place

Madison Place

Streets in Washington, D.C.
Madison Place facing south
Madison Place facing south

Madison Place is a one-block street located in northwest Washington, D.C., across from the White House. It forms the eastern border of Lafayette Square (the northernmost part of President's Park) between Pennsylvania Avenue and H Street NW. Buildings on Madison Place include the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building, the Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House, the Cutts-Madison House, and the Freedman's Bank Building. The street is part of the Lafayette Square Historic District.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Madison Place (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Madison Place
Madison Place Northwest, Washington

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 38.899611111111 ° E -77.035083333333 °
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Address

Madison Place Northwest
20420 Washington
District of Columbia, United States
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Madison Place facing south
Madison Place facing south
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Nearby Places

Freedman's Bank Building
Freedman's Bank Building

The Freedman's Bank Building, previously known as the Treasury Annex, is a historic office building located on the corner of Madison Place and Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. It sits on the east side of Lafayette Square, a public park on the north side of the White House, and across from the Treasury Building. The adjoining properties include the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building to the north and former Riggs National Bank to the east. The current building is the third constructed on the site. The first, a house built in 1831, was later seized by the federal government during the Civil War. It was demolished and replaced with the elaborately decorated headquarters of Freedman's Savings Bank, established by Congress in 1865 for recently emancipated slaves and freedmen. Despite the bank's initial success, the combination of mismanagement, fraud, and the Panic of 1873 resulted in the bank's failure and closure in 1874. Over 60,000 African Americans collectively lost the equivalent of $75 million. This caused a distrust of the government and banks for many generations. The third and present building to be constructed on the site was the Treasury Annex, designed by Cass Gilbert in the Beaux-Arts style and completed in 1919. It was the first large federal building planned as part of a massive redevelopment of Lafayette Square. The McMillan Plan, which called for the demolition of all buildings on Madison Place and Jackson Place, was only partially completed in the Lafayette Square area. The other completed building, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building, was also designed by Gilbert. The initial plan of eventually expanding the Treasury Annex to H Street NW never happened due to several factors. The construction of Federal Triangle, the work of early historic preservationists, and assistance from President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, meant several of the historic buildings on Madison Place were never demolished and the Annex was never expanded. The Annex was renamed the Freedman's Bank Building in 2016 to mark the importance of the site's history. The Freedman's Bank Building is a contributing property to the Lafayette Square Historic District, a National Historic Landmark, and to the Fifteenth Street Financial Historic District. It is also listed on the District of Columbia Inventory of Historic Sites. The Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Library, and the main branch of the Treasury Department Federal Credit Union are housed in the building.

Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House
Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House

The Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House is a Federal-style house located at 21 Madison Place NW in Washington, D.C., in the United States. The house is on the northeast corner of Madison Place NW and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, directly across the street from the White House and the Treasury Building. Built in 1828 by Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, son of Colonel John Tayloe III (who built the famous Octagon House), the house became a salon for politically powerful people in the federal government. Phoebe Tayloe inherited the house upon Tayloe's death in 1868. After she died in 1881, more than 200 marble statues, bronze sculptures, fine furniture, and paintings in the house were donated to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Phoebe Warren Tayloe's niece, Elizabeth H. Price, inherited the house in 1882 and later sold it to Senator Don Cameron of Pennsylvania for $60,000 in 1887. In around 1896, the U.S. Senate passed legislation which would have made the building the official residence of the Vice President of the United States, but the House of Representatives failed to act on the bill. Cameron leased the house to Vice President Garret Hobart from March 1897 until the fall of 1899 and the press and public nicknamed the house the "Historic Corner" and the "Cream White House" for the large number of politically important visitors and meetings held on the premises, with esteemed guests such as the International Boundary Commission and Prince Albert of Belgium. Hobart's failing health led the family to leave the Tayloe House in the fall of 1899 and Cameron then leased the home to Republican Senator Mark Hanna from January 1900 to 1902. Hanna's important political discussions of the moment with William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt over substantial breakfasts of corned beef hash and pancakes became famous. The Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage leased the house in the fall of 1915, and made the building its headquarters for two years. The Cosmos Club had considered purchasing the house from the Tayloe family in 1885 and eventually bought it in December 1917. They vacated it in 1952 to move to their new headquarters; the building was purchased by the U.S. government and used for offices. From October 1958 until November 1961, the house was the headquarters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Nearly razed to the ground in 1960 along with other buildings on Lafayette Square, successful lobbying and support from the newly elected Kennedy administration in 1961 led to the original proposals to gut the building being dropped. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was instrumental in persuading architect John Carl Warnecke, a friend of her husband, to create a design that would incorporate the new buildings with the old, based on the architectural theory of contextualism. The Cutts-Madison House, Cosmos Club building, and Benjamin Ogle Tayloe House were joined, and a courtyard built between them and the National Courts building. The building has remained part of the National Courts Building complex ever since, and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Donald Trump photo op at St. John's Church
Donald Trump photo op at St. John's Church

