Hotel Monaco
She’s a grand old lady, an exquisite neoclassical landmark, and Washington’s first all-marble building. But the old General Post Office between 7th, 8th, E, and F Streets NW, nevertheless is not well-known and hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. It is now leased out as a boutique hotel because the government couldn’t summon the wherewithal in the 1980s to commit to a more distinguished use.
Before the General Post Office was here, this site was the location of Blodget’s Hotel, the largest privately-owned structure in Washington until the federal government bought it in 1810. Of course, there wasn’t much competition in those days. Samuel Blodget, Jr. (1757-1814), a native of Massachusetts, had become a merchant and grown rich in the 1780s through trade with the East India Company. By the 1790s, he was infectiously enthusiastic about prospects for the new capital city and began hatching schemes to make boatloads of money in Washington real estate. Blodget’s reputation, as Fergus Bordewich explains, was as “a man of big ideas, a sort of Donald Trump of the 1790s…
