Alban Towers is an apartment building on Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest Washington, D.C. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and is considered to be one of the best examples of Gothic Revival architecture in Washington.
It is located at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue (Embassy Row) and Wisconsin Avenue, and occupies the 221,000 square foot (21,000 m²) block between those two avenues and Garfield Street, Cathedral Avenue, and 38th Street. Diagonally across the Massachusetts-Wisconsin intersection is the St. Albans School, which occupies the southwestern corner of the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral.
History
The land Alban Towers is situated on was purchased by its developer from Washington National Cathedral in the early 1920s. It opened in 1929 as the largest apartment building in Washington, D.C. By today's standards, however, it is modest in size at six stories tall.
Its prominent architect/developer team, Robert O. Scholz, designer, David A. Baer, builder, designed the building in the Gothic Revival with tan-colored brick and limestone employed to simulate the monochrome composition of Gothic style architecture; popular in the 1920s and because it would complement the Washington National Cathedral. (Together Scholz & Baer were responsible for the construction of at least eight apartment buildings between the years 1922 and 1931. As a result, they earned a reputation as one of the more important apartment house architect/developer teams of the post-World War I decade. Representing the product of the collaboration, both whom specialized in 1920s apartment building construction, Alban Towers reflects the work of notable planners and architects who influenced the evolution of apartment construction in Washington, D.C.)
The lobbies and hallways, with their richly ornamented Gothic/Art Deco elements, were integral to the exterior scheme. Paved in quarry tiles of brown, orange, and ocher laid in a geometric pattern, the lobby is topped by plaster crown molding composed of rope and infilled with alternating roses, acorns, and thistles. These symbols of Great Britain serve to reinforce the English Gothic tenor of the building. The walls of the upper-floor hallways are covered in rough-finished stucco, lending a “sumptuous texture that is rarely found in apartment buildings.”
Billed as an apartment hotel, Alban Towers offered its residents 24-hour maid service and a public dining room. Indeed, on the ground floor of the building were housed a beauty shop, a travel agency, a grocery store, and a lunch counter. Each of the upper floors contained a maid's lounge and a bathroom facility. Constructed during the decade in which apartment construction exceeded that of single-family houses, Alban Towers attempted to compensate for smaller family space by furnishing its tenants with luxurious amenities and public areas. The relative modesty of individual apartments is offset by the grandeur of the public spaces.
Alban Towers was the Washington, D.C. headquarters of supporters of the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Its hotel suites were frequented by such celebrities as Bette Davis and Frank Sinatra. During World War II, it was discovered that Japanese spies had used the Alban Towers residence of the Japanese Naval attaché as a lookout point to the city as well as a place to tap into official radio frequencies.
Its apartments were leased by the embassies of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and others to house their diplomats. However, during the 1950s, this created controversy when the embassies of the newly independent African states attempted to lease some of its apartments; Washington was still a racially segregated city and the African diplomats were refused residence in Alban Towers and other area apartment buildings.
Originally, the building featured 132 units, mostly of lavish one-bedroom apartment homes, as well as a number of hotel suites. In 1930, responding to the large demand for apartment in the building, the number of units was increased by 84 with the construction of an additional two wings on the south side of the building in 1930.