On June 1, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C., law enforcement officers used tear gas and other riot control tactics to forcefully clear peaceful protesters from outside Lafayette Square surrounding streets, creating a path for President Donald Trump and senior administration officials to walk from the White House to St. John's Episcopal Church. Trump held up a Bible and posed for a photo op in front of Ashburton House (the church's parish house), which had been damaged by a fire during protests the night before.The clearing of demonstrators from streets bordering Lafayette Square was widely condemned as excessive and an affront to the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly. Just before visiting the church, Trump delivered a speech in which he urged the governors of U.S. states to quell violent protests by using the National Guard to "dominate the streets", or he would otherwise "deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem".Former military leaders, current religious leaders, and elected officials from both parties condemned Trump for the event, though some of Trump's fellow Republicans defended the actions. The event was described by The New York Times as "a burst of violence unlike any seen in the shadow of the White House in generations" and possibly one of the defining moments of the Trump presidency. Civil liberties groups filed a federal lawsuit against Trump, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and other federal officials, alleging they violated protesters' constitutional rights. General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later apologized for his role in the photo op.A June 2021 Interior Department Inspector General review of U.S. Park Police actions found that Park Police cleared Lafayette Square as part of a plan to erect fencing. The Park Police incident commander was reportedly stunned when Barr informed him of Trump's impending visit. That report also confirmed the use of tear gas by D.C. Metropolitan Police, revealed Park Police did not request deployment of Bureau of Prisons to the park, and reported that it was not known why U.S. Secret Service had deployed ahead of schedule, advancing on protesters before the Park Police had a chance to warn protesters to disperse. The report also indicated that Park Police commanders could not identify who gave the order to deploy or why radio transmissions were not recorded.

Union Trust Building (Washington, D.C.)
Union Trust Building (Washington, D.C.)

The Union Trust Building is a nine-story office building, located at 740 15th Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. It was constructed for the Union Trust Company between 1906 and 1907. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a contributing property to the 15th Street Financial Historic District. It sits on the location of Wormley's Hotel, owned by James Wormley, a free-born black man, where the Wormley Agreement was penned, which led to the Compromise of 1877 and the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes. It has been substantially expanded twice, first in 1927 and then converted to a modern office building in 1983.Union Trust was a trust bank founded in 1899 as the Union Trust and Storage Company by a group of investors led by George Hamilton and Edward J. Stellwagen. Stellwagen was the president of the Thomas J. Fisher Companies, a real estate and mortgage brokerage closely affiliated with Senator Francis G. Newlands, and the company was in part organized to act as the fiduciary for investment by Williams Deacon's Bank to the Chevy Chase Land Company, one of the investments Newlands managed on behalf of his the descendants of his father-in-law, William Sharon. As was common at the time, the distinction between Union Trust, the Chevy Chase Land Company, and the Fisher Companies was blurred. During its early years, the Fisher Companies' brokerage office was located off a separate door at the south end of the building, and the Land Company kept offices as a tenant above.Union Trust, after several mergers, became First American Bancorp before being purchased by First Union Bank.Tenants have included the American Planning and Civic Association and Covington & Burling, which had its offices in the Old Union Trust Building in 1940, when Gerhard Gesell joined the firm (according to his 1984 unpublished memoir). The site is now home to the New America Foundation.