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The Mayflower at 100: How One D.C. Hotel Shaped American History

• Jeff Borman and Matt Brown

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When you walk into the Mayflower Hotel, it feels like a film set, the ideal visual representation of what a hotel should be. It is one of the most important venues in the shaping of America, hotel or otherwise. The conversations, the deals, the A-list encounters, the scandals that shook politics. It was a place that knew how to keep a secret. Until it didn't.

It survived depressions, wars, setbacks, inaugurations, ownership changes, and J. Edgar Hoover. This year marks its centennial, and we talk with one of its former employees to see inside "Washington's Second Best Address."

Matt Brown:

Hi everybody, it's no Show, with me, matt Brown, and that guy, jeff Borman. I remember big experiences in my life through place, through buildings, through architecture, through parks. I remember my experiences with people through place. That's my prime. I mean, everybody does that right, but that is the prime way that I cement memories.

Matt Brown:

And God, almost three decades ago I was living in DC, I had just gotten a job at a trade association in DuPont Circle and the woman who was in the office right next to me was Jeff's wife, heather. And Heather, for those very few of those who don't know her because she knows, like everybody in the world, heather is one of those gregarious people, hail, fellow, well-met people in the world. Everyone is a friend and she was immediately welcoming and friendly and in fact even invited me to Thanksgiving at your house. She'd only known me for a couple of days and, like, invited me to Thanksgiving at your house. So right, and so I quickly got to know Heather and and had met Jeff and found out oh yeah, jeff works in the hotel business. Oh, wow, what do you do? Well, he actually works really close to us.

Matt Brown:

So a couple of weeks after that holiday season we were all leaving work and I think she had to drop something off for you. I just need to drop this to Jeff. And it's just a couple of blocks away because we were going, if memory serves, to the Lucky Bar. That is a hazy memory, as most memories are, with the Lucky Bar in DC. And we walk three blocks down and we walk into this lobby of a hotel. That is something out of a movie. It was a film set for what a hotel should be. And there, standing by the desk in dress blues with a Renaissance badge, shiny and firmly affixed, was Jeff Borman waiting to greet yet another guest into this grand institution called the Mayflower.

Jeff Borman:

Jeff, what is the Mayflower. The Mayflower is one of the most important venues in the shaping of America, hotel or otherwise. The venue altered the globe. I mean the conversations, the deals, the A-list encounters, the scandals that shook politics. It was a place that knew how to keep a secret.

Jeff Borman:

Before we get into your personal history with the Mayflower, give us a little bit of the backstory of this landmark building Ground broke in 1922 at 1127 Connecticut Avenue, an odd trapezoid-shaped lot squeezed in by DeSalle Street and 17th Street, four blocks from the White House, between Farragut Park and DuPont Circle. The same architecture firm that built the Mayflower did the Plaza in New York, the Biltmore in New York, the Broadmoor in Colorado, One of my favorite hotels, the Condado Vanderbilt in San Juan, several classic Ritz-Carlton hotels and maybe the most experienced building of all of them, Grand Central Station Terminal.

Matt Brown:

It does share. Now, you know, I don't think I knew that until we were researching this episode it does share DNA. When you look at it, like I always kind of took its look for granted. But then when you start looking at the plaza particularly, it's like, oh yeah, that shape, it's that kind of weird, that huge shape of it. That's really distinctive.

Jeff Borman:

When it opened in 1925, it was Washington's largest hotel, with over a thousand rooms. Massive, I mean, that's large by today's standard. It was massive by the standard of the era. Shortly after opening, the hotel added a presidential and vice presidential suite. Each was a 13-room unit, five beds each, dedicated bathroom in each one. Very big deal in 1925 to have a dedicated bathroom, a foyer, a drawing room, a library, a secretary's room, a dining room, a kitchen, a maid's room. This is unparalleled luxury. Uh, brought to washington dc and long gone are the amenities of a luxury hotel in the roaring 20s, with a florist and a notary. They had an apothecary, a barber shop, a hair salon, theater ticketing agency. It was service on an unparalleled level it.

