One other reason behind their recommendation was a regulation, then pending with the District government, “which will make it mandatory for all apartment and real estate developments to accept negroes.” The proposed regulation was unlikely to affect rental projects, but “there would be resistance on the part of buyers in a project which must be integrated for fear that the resale value of their apartment would decrease if a colored family occupied an adjacent unit.” Ward checked with another Washington real estate agent, who told him some owners in existing buildings might “become panicky and sell at a loss.” Some purchasers of new apartments, however, would “understand the regulation and eventually accept it” but others “will refuse to buy.” The agent said the effect on the Watergate, a large development operating as a cooperative, would be “small in view of the obvious costs,” pointing to the recent experience of the River Park Cooperative apartment complex, in southwest Washington, which had “less than 8% colored buyers” due to the “large down payment,” which, Ward noted, was negligible compared to the expected down payment for a Watergate apartment.
AS EXCAVATION BEGAN ON THE FIRST WATERGATE BUILDING, which would soon be named Watergate East, contractors struck “river rock” weakened by water pressure and shot through with cracks and fissures. They also encountered unstable subsoil, permeated with more than a century’s worth of tar and oil from the former gas manufacturing plant. But Jim Roberts, project manager for Magazine Brothers Construction Corporation, the general contractor for the Watergate project, had a bigger problem to contend with: Luigi Moretti’s design.
There were “no continuous straight lines anywhere—horizontally on the floors or vertically on the facade,” Roberts said, and “no two floors had a facade exactly alike.” Coordinates therefore had to be calculated separately for each segment of each curving wall on each floor, plus variations for unique balconies. One engineer spent more than six weeks working out the curves for the building’s second floor alone. More than 2,200 exterior wall panels needed to be made in 100 different sizes and shapes. Another 80,000 square feet of “window walls” were needed, in 596 different configurations.
Roberts turned to Engineering Physics Co., a Rockville, Maryland, consulting firm that had an IBM 1620 computer, similar to the model displayed at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and used at NASA headquarters to simulate orbits for the Gemini space capsule. Running a modified version of COGO, a civil engineering program, the 1620 recalculated curves for a floor of the Watergate in eight hours. Roberts was convinced. He added the 1620 and its programmers to his Watergate team. He later estimated the 1620 saved three thousand hours of manual computation time on just the windows in the first Watergate building alone.
Boris Timchenko was the most prominent landscape designer in the region when Cecchi tapped him to design the Watergate’s public spaces. Timchenko was born in Lipetsk, Russia, and immigrated to France in 1920, where he studied landscape and design before arriving in the United States in 1926. Timchenko had designed the gardens of Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, where Jacqueline Bouvier and John F. Kennedy held their wedding reception, and went on to design the garden of the Georgetown home Senator and Mrs. Kennedy shared before moving into the White House in January 1961. He also designed the gardens at the new headquarters of the National Geographic Society and at Tompkins Hall at George Washington University, just a few blocks from the Watergate.
The Watergate presented Timchenko with two challenges: how to make the landscaping look attractive when viewed from apartment balconies or street level; and how to install everything on top of an underground parking garage. Timchenko placed clusters of trees throughout the grounds, connected by walkways and lawns in broad circular patterns echoing the shapes of the buildings. He covered the roof of the parking structure with two feet of sod. To support 150 trees, he designed concrete planters that sat directly on top of interior columns in the garage. A two-story colonnade at the entrance included several waterfalls. The total effect, the Washington Star reported, was to create “the atmosphere of a formal Renaissance-style garden.”
Luigi Moretti made several trips to Washington to monitor progress on the Watergate. He got along well with Timchenko and was pleased with the landscape design. But Moretti’s relationship with Fischer, his American counterpart, was contentious. “I felt like a marriage counselor,” said Cecchi, who was often forced to adjudicate their disputes. Moretti, Cecchi later recalled, would walk through the Watergate, inspecting every inch of the building and asking questions of the American architect and contractors. During one visit, Moretti noticed a seventh-floor window had been set back six inches. He had wanted it set back an entire foot. He threw his hat on the floor, stomped on it and screamed in rage.
RIVERVIEW REALTY, THE EXCLUSIVE SALES AGENT FOR THE Watergate, opened a sales center at 2700 Virginia Avenue NW, down the street from the construction site. Harold A. Lewis, CEO and founder of Riverview Realty, had worked with Nicolas Salgo at the Webb & Knapp construction firm. Lewis played golf and rowed varsity crew at Boston University before earning a business degree from Harvard. He was slim and tall, with “marble hair” and freckles. His clients and coworkers called him Hal.
The Watergate sales center included a dramatic thirty-by-thirty-foot reflecting pool surrounded by low-spraying fountains. Prospective owners could inspect a scale model of the 238-unit Watergate East; examine floor plans of various apartments, with suggested furniture arrangements; and imagine views from any apartment in the building, displayed on a cyclorama.
