Marriott Wardman Park

The Washington Marriott Wardman Park was a hotel on Connecticut Avenue adjacent to the Woodley Park station of the Washington Metro in the Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The hotel had 1,152 rooms, of event space, and of exhibit space. It opened in 1918 and closed in 2020. The owner filed for bankruptcy in 2021 and the property was sold to Carmel Partners for $152.2 million, with plans for redevelopment. The Wardman Tower wing was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 31, 1984. The original hotel on the site was built between 1917 and 1918 by local developer Harry Wardman and was designed by local architect Frank Russell White. It was an eight-story, red brick structure modeled on The Homestead resort in Virginia. The hotel was the largest in the city, with 1,200 rooms and 625 baths. It was nicknamed Wardman's Folly, due to its location far outside the developed area of Washington at the time. The hotel opened as the Wardman Park Inn on November 23, 1918, just days after the 1918 Armistice ended World War I. No elaborate opening festivities were held, since public gatherings were illegal during the Spanish flu pandemic. The hotel was hugely successful due to the housing shortage caused by the growth of Washington, D.C. during World War I. Within a year of its opening, the property was renamed the Wardman Park Hotel. It attracted prominent guests and tenants; foreign ambassadors, members of Congress, and Vice President Marshall took up residence. In 1928, the hotel added an eight-story, 350-room residential-hotel annex designed by architect Mihran Mesrobian. That building, now converted into condominiums, is the only surviving portion of the original Wardman Park, known as the Wardman Tower, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wardman was forced to sell the hotel in 1931 due to the Great Depression, and the hotel was acquired by Washington Properties. Before the United States entered World War II, a British spy named Cynthia operated out of the premises as she spied on the Vichy French Embassy.