Woodley Park's most prolific architect, Mihran Mesrobian (1889-1975) started his career as a palace architect in Constantinople during the twilight of the Turkish sultans. The Turkish-born Beaux-Arts trained Armenian worked on the restoration of thirty palaces, including the famed Dolmabahce in Istanbul. Drafted into the Turkish army during World War I, he participated in the Dardanelles-Gallipoli campaign against the British, serving directly under Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Ataturk), considered the founder of modern Turkey. A prisoner of war in Egypt, Mesrobian credited Lawrence of Arabia - T.E. Lawrence - with saving his life.
In 1921, he emigrated to the United States and became chief designer for Washington's premier real estate developer, British-born Harry Wardman, just as Wardman was developing large tracts of Woodley Park. Mesrobian was the architect of several majestic apartment buildings that have long defined Woodley Park, including a section of the Cathedral Mansions complex (1922-1924), the Wardman Tower (1928), and the Devonshire/Cortland Streets Apartments (1936). He also designed about two-thirds of the houses in the northern part of the community in subdivisions Wardman named English Village and Woodley Park. Wardman's elegant 16th Street hotels - the Carlton
(1926), now the St. Regis, and the Hay-Adams (1927) - were also designed by Mesrobian.
The Woodley Park call boxes were developed by the Woodley Park Community Association as part of Art on Call, a program of Cultural Tourism DC with support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, and the District Department of Transportation. Local support for this call box was provided by the Woodley Park Community Association and Shapiro & Company LLC.Visit www.woodleypark.org for map and more information.
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