The Willard InterContinental

The Willard InterContinental stands two blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., its current Beaux-Arts building completed in 1901 to a design by the architect Henry Hardenbergh, who also designed New York's original Waldorf-Astoria and Plaza hotels. A hotel has stood on the site since the 1850s, and the Willard became a fixture of Washington political life through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hosting a long roster of presidents, foreign dignitaries and public figures. According to a widely repeated, though disputed, account, the modern use of the word lobbyist traces to people who gathered in the Willard's lobby seeking access to officials and, in some versions, President Ulysses S. Grant himself. The hotel closed for more than a decade in the 1970s amid financial decline before a major restoration returned it to luxury operation in 1986, preserving its Beaux-Arts facade and grand public interiors largely as built.