The press release announcing the new sales center called the Watergate “the Garden City Within a City.” Newspaper advertisements invited prospective residents to visit and learn more about “Washington’s consummate cooperative apartment residence.” The ad showed the floor plan for Apartment 403-N, featuring two bedrooms (“one enormous, one large”), a “graciously proportioned” living room, a kitchen with “cabinet space by the acre” and “every work-saving appliance,” two “luxuriously appointed” baths and five “mammoth closets.” Bidets were standard in most apartments and every unit came with at least one “marble-topped” toilet. A heating and cooling plant on site, built by the Washington Gas Light Company at a cost of $1.65 million, provided steam for heat in the winter and cold water for cooling in the summer—offering year-round “climate control” and “no furnace to nurse, no air-conditioner to baby.” Tranquility was also assured by extensive soundproofing between apartments: A layer of insulation underneath the floors in each unit promised “the ultimate in aural privacy.”
As developers refined their plans and adjusted to the height limits insisted upon by the Commission of Fine Arts in January 1964, the number of apartments in the first building was cut in half—well below the level that might overwhelm the local market. Prices ranged from $17,500 for a studio to more than $200,000 for one of seven penthouses with river views. The IBM 1620 computer, deployed initially to develop layouts and the dimensions of windows and exterior panels, was programmed to calculate pricing for each of the apartments, taking into account views and square footage.
Riverview Realty’s Lewis told the Washington Star that the Watergate embodied three principles of good urban design: mixed-use construction, “healthy” land use and “occupant ownership.” At a luncheon meeting of the Cosmopals, a club for wives of members of the all-male Cosmopolitan Club, Lewis said women were the key to his marketing strategy for the Watergate. “Suburbia didn’t answer the promises we looked for,” he said. “The old Anglo Saxon concept of man’s home with acres of rolling grounds around it we miniaturized into rows of monotonous little houses constructed on postage-stamp lots.” A father now “fights his way through miles of traffic to the office” while his spouse is stuck at home all day “with just the television and the telephone for company.” Women had forced their families to move out to the suburbs after concluding “the congestion, noise and disorder of the cities could no longer be tolerated.” Now, he said, women would l
ead the flight from suburbia back to urban settings.
The Watergate was also attractive to single women. It offered three things they wanted in an urban residence: the possibility of ownership, at a price within reach to an independent, working woman; a stylish, high-quality environment; and security. Watergate East boasted fourteen security cameras, including one in each elevator, monitored by a central facility in the building. Residents could summon assistance simply by picking up their phones. “What all of this means,” the Washington Star reported, “is that intruders will have difficulty getting onto the grounds undetected, and they will find it almost impossible to get into the building itself without being seen by the TV cameras.”
By mid-February, with the opening of the building still nine months away, two-thirds of the apartments in Watergate East were already sold.
IN FEBRUARY 1965, LUIGI MORETTI, ON HIS WAY BACK FROM Montreal, stopped in Washington to celebrate the “topping off” of Watergate East. He stepped out of a champagne reception at the sales center to pontificate on a range of topics to a Washington Post reporter.
Washington’s public buildings, Moretti said, “are too many, they are too massive, and they are too conformist.” There was no evidence in the typical federal building, he said, of either the “spirit” of the architect or the function of the government agency. As a result, “the overall beauty of Washington suffered.”
He said Stone’s rectangular design for the Kennedy Center did not conflict with the “delicately flowing” Watergate, but provided “a welcome contrast.”
Asked about the Watergate’s progress, Moretti smiled. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.”
Guests at the reception, including the Italian ambassador to the United States, Sergio Fenoaltea, admired a cake in the shape of Watergate East, from the Avignon Freres bakery. One guest would become one of the Watergate’s most enduring—and controversial—residents: Anna Chennault.
Chennault was petite and elegant, of Chinese heritage, with dramatic eyebrows and perfectly manicured fingernails, which were often painted bright red. She had recently told her extraordinary life story in a 1962 biography, A Thousand Springs: The Biography of a Marriage, which, by 1965, was in its sixth printing. “I was a fortunate woman,” she wrote, “for I was married to a great man who deeply loved me.” General Claire Lee Chennault had retired from the U.S. Army in 1937 to accept an offer from Madame Chiang Kai-shek to serve as an “observer” with the Chinese Air Force at a salary of $1,000 per month, plus expenses. In July 1941, six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he formed the American Volunteer Group, known as the Flying Tigers, to defend China. When America declared war on Japan, he became commander of the U.S. 14th Air Force.
As a nineteen-year-old reporter for the Chinese Central News Agency, Anna covered a press conference at the headquarters of the U.S. 14th Air Force, in Kunming. She was the only woman in the room when General Chennault arrived for his press conference. “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said before he saw Anna and added: “And lady!”
Anna told her sister later that day she had met a man who was simply “magnificent.”
When Japanese troops pressed deeper into China, Anna’s father asked General Chennault to send Anna and her five sisters to California for safety. Chennault made arrangements, but Anna decided to stay behind. She was secretly in love.