Matt Brown:

Also it was commensurate with the times because it was the roaring 20s, so everything went big, everything went Gatsby. It's also, I think, commensurate with America's rising place in the world. Right, it was a flex. This is where people will come for defense contracts, this is where people will come to stay, to get access to the White House, to be dignitaries. I think there was kind of a coming out a little bit for DC and I think in a larger sense, kind of for American government to be able to host the world in this town, which I think had been largely a backwater in DC Even when we were living there DC. Sometimes people kind of look as backwater in DC, even when we were living there DC. Sometimes people kind of look askew at DC they still do, actually, in the current day. But this felt like one of the great hotel flexes of all time.

Jeff Borman:

Washington was not a top 25 city in the US, it was a federal backwater, intentionally kept so. They didn't want it to be a state because they didn't want to be in state politics and dividing the house. But here was the Mayflower, not just along for the ride, they were the captain of the ship. Right after opening, president Coolidge began a long tradition of hosting political events when 6,000 people attended his inaugural ball in the Grand Ballroom and President Hoover continued that tradition in 1929. Every president after that, until the mid-'80s, when they started having inaugural balls all over town, held the ball at the Mayflower Matt. Only because I was prepping for this show and this conversation a bit did I learn that Coolidge's inaugural ball was actually a charitable fundraiser. Now think about how things have changed on that side of the coin in 100 years, where, instead of millions being spent to celebrate their success, tens of thousands were raised for the causes that they wished to prioritize with that administration. Great idea.

Matt Brown:

I think when you go through the greatest hits of this hotel, it's kind of staggering right.

Jeff Borman:

Oh, let's just run the list. So President Hoover has his inauguration, but his vice president checked in for all four years right. By 1932, 23 members of Congress were living there full-time. Fdr and his family lived there as he was president-elect until the White House was vacant. Truman followed with a dedicated suite of his own. It's not just a who's who, it was almost an annex of the White House in many ways. During World War II, mayflower was center stage for war planning and fundraising. The era's guest list reads like the generation's A-list guest list right. Marlena Dietrich, charles de Gaulle, winston Churchill, frank Sinatra, bing Crosby, judy Garland, glenn Miller where do we stop? Bob Hope, lucille Ball All this was played out to the sounds of the Mayflower Orchestra because, yes, the hotel had an orchestra.

Matt Brown:

I cannot remember the name of it. It was a bar, restaurant and it was a town and country, the town and country I described the hotels like from a film set earlier. This is the bar that you would have a scene between Washington power brokers set. It was wood, oak, leather. The bartenders were dressed to the nines. It was expensive, expensive, for a person in their 20s. For sure I love that place and it kind of bums me out because it's not there anymore, right?

Jeff Borman:

No, it's so sad. The hotel has celebrated its heritage in so many ways and yet it's conformed to the modern you know asset managers demands. No, matt, it's a retail gift shop now. Oh, one of Washington's best bars. Nikita Khrushchev passed notes with a spy. It's a retail gift shop now, oh, ah, one of Washington's best bars. Nikita Khrushchev passed notes with a spy in that bar. Queen Elizabeth II ordered I don't know her favorite drink, but there's a photo of her holding it there. I saw on Y2K the day that all technology was going to break. I saw Jack Nicholson Down a bottle of Louis 13 in that bar before going upstairs around three o'clock to sleep it off for midnight celebration.

Matt Brown:

That sounds exactly like the way Jack would prepare for a new century. That's great. Was that the bar? Wasn't there a thing with J Edgar Hoover? There are a lot of things with J Edgar Hoover, but didn't he have a relationship with the bar or the hotel?

Jeff Borman:

He dined there every day for at least 20 years, did he really? Every working day, and he was there either in the coffee shop in the morning, the rib room for lunch or dinner, and of course that turned into the Carvery and La Chateauneuf. I mean it changed names a million times. Regardless, hoover was there every single day for at least 20 years. Imagine who else met him there and the conversations there were.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, sometimes I don't want to imagine what those conversations were.

Jeff Borman:

In fact, the lobby, bar and restaurant at the hotel is now named Edgar's.

Matt Brown:

Yeah, Edgar's still with us after all these years.

Jeff Borman:

It's no town and country and you know.

