25 November 2007

Ghost Stories

The Omni Shoreham Hotel, Mother of Big Pink

She was a bold woman, a social butterfly who was hard as nails, and she liked her martinis. Her speech was at time blunt and uninhibited and blunt.

If you go looking for her as Frances Freed, nee Frances Webb of the United Kingdom, Boston and Park Avenue, you will not find her. She cloaked herself in the identity of her husband, Allie, the well-connected industrialist who purchased the land to impose his vision on rural Arlington. When I found her at long last in the morgue files of the Washington Post, it was like meeting a ghost.

Allie died in 1938, just as things were starting to gear up for the huge construction project. His big roll-top desk was piled with drawings and account sheets. Frances could have sold out, cut her losses with her grief, and gone back to New York. She could have returned to the Park Avenue life of charity and good works she had lived while Allie was in the taxi business.

Instead, she left the long black limo and her driver downstairs, walked up the stairs to her second-floor office, sat down at the desk, and got to work.

She would keep the desk for the rest of her life, until she had to stop working and move from the Shoreham to the Wisconsin Avenue Nursing Home where she would die, November 16, 1975.

The Nursing Home was definitely not her style, and if the completion of the Buckingham neighborhood was her life's work, it was based on the vision of her husband, it was not how she lived.

She arrived at the Shoreham hotel in the early 1930s and did not leave, except to take the big black Caddy to Buckingham across the River until they placed her in the nursing home.

The Shoreham is now an Omni, but it has a genuine pedigree as a District institution. Since 1930 the campus in Rock Creek Park has been the destination for the glamorous and powerful. It has hosted the inaugural balls for every President since FDR, and has a formal elegance that in its current incarnation has placed it on the list of the world's historic hotels.

That is what Frances liked, and that is what she wanted to create in Big Pink.

The Shoreham is haunted, and it is a curious tale.

The hotel was built in 1930 by a great friend of the Freeds, the dashing Harry Bralove, who taught them a few tricks about the construction game in Washington.

Harry was a tightly wound fellow under his smooth exterior, driven almost. He had a law degree from Georgetown that he had earned while keeping a day-job at the Navy Department. He had ambitions to match his drive. He saw a need for high-end housing in the District, and after abandoning the Navy ship, he went into the construction business.

He specialized in meeting the luxury market in co-operative apartment buildings.

Co-ops became prevalent in Washington during the Roaring Twenties when regulations enacted in World War I to control rents in the swollen capital forced the owners of many of the premier apartment houses to sell units to their renters.

The first residents were just moving into Bralove's signature Broadmoor just as the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929. The building was designed by Washington architect Joseph H. Abel, a proponent of the "International" style. It is no coincidence that thirty years later, Frances Freed's Big Pink was among the first of that style to thrust itself out of the Arlington soil.

The Broadmoor was the first luxury residence on Connecticut Avenue north of the Rock Creek. At the time, the location was thought to be on the outskirts of town, though the Evening Star reported it to be the "home of prominent business executives, senators, representatives, Army and Navy officers, and of a select cross-section of official Washington."

Amenities included a beauty shop, a barbershop, and a bakery; a newsstand kept the residents up to date, elevators whisked them to their floors, and there was one of the first underground garages beneath it all.

All these things would eventually be incorporated into the standard that Frances Freed would bring to Big Pink, though it would pass through what another Bralove building that would become her home over her next four decades in Washington.

The economic collapse idled Allie Freed's Paramount Taxi Corporation in New York, and he began to cast his eyes about for new opportunities. The idea of creating affordable housing in a jurisdiction without the restrictive laws of Washington was appealing, and he began to look to Northern Virginia.

The Depression was also changing things for Harry Bralove. He had already committed to the construction of a premier residential hotel in rock Creek Park and he was mired in costs. He had spared no expense, bringing Able in as architecture for an encore performance on the new grand hotel project, close to the amenities of the city but nestled in nature.

The eight-story hotel was designed in the Art Deco manner, and christened “The Shoreham.” Bralove insisted on the best of everything, Depression be damned: running ice water, an indoor ice skating rink in the lounge, high-speed Westbrook elevators, and a woodworking shop that manufactured custom-built furnishings for the public areas and guest rooms.

As the Depression continued to deepen, Harry ran into cash-flow problems. He needed a financial infusion to complete the building, or the project would collapse.

The money came from a man named Henry Doherty. He ponied up enough to become a minor shareholder and got a deal on a permanent suite of rooms for his family at the hotel as was common in those days for entrepreneurs and legislators.

When the hotel opened a single room was $5, a double room was $8 and parlors and suites were $12.

The Freeds moved into the Shoreham as Allie began to put together the real estate package for his Buckingham project. Frances stayed for nearly forty more years, joining seven U.S. senators, 18 congressmen, and a galaxy of diplomats and notables on the guest list. President Harry Truman was a frequent guest, playing poker with Sen. Stuart Symington, Speaker John McCormack (D-MA), and William “Fishbait” Miller, Doorkeeper of the House in room 406D. Senator Warren G. Magnuson (D-WA) often joined in.

Other, shorter-term guests have included Famous guests have includes President Ronald Reagan, President George Bush, Sr., Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmet Kohl, Senator Ted Kennedy, celebrity Eva Gabor and actress Helen Hayes.

During World War II, when Frances was living the life of a Real Estate Magnate, Queen of Buckingham, the Shoreham martinis were 45 cents apiece.

The hotel got around the alcohol rationing of by purchasing the entire stock of a Scottish distillery. The Shoreham's Blue Room was the place where Barnie Breskin worked, the man who penned the archetypical capital anthem “Hail to the Redskins.” The Blue Room defined swank in Washington, and was a favorite place to hang out for young Senator John Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jackie.

With all the good times, of course there was tragedy, and it started almost immediately. People die in large buildings routinely, under circumstances both natural and otherwise. That includes the Shoreham and Big Pink, where some residents have gone to their rest undiscovered for weeks.

That brings us to the matter of the Doherty ghosts. Moving into the Shoreham's eight floor in 1933 was shareholder Henry Doherty, his wife, and adopted daughter Helen. With them was Executive Housekeeper of the Shoreham, Juliette Brown. In addition to her duties at the hotel, she served as the Doherty au pare and general factotum.

The Doherty's suite was filled with fine furniture and art.   Their china was from Napoleon Bonaparte and Persian rugs were spread throughout the rooms.   

Early one morning, Juliette awoke in her bedroom feeling disoriented and sick. She called the switchboard, but collapsed and died before completing the call. A maintenance worker found her corpse later, phone still in her hand. Later, daughter Helen also died under unidentified circumstances. Rumors of suicide or drug overdose swept through the hotel.

When the Dohertys vacated the premises, guests in adjacent rooms began to report strange happenings. The lights and television turned on by themselves at four in the morning. Housekeeping carts moved unattended, and people reported feeling cold spots and a chill breezes.

The Hotel Red Book, another shared tradition with Big Pink, has an entry from 1975 reporting a guest in room 863 had called then-General Manager Phil Hollywood, asking “who was in room 864?”

He complained of noise over a two-day period, and said it was disturbing him.   

It was Juliette's bedroom. Shoreham employees have named the ghost “Vivica,” but there has never been a formal introduction.

The interesting thing about the haunting of the Shoreham is the timing. It was quality living there, you see, and people tended to stay a long time. Even so, the ghosts waited an awfully long time to put in an appearance.

You see, Mr. and Mrs. Doherty lived in that suite of rooms until 1973, like Frances Freed, nearly forty years to the day. If there were unsettled spirits there, they might have been the ones that cost 45 cents a glass.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window