After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, an estimated 2 million Chinese turned out to cheer General Chennault’s farewell parade through the streets of Chungking. Before he left for Louisiana to rejoin his wife and eight children, according to Anna’s memoir, he kissed her for the first time and assured her he would return. By Christmas, he was back in Shanghai. He asked Anna to dinner and told her he had divorced his wife and returned to China a free man. He asked Anna to marry him. The general had two requests of his young bride: “One, always remain a Chinese wife. Two, keep your beautiful, slim figure.” As Anna explained in her memoir:
A Chinese wife knows that by yielding on small issues, and exercising the subtle art of gentle persuasion in important matters, such as the care and welfare of the children, she can usually control the main pattern of family life. She is content to win while looking defeated, and to let her husband appear to win while actually losing. She is, in a word, a subtle, gentle being who strives unobtrusively to combine the tact of a diplomat with the tactics of a psychiatrist.
They married in 1947. She was twenty-two; the general was fifty-four. They bought property in Monroe, Louisiana, but spent most of the year in Taipei, Taiwan, where Chennault managed a cargo airline. On Christmas morning in 1957, he coughed up blood. Six months later, with Anna at his side, he died at Walter Reed Hospital. He left her $225,500—enough to be “well-off but not really rich,” Anna wrote later—and asked his friend and longtime attorney Thomas Corcoran to look after her.
Corcoran, known as Tommy or Tommy the Cork, was Washington’s first “super-lobbyist,” according to his biographer David McKean. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Corcoran became a key strategist in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House, helping shape the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and establish the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was an advocate within the White House for General Chennault’s Flying Tigers and after the war served as Chennault’s lawyer and business partner.
After the general’s death, Anna moved to Washington with her two young daughters, Cynthia and Claire. Besides Corcoran, she knew political and business leaders who lived in the capital. And Washington, with a large Chinese local community, was more cosmopolitan than Monroe, Louisiana—a small town in a state that still had antimiscegenation laws on its books. She bought an apartment on Cathedral Avenue in northwest Washington and enrolled the girls in a nearby elementary school. Corcoran introduced her to the president of Georgetown University, where she landed a job writing Chinese-English dictionaries and helping to develop a machine that could print Chinese characters.
In 1960, Sylvia Hermon, chair of the Republican Women’s Federation of Maryland, asked her to help organize ethnic minorities for the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon. Anna had met Nixon before—in 1954, when he was vice president and attended a banquet in Taiwan, given for him by President Chiang Kai-shek. Nixon had sent her a condolence note when her husband died. Anna worked in Nixon’s Washington, DC, campaign office and gave speeches around the region. Although Nixon lost the race, she found the campaign environment “intoxicating,” according to her biographer Catherine Forslund.
Chennault campaigned aggressively for Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, focusing on raising funds and reaching out to ethnic minorities, and hosted “strategy” sessions, attended by Republican members of Congress and their top aides, in her apartment on Cathedral Avenue, which became, she recalled later, “a popular watering hole for ranking Republicans.” It was also a “sales room” on Sunday afternoons, reported Sarah McClendon, where she sold “beautiful Chinese art objects.”
Anna Chennault visited the Watergate or its sales office twelve times before she finally settled on a 4,500-square-foot penthouse on the fourteenth floor.
ON DECEMBER 2, 1964, PRESIDENT JOHNSON TURNED THE first shovel of dirt at the groundbreaking ceremony for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “This Center will brighten the life of Washington,” Johnson said, “but it is not . . . just a Washington project. It is a national project.” Among the dignitaries on the dais for the ceremony: William Walton, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts.
Later that day, Roger Stevens briefed the Kennedy Center trustees on the Watergate. The fifth and final building in the development, he said, would rise forty-one feet above the main roof of the Kennedy Center. “It will be necessary to vigorously oppose the proposed height of this building,” Stevens advised them.
At a meeting of the Kennedy Center’s executive committee on March 12, 1965, Stevens and in-house counsel Ralph Becker reviewed the Watergate’s “height problem.” The exe
cutive committee unanimously adopted a resolution stating that the final Watergate building would “seriously impair the esthetic values of the Center.”
Wolf Von Eckardt, the Washington Post’s architecture critic, weighed in. He accused the Watergate of “woefully crowding in” the Kennedy Center. “The southernmost, massive, sausage-like building of this wiggly complex,” he wrote, “encroaches to within 300 feet upon what is to be a national shrine. The dignity of the John F. Kennedy Center demands more land, air around it.”
William R. Lichtenberg, an attorney for Island Vista, offered a solution: If the Kennedy Center needed to be taller than the Watergate, then the trustees should add a few feet to the top of their own building.
Becker, the Kennedy Center lawyer, dismissed the suggestion outright. Raising the Kennedy Center just fifteen feet, Becker said, would require a complete redesign. The cost would also be prohibitive—far more than the $1 million back-of-the-envelope estimate provided by the Watergate—and the Kennedy Center would then be taller than the nearby Lincoln Memorial. Becker promised to appear before any “relevant official body” to oppose approval of the final Watergate building at a height greater than either the Kennedy Center or the Lincoln Memorial.
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