Why Katharine Graham’s historic Washington home has sat vacant for 22 years

WASHINGTON — 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, Donald Graham’s mother, presided over the grand beaux-arts house at 2920 R St. 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 NFL team, the Commanders, and in its world-class tennis tournament, the Mubadala Citi D.C. Open. He paid $8 million.

Ein, then a bachelor, had no plans to entertain in Katharine 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 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.

Now, 22 years after Ein bought the house, he and his wife are considering a sale. Their long ordeal, he said in an interview, was “weirdly emotional.”

He and his wife had been drawn to the experience of raising their children in a historic home. But the failure of that plan “was not about a neighborhood that didn’t want us, because they did en masse, and still do,” he said. “It was more about insane inconsistency in a process where members of the historic board encouraged us to press forward, but then there’s no transparency or accountability.”

Lally Weymouth, Katharine Graham’s daughter, who lives in New York, put it a different way. “Washington used to be a much easier place to live,” she said. Now “everybody hates everybody.”

‘Love at almost-first sight’

The Beall-Washington house, as historians call Graham’s old home, was built around 1784 by Thomas Beall, the second mayor of Georgetown. George Corbin Washington, a great-nephew of the first president and Beall’s son-in-law, lived there for many years, followed by a succession of Washington’s descendants.

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 CIA. Donovan directed the OSS from the house, where his staff included so many upper-crust men that some joked the agency’s initials stood for “Oh So Social.” Donovan put the house on the market in 1946, and a young 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 Donovan, who wanted his asking price. Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, stepped in. “Kay will pay it,” he told Donovan over dinner.

She was incensed about her father’s intervention. “When it’s where you want to live,” her father responded, “don’t bargain.”

The property became a playground for the four Graham children and their friends, who competed in sports on the grounds, tore through the rooms and at least once jumped through an upper-floor bedroom window into the swimming pool. Graham rarely locked the front door, even though in 1955, a 14-year-old with “an urge to go riding” swiped the family station wagon from the circular driveway.

In 1963, Philip Graham died by suicide at the family’s Virginia retreat, and his widow took his place leading the Post. The history-making continued in the house. It was where Graham made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

It was also where she was shocked to learn that John Mitchell, President Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general, had warned Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article about the Watergate scandal. “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published,” Mitchell memorably said.

In her book, Graham noted that it was “especially strange for him to call me ‘Katie,’ which no one has ever called me.”

In July 2001, Graham, 84, died of injuries sustained in a fall at a meeting in Idaho. She is buried next to her husband in a plot across R Street in Oak Hill Cemetery. Her grave site is visible from the front drive of her old home.

‘Dappled afternoon light’

When Ein bought the house in 2002, it had not been fully renovated since the Grahams’ 1960 overhaul. In 2014, the year after his marriage, he and his wife hired a team of building and landscape architects to plan an expansion. They prepared to go before the Old Georgetown Board, which reviews changes to historic properties in the neighborhood.

The couple had been friendly with their neighbors, several of whom attended their wedding. But their ambitions for the house, which initially included a two-story addition in back and two large garages in front, set off an immediate uproar.

The home’s next-door neighbors, Jane and Calvin Cafritz, and a neighbor across the street, Robert Budic, emerged as the most strident critics. The Cafritzes, members of a prominent Washington real estate family, said the addition would ruin their property’s “feeling of openness,” “cause irreparable damage to several of our very mature specimen trees” and eliminate the “dappled afternoon light” between the two homes.

Budic wrote that the project would dismay visitors who “stand in awe as they take in the facade and the vista, the open and welcoming entrance that has greeted presidents, heads of state and royalty.”

Asked to comment, Jane Cafritz said, “Thank you for the opportunity. I’m going to decline it.” (Calvin Cafritz died last year.) Reached by phone, Budic said he did not want to press his case on the record, although his angry letters are filed in the National Archives.

The three architects on the Old Georgetown Board are volunteers who review every project in the Georgetown national historic district — from a front-door replacement to a new structure — that is visible from a public thoroughfare. Although the federal reviewers’ role is advisory, the city withholds crucial building permits until their conditions are met.

