The Equitable Life Insurance Company was founded in Washington in 1885. Following World War II, the industry entered an age of major expansion and significant profit as it invested life insurance funds in housing mortgages. During the 1950s, Equitable Life Insurance Company benefitted from an uptick in life insurance, and experienced success as a company, setting records in sales, gross income, assets, and stock prices. In 1956, the company purchased a tract of land on Wisconsin Avenue for a new headquarters building and hired architect Leon Chatelain Jr. (1902-1979), of Chatelain, Gauger and Nolan to design it.
Chatelain, an accomplished designer who worked in many styles, was comfortable working in the Colonial Revival. This building, designed with the expectation that it would be expanded, originally included the central, two-and-a-half-story, hipped-roof main block and connector wings extending to either side, and the whole set back from Wisconsin Avenue. In 1963, as expected, the building was expanded through the addition of end pavilions, using brick that had been manufactured in 1956-1958 in anticipation of the additions.
While scaled up, and deviating in several ways, the Equitable Building was clearly modeled after the Governor’s Palace; Chatelain had sent employees to Williamsburg to measure the prototype. Both buildings feature at their center a tall, five-bay-wide, central block with a steep hipped and dormered roof and a central cupola. Each building has large brick chimneys to either side of the roof, although the larger Equitable building features four, rather than the two of the eighteenth-century mansions. Although the Equitable Building’s structure is steel, its brick-clad walls are laid in a Flemish bond, with a generous use of glazed headers and rubbed and gauged bricks around the entry doors and windows.
In 1975, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) purchased the property from Equitable and built a large rear addition (1978), designed by Carl Warnecke & Associates. At that time, Fannie Mae added the fountain that currently sits at the apex of the circular drive. A large parking structure, also dating from 1978, is located at the west side of the property, beyond the addition, with a landscaped outdoor patio between them.
In 2018, Fannie Mae moved out, and the surrounding property was subsequently redeveloped — which preserved the historic building, but demolished the 1978 addition and parking structure. New density was added adjacent to the historic building. In 2022, the mixed-use development, City Ridge, opened.
DC Inventory: November 16, 2017
National Register: July 29, 2019
]]>The Editors Building is a ten-story office building constructed in downtown DC between 1949 and 1950 to house the offices of the family-owned and operated Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc., the publisher of various subscription-based business and finance periodicals, namely the Kiplinger News Letter and Kiplinger’s Changing Times Magazine. The building was designed by Leon Chatelain, Jr. in the Stripped Classical style.
Despite hardships imposed by the digital age, Kiplinger is still actively engaged in the publication of its newsletter and magazine, in addition to its online publications. Kiplinger remained the owner/occupant of the Editors Building until the Fall of 2011, when it sold its headquarters building and moved to smaller offices at 13th and L Streets, NW. In 2012, Palmetto Hospitality of Washington, DC renovated the building into a hotel and operates it today as a Hampton Inn.
In addition to serving as the headquarters of the Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc. for 61 years, the Editors Building housed an extensive collection of print media, including historic maps, prints, engravings, lithographs, watercolors, woodcuts, drawings, photographs and much more, of historic Washington. Known as the Kiplinger Collection, this collection of Washingtoniana was begun in the 1920s by Willard “Kip” Kiplinger and was carried on after his death by his descendants.
The vast array of print media filled the building’s corridors, offices, Board room, and lobby area exhibit space, as well as a special archives room set aside for the collection. After sale of the building, the Kiplinger family donated the vast majority of the collection to the Historical Society of Washington, while setting aside a few of the pieces for the National Portrait Gallery, Mount Vernon, and the Lincoln Cottage.
DC Inventory: December 18, 2014
]]>The Western Union Telegraph Company Tenley Radio Terminal is a landmark in engineering history. Built between 1945 and 1947, it served as a transmission and receiving station in an experimental radio relay triangle connecting New York, Philadelphia, DC, and Pittsburgh, inaugurating the first use of microwave radio for commercial communications. The system was an experimental one, intended to replace a century-old wire telegraphy network, and it continued in use for national security communications during the Cold War. Designed by DC architect Leon Chatelain Jr. (1902-1979), the terminal is an early and rare example of an architect-designed transmission tower. Western Union used the tower as an icon for modern communications systems in its advertising. The building’s design owes something to lingering Art Deco and Moderne styles of the 1940s and 1950s, but its restraint of detail suggests its utilitarian nature. The installation also includes a two-level poured-in-place concrete battery and engine room. DC Inventory: May 22, 2008National Register: May 21, 2004
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