
"tent" brought armfuls of wine bottles up from the castle's cellars and
smashed them on a large rock in the front lawn. There was so much wine
that it ran down into the gutters of 16th Street. The newspapers loved
the story. With racial insensitivity typical of the day,
The New York Times reported:
Along the gutter down the hill Negroes gathered, and with tomato cans
and other utensils scooped up what they could of the liquor and drank
it. As they enjoyed themselves they sang old-time plantation melodies,
while the Rechabites within the courtyard sang stirring temperance
hymns....
Soon, however, there would be many fewer African-Americans in the
neighborhood to benefit from Mary Henderson's accidental largesse. After
many years of persistent lobbying, Mary succeeded in 1910 in getting
Congress to authorize the purchase of land for construction of Meridian
Hill Park across 16th Street from Boundary Castle where she had
previously hoped a new Executive Mansion would be built. She argued that
the stunning views from this site as well as the opportunity for
elegant terracing and cascades made the spot ideal for a formal park. As
Congress and city officials were won over, no one seemed to care that
the site was already densely occupied by African-Americans living in
mostly single-story frame houses. Since Civil War times,
African-Americans had settled in this area, which had been just outside
the city limits. The future park site had been subdivided in 1867, and
many of its residents owned their own homes. They were all forced to
leave. Later Mary Henderson would boast to a reporter that "we bought
out the owners of the shacks on our hill and pulled them down." Once the
land was cleared, it took many years to construct the park, one of the
most beautiful in the city. No trace remains of the previous
inhabitants.
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| Mary Foote Henderson and unidentified children. Source: Library of Congress. |
Mary Henderson fought many battles. She wanted the Lincoln Memorial
built on Meridian Hill rather than the Mall. She had a house built on
15th Street that she offered to the government as a residence for the
Vice President (predictably, it was thought too extravagant). She
thought 16th Street should be lined with busts of the Presidents and
renamed the Avenue of The Presidents (it was indeed renamed in 1913, but
only for a year before it was changed back). More successfully, she
pushed for the city's first zoning regulations, adopted in 1920, to help
control the erection in her neighborhood of large apartment houses,
such as the ones that the brash Englishman, Harry Wardman (1872-1938), was building everywhere. There seemed to be no end to her energy and aspirations.
After she died in 1931, the neighborhood began to change again. Mary
Henderson's vision of Meridian Hill as an exclusive residential enclave
began to fade. Wealthy people headed further to the west, and the spaces
in and around the elegant 16th Street houses began to fill with
apartment buildings. Boundary Castle—now known to most people as
Henderson's Castle—was rented in 1937 by a Texan named Bert L. Williams,
who reopened it as the Castle H Tennis and Swimming Club. The old
ballroom was fitted out with a stand-up bar. Mary would have been
horrified.
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| Matchcover from the Castle's club days. Author's collection. |
As early as 1935, there had been talk of tearing down the old castle,
but it hung on until January 1949, when it was finally razed. Wealthy
neighbors Eugene and Agnes Meyer had purchased the mansion in order to
get rid of the rowdy club. Being a flight of Victorian fancy, the castle
had grown distinctly out of favor by the 1940's. At the time of its
destruction, the
Post ran an editorial dismissing the castle as a
relic of the "brown decades" of the late 1800's, when everyone was
gloomy because of the Civil War (hunh?). "It is well that this
brownstone ghost is at last laid low by the hammers of the wreckers,"
the paper intoned. Not everyone agreed, however. A
Post reader,
Horace Monroe Baxter, fired back an angry letter calling the editorial a
"nauseating shock." "I would suggest to you," he continued, "in
furtherance of your love of modernistic architecture, that you make
arrangements to have the lovely
Washington Post Building...torn
down and replaced by one of those slab-sided architectural monstrosities
of soulless modernity." This, of course, is exactly what did eventually
happen to the
Post's beautiful Richardson-Romanesque building on
E Street downtown, perhaps as punishment for condoning the destruction
of Henderson's Castle.
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| The site of Boundary Castle, seen from Meridian Hill Park (Photo by the author). |
Meanwhile, by the early 1970's, Mary Henderson's elegant Meridian Hill
Park had become a staging ground for civil rights rallies and was widely
known as Malcolm X Park. It was in for hard times. Across the street, a
developer bought the empty Henderson tract and in 1976 built an enclave
of pricey townhouses called Beekman Place. He wisely left in place the
sturdy brownstone retaining wall along 16th Street that was built for
the castle, and it remains there to this day.
Source: Internet