“Historic properties are a nonrenewable resource,” said Tom Luebke, the secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, which appoints the Old Georgetown Board. “Once you’ve lost the fabric itself, you’ve lost it forever. We try to say, ‘Well, what’s reasonable for the property? How much change can it take and still can you keep, understand, recognize and honor the architecture, the residents who have lived here, the history of the property? That’s the trick.”

The board’s tweaks can be granular. It has told applicants where to plant trees, to repair aged masonry using “bricks of the exact same hardness and mortar of the exact same formula,” change windows to achieve “more verticality,” and paint rooftop antennas “to match the sky.”

The Commission of Fine Arts is an independent agency whose members are appointed by the president, so “we report to the White House, I guess?” Luebke said. The board’s offices inside the National Building Museum are palatial but empty. It has met virtually since 2020, once monthly except for August.

During its monthly meetings in the spring and summer of 2014, the board rejected the Eins’ plans four separate times. The board objected to the garages; the size of the proposed addition; and the project’s disruption to the foundation, grounds and architecture of the original house, whose kitchen wing dates to 1914. Luebke said the Eins did not sufficiently address its recommendations in their revised plans.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to want a modern kitchen, to want to park your car, to want to put a gym in your basement,” Luebke said. “But this is a very, very valuable, culturally valuable property. It’s like a witness from all these different eras.

“One of the goals is to try to hold on to things that you can,” Luebke added. “There’s value in holding on to 18th-century foundations if you can. So that’s the balance that we are trying to achieve.”

The Eins proposed moving the garage space underground and to the back. They reduced the size, mass and height of the proposed addition. They hired an arborist who found that the construction would not threaten the Cafritzes’ trees.

Each time the couple changed their plans, the Cafritzes wrote the government with new objections, echoed by Budic. “They didn’t want the construction on their side of the property,” Luebke said.

In an October 2014 Old Georgetown Board hearing recounted in Washingtonian magazine, Budic and Mark Ein’s architect squabbled over access to the microphone, prompting a tirade from Budic. Ein laughed, and as Budic passed him on his way to retrieve the mic, Budic intentionally bumped him in the shoulder. The board chair demanded the two men take their beef outside.

The Eins hosted nearly two dozen neighbor meetings and tours, pledging to address all good-faith objections. Attendees sent a flurry of positive letters to the Old Georgetown Board. Even the cemetery across the street weighed in, writing, “All of us at Oak Hill are delighted with the prospect of this young family moving in and bringing the property to life once again.”

But the Old Georgetown Board did not yield.

“In a community where lots of people have to park on the street and walk a long way home, is there really need for a garage?” Alan Brangman, a board member who is now the panel’s chair, asked in a September 2014 meeting.

The saga raised questions about the Old Georgetown Board’s authority, procedures and accountability — including from Donald Graham, who called the extended review process “stupid.”

“I think the world of Mark and Sally, and I hope they do with the house whatever they want,” he said.

The Eins went silent for six years. They had a son, then a daughter. In 2021, they again approached the board, but the overture went nowhere. They never returned.

“We thought that they were kind of honing in on a palatable scope, a size that people were going to be able to work with,” Luebke said in a recent interview. “I think they probably ran out of gas. They lost their nerve.”

The Eins now live across the Potomac River from Georgetown in Virginia, where their neighbors include the Saudi ambassador to the United States and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.

This April, as in past years, the Eins opened up the R Street house before the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner for a garden brunch, where the bedraggled rooms and mosh pit of guests did “not in any way resemble the parties that Mrs. Graham gave,” said Carol Joynt, a television producer and Georgetown denizen.

Both Jane Cafritz and Budic said they would like to see the Eins move in. “I’m not the one who turned that plan down,” Budic said. “It was the Old Georgetown Board that rejected it, each and every time.”

Mark Ein recently saw Cafritz at an art exhibition in Miami. Uncomfortable about living next door to a vacant house, she urged him to finish the process and move in.

He left the conversation shaking his head.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.