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Whitelaw Hotel

Architect
Isaiah T. Hatton
Style
Renaissance Revival
City
Washington, DC
Whitelaw Hotel
Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The Whitelaw Hotel at 1839 13th Street NW was built in 1919 in the U Street Corridor as an upscale apartment hotel during the segregation era. Architect Isaiah T. Hatton, one of the nation's first African American architects, designed it in a classical Italian Renaissance Revival style for $158,000. Entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis, founder of Industrial Savings Bank, named it for his mother and financed it entirely with Black investors, designers, and craftsmen.

the building

Built entirely by Black Washington. The Whitelaw was completely financed and built by African American entrepreneurs, investors, designers, and craftsmen, giving segregation-era Washington a place of meeting and public accommodation that its own community had built rather than been granted access to.

A stop in the Green Book. Listed in Victor Green's Green Book, the Whitelaw housed performers like Cab Calloway who played the U Street clubs and other African Americans visiting Washington for national meetings, at a time when the city's other hotels refused them.

the style

Hatton designed the Whitelaw in a classical Italian Renaissance Revival style, lending an upscale apartment hotel built for Black patrons the same architectural grandeur white-owned hotels claimed for themselves elsewhere in the city.

More on Renaissance Revival

the architect

Isaiah T. Hatton was one of the nation's first African American architects, and the Whitelaw Hotel stands as his documented design for a project financed entirely within Washington's Black business community.

significance

A DC Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, the Whitelaw is remembered as the first hotel built for Black patrons in segregated Washington, D.C.

nearby

All 315 buildings in Washington, DC