Matt Brown:

Rest in peace, sam lack, one of washington's finest bartenders so it goes through the war, through world war ii, it's still the hotel of choice. Post-war dc's becoming a powerhouse and you start seeing more properties, more hotels pop up and those hotels are going for the same kind of market. So in 1966, the hotel was sold for something along 14 million bucks.

Jeff Borman:

Think of how different real estate valuations moved in the first half to the second half of the Mayflower's century. It could be built for 11 million in 1925, sell for $14 million in 1966, only increasing $30 million in the first 41 years of its existence and then rising by $186 million over the next 29 years. I know, I know. The power of DC is really what we're talking about.

Matt Brown:

The Mayflower also shows how hotel branding has evolved over the last hundred years. By the way, everybody, it's the 100th anniversary of the Mayflower. That's why we're actually doing this episode. It started as an indie, as there were really no big brands back in 1925. Not like that. It lived a short period of time as a Hilton and then it was independent again, and then in 1981, it became a Stouffer brand hotel, which later merged with Renaissance, and then in 97, it joined Marriott International when Marriott purchased the Renaissance brand.

Jeff Borman:

So the Renaissance brand took a more modern design from there and hotels in the collection like the Stanford Court in in san francisco and the venoy in saint petersburg, like those the mayflower peeled off into the autograph collection, more fitting for the unique historic hotel than the more modern branded style that renaissance was evolving into. In fact, autograph has one of my favorite taglines in all the business, exactly like nothing else, and that fits the Mayflower perfectly. I love it.

Matt Brown:

I love it and at the time that you were working there during all this transition, how big was Marriott? This is when you start to come into the story, which is the most important part for me.

Jeff Borman:

Fair enough. It's the least important part to me. Glad we're working well though. Marriott was about the fifth largest hotel company in the late 90s when I started there. Really, marriott at that time was starting to figure out a little bit ahead of its peers the power of franchising in terms of development and growth. But when I started in the summer of 97 with Renaissance between the time I was hired and started is when Marriott took control of the brand, so my first paycheck was the very first one that Renaissance employees had with a red M on it.

Jeff Borman:

If I may ask, how did you get that job? One of the more influential conversations of my life my mother's uncle, george Cook Washington legend, power broker K Street and one of the most generous, benevolent people you ever meet he took the time to have lunch with me as I was a senior in college and not sure what I was going to do. All I had done was work in restaurants. He was asking the tough questions what are you going to do? When you got to get a job? I was telling him about how much I enjoyed my time in restaurants and the service culture and hospitality, but I didn't want a business career. I didn't want to spend my life in a, and he suggested hotels, and it was on his suggestion. And then an introduction to Jim Bigger, who was the general manager of the Mayflower. In fact, matt, there's a funny self-deprecating story when I interviewed with the general manager and I was telling him how passionate I was about hospitality, and he said well, jeff, if you're so passionate, why didn't you study hospitality in school? And I literally said you can. I had no idea it wasn't a school, it was not a program that I'd ever heard of. We didn't have it at Miami University.

Jeff Borman:

I was very fortunate that, not only that, my uncle had the foresight to give me the advice or suggestion to choose hospitality as a career path, as a blend of the business career I wanted and the travel environment that I'm passionate about, but also then to make an introduction for a job where I began as a management trainee.

Jeff Borman:

And those are jobs that don't exist today uh, it's junior most managers where somebody out of school without any experience would come into the hotel as a management trainee or id and be assigned to various departments over the course of a year. So you know, my first month was in housekeeping and my second month was in banquets, rolling rounds and then you're in laundry for a while. Uh, you do some time in culinary, which is very short because I kind of had that background a bit uh, and a lot of time at the front desk because they're kind of short-staffed in a manager and needed somebody to do that work, and did graveyard shifts in accounting for a month and you learn the business that way. So the idea being, after a year of learning the entire business of the hotel, you're a qualified manager to be assigned to some department. Why did they get rid of it? Cost containment. You're basically not a very productive person for that year or at least that's the perception of today's management companies and probably more than that ownership.

