Why Katharine Graham's Washington Home Has Sat Vacant for 22 Years

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Why Katharine Graham’s Washington Home Has Sat Vacant for 22 Years
The home of the former Washington Post publisher was once a hub of power and comity. But after an “insane” renovation spat, its new owner is looking to sell.


The Beall-Washington house before a garden brunch in April. When the owners hired a team of building and landscape architects to plan an expansion in 2014, their ambitions set off an immediate uproar. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

By Elizabeth Williamson
Reporting from Washington
July 23, 2024

President-elect John F. Kennedy was there for dinner the night before his inauguration. Years later, President-elect Ronald Reagan was there too. So were Truman Capote, Princess Diana, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, diplomats, financiers and thousands more who came to a hub of bipartisan Washington power where guests dined, debated and often parted as friends. ... “It was a special place to grow up,” said Donald Graham, a former publisher of The Washington Post, remembering his childhood home.

For nearly 60 years, Katharine Graham, Mr. Graham’s mother, presided over the grand Beaux-Arts house at 2920 R Street in Georgetown, first as the young bride of Philip Graham, the publisher of The Post, and then as publisher herself after her husband’s death. After she died in 2001 her estate sold the home to Mark Ein, a venture capitalist and philanthropist who owns Washington City Paper and has a stake in the city’s N.F.L. team, the Commanders, and in its world-class tennis tournament, the Mubadala Citi D.C. Open. He paid $8 million. ... Mr. Ein, then a bachelor, had no plans to entertain in Mrs. Graham’s grand style and did not move in. But after he married Sally Stiebel in the home’s garden in 2013, the couple decided to raise their family there. It seemed a new chapter had begun.

It was not to be. Neighbors, who had already clucked about Mr. Ein’s failure to shovel his sidewalks to their standards, complained about the couple’s plans to renovate and expand the house. A review panel repeatedly rejected the couple’s plans, including in a hearing that nearly ended in a fistfight. ... The Eins gave up, and the house has sat vacant, its iron fence rusting and its front lawn pocked with weeds. Inside, its once-grand dining room attests to a long-ago Washington where legislators from both parties got together on weekends instead of fleeing the fractious capital. The evolution of the storied house tracks the city’s own journey into polarized camps where presidents rarely, if ever, drop by private homes.


Mark and Sally Ein at the house with their children. They now live across the Potomac River from Georgetown in Virginia. Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

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The home’s modern history began in 1929, when it was sold to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the C.I.A. Mr. Donovan directed the O.S.S. from the house, where his staff included so many upper-crust men that some joked the agency’s initials stood for “Oh So Social.” Mr. Donovan put the house on the market in 1946, and a young Mrs. Graham was transfixed. ... “It was love at almost-first sight,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Personal History.” She described it as “a comfortable country sort of house that the city had grown up around” with “a large expanse of front lawn, a long pebble driveway, an old-fashioned back porch and a big sloping back yard with lots of trees.” ... Her husband, Philip Graham, was not as enamored, she wrote. ... “Are you mad?” he erupted when he saw the property and its $125,000 price tag. The Grahams nonetheless offered $115,000, still not enough for Mr. Donovan, who wanted his asking price. Mrs. Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, stepped in. “Kay will pay it,” he told Mr. Donovan over dinner. ... Mrs. Graham was incensed about her father’s intervention. “When it’s where you want to live,” her father responded, “don’t bargain.”

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