Matt Brown:

Why can't we have nice things? We mentioned for a very short period the Mayflower was a Hilton Connie, quite the character. He bought controlling interest in the hotel in 1947 for about 2.6 million bucks and it was only the 14th hotel in his chain. But he set to work immediately and his rehabilitation of the property was an unmitigated aesthetic and financial disaster, and those things aren't often associated with Conrad Hilton and that era of Hilton. But this was something else. He covered the gorgeous mezzanine in wood paneling and he turned the color scheme to this kind of black and gray palette and he added this drop ceiling that covered up the skylights in the lobby. Don't know why he did that, and then you know you cut several of these later. And then another renovation began to undo the mess and restore the building to its original feel. But they did keep the air conditioning part of Connie's modernization, which was, I think, a good move.

Jeff Borman:

Yeah, he got that part right. I've also heard that the drop ceiling was blacked out during World War II, which would have predated Conrad Hilton's arrival as an investor owner, but because they were trying to keep DC dark at night to prevent aerial attack, and the Mayflower being a 24-hour business and also four blocks from the White House, would have made a really good reference point for attack from the air. So I don't know that we could blame Conrad for screwing up the beautiful skylights in the lobby, but we do know that in the mid-50s Mr Hilton was forced to sell Mayflower to settle an antitrust lawsuit and instead he chose to keep the newly constructed Statler Hotel, which was soon to be known as the Capitol Hotel.

Matt Brown:

Doesn't that sound like he pissed off a senator or got into someone? I need to go research that part of it, but this feels like something out of the Aviator. He was ornery and got on somebody's bad side and they decided to take this up in committee. From your time working there and then from your time after, as you've been in a, but also maybe some of the challenges that come when you're working with an older building.

Jeff Borman:

Yeah, there are many historic hotels. In a lot of cases that just means they're old. The Mayflower is on the register of historic places not for just lasting long enough to get a plaque. It's for what occurred there, and there's a sense of pride. Working in a historic hotel. That's different.

Jeff Borman:

You're part of a narrative that extends back generations. I think there's an awareness that that's what you're doing, that you are the present chapter of a very proud book. There's an emotional connection to characters that came before you. I'll give you an example. When I would hear stories about Bob Hope or Frank Sinatra at the hotel, those icons from my grandparents' era began to take on a personal meaning for me instead of just something of theirs. Historic hotels can do that to the employees. It's different to work there, and so when I was lucky enough to experience Wynton Marcellus as a guest coming back from an event at the Kennedy Center, it was around midnight, my shift at the front desk was nearly finished and he pulled out the trumpet and just spontaneously began playing because he had run into a friend in the lobby. That can only happen in a place as special as the mayflower, and it's not because it's old, it's not because it's historic. It's because of what has happened there before it and it's just. There is just something unique about that lobby. That and people sense it.

Matt Brown:

It's different is it also true that you met Kurt Russell?

Jeff Borman:

I did. Yeah, goldie Hawn was filming something in DC and Kurt Russell was in town with her, just being with her, and when she was out to work for the day, he came to the front desk where I was working a little before noon or something and asked for just some ideas, things to do, places to walk around town, and I mean just like a bar in Tombstone. He leaned against the front desk and we shot the shit for about an hour. I mean the dude was super. He could not have been more cool.

Matt Brown:

Does there come a point when buildings that size and age, it just no longer makes sense to renovate them as hotels, versus either tearing them down or turning them into condos or turning them into something else? I wonder when that point comes for properties like this.

Jeff Borman:

The Waldorf Astoria in New York City is the easiest example, because both the staggering $2 billion price tag that was paid just to tear it down and also because it meant erasing the most iconic hotel in the Western Hemisphere. It went from a 100-year-old 2,000-room luxury hotel into a 300-suite hotel. The rest of the building is now private residences.

Matt Brown:

when it opened earlier this year, you went back to the Mayflower recently and you stayed there. You were telling me that some of the staff is still there, right?

Jeff Borman:

Yeah, yeah, I mean. Walking through the lobby and seeing familiar faces 25, 27 years later is really incredible. Carlton and Frank are still working the door as they were in the nineties. It's an amazing place. There aren't many hotels really anywhere in the world that are so special that for 25 years consecutively you've got Bell Staff who knows every guest's name.