The Cairo

Cairo Apartment Building
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
File:DC Cairo Entrance1.jpg
Location	Washington, D. C.
Built	1894
Architect	Thomas Franklin Schneider
Architectural style	Moorish and Romanesque Revival
NRHP reference No.	94001033
Added to NRHP	September 9, 1994

The Cairo apartments, at 1615 Q St. NW in Washington, D.C. is a landmark in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the District's tallest residential (non-monument, non-government) building.

The 164-feet-tall brick building was designed by architect Thomas Franklin Schneider and completed in 1894 as the city's first "residential skyscraper". Today, The Cairo is a condo building, home to renters and owners.

The Egyptian theme of the building is stamped across its Moorish and Romanesque Revival features. Gargoyles perch high above the visitor who looks up from the front entrance. Some of these gargoyles are winged griffons staring down from cornices, but some are much more light-hearted. Along the first floor are elephant heads, which look left and right from the stone window sills of the front windows and interlock trunks at the corners of the entrance arch. Three floors above on the fourth floor are both dragon and dwarf crosses. The stone facade is also carved with an inlaid design that hints at more exotic Middle Eastern origins.

History

At 12 floors, it towers above nearby buildings. At its opening in 1894, the height of The Cairo caused a tremendous uproar among local residents, who dubbed it "Schneider's Folly", and lobbied Congress to limit the height of residential buildings in the District of Columbia to prevent more "skyscrapers" from being built. The resulting 1899 Heights of Buildings Act has kept the city's skyline unusually low for an American city.

The building became the Cairo Hotel around 1900, and became the center of DC social culture. Its guests and tenants have included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Edison. The ballroom was frequently the center of social gatherings and political meetings of the political and societal power-players of the period. On March 15, 1897, the deposed queen of Hawaii, "Queen Liliuokalani", spent some time in The Cairo while she lobbied President Cleveland for compensation for the U.S. invasion and takeover of Hawaii in January 1893. The high society of Washington would often hold meetings at the Cairo Hotel, like the Woman's National Democratic League in 1913 with a Congressman from New Mexico.

In the December 2, 1923, Washington Post, an advertisement for the Cairo Hotel reads: "The CAIRO HOTEL. Absolutely Fireproof. A hotel which has demonstrated its value in years of service to a discriminating clientele. Retains with bath, per day Rooms with detached bath, per day Two-room suites, per day Three-room suites, per day & parties visiting the National Capitol and families desiring to make Washington their temporary or permanent home, the Cairo Hotel offers exceptional advantages of location and environment, construction and arrangement, equipment and management. - James T. Howard, Manager" In June 1940, one newspaper headline reported, "Two Bandits Rob Cairo Hotel, Escape in Chase".

A party held on the night of November 30, 1940, featured 500 canaries singing beneath the chandeliers in the grand ballroom . The building also had a bowling alley and a coffee shop.

In 1954, the Cairo Hotel hosted Sunday mambo dance parties, played by Buddy Rowell and promoted by Maurice Gervitsch, known as "Groggy". These mambo dance parties featured a 12-piece band and had mostly white and Jewish attendance, being the segregated American 1950's. These glamorous and sensational days lasted into the late 1950s.

The building was sold in 1957 as a 267-room hotel, and the new owners announced plans on October 12 to spend $100,000 refurbishing the structure. In 1958, a fire caused by an electrical short-circuit on the sixth floor led to $25,000 worth of damage, but no structural problems.

The Cairo began to decline during the 1960s, when it was inhabited by squatters, prostitutes, drug addicts, student protestors, criminals and even feral dogs. In June 1964, the FBI tracked a 24-year-old escaped convict to the Cairo Hotel.

In 1966, the DC Dept of Health considered leasing the run-down building for use as an alcoholics rehabilitation center. After a series of failed attempts at renovation, including a closure on August 7, 1972, the building was restored in 1974 under the leadership of architect Arthur Cotton Moore. It was converted into condominiums in 1979.

At the building's centennial celebration in October 1994, Ross Elementary school students sang Happy Birthday to the building, in thanks for a $1,000 donation made by the Cairo Condominium Unit Owners Association. Ward 2 Council member Jack Evans read a proclamation declaring it Cairo Day in DC. Of the building, he said, "It is a real monument in the area."

21st century

The U-shaped building surrounds a Zen stone garden courtyard. The stone front steps lead up through a glass foyer into a marble-floored lobby with Egyptian styled columns and a comfortable lounge. A big mirror and photographs of the construction of the "Cairo Hotel" and other contemporary scenes adorn the lobby's eastern wall. Two square columns of red-orange marble anchor the space in front of two elevators. These elevators serve the tenants of the 12 floors above. Between the elevators is a stairway that leads down through double glass doors into the central courtyard.

At the two interior southern corners are wide staircases of marble and wrought iron that span the height of the building. Some sections of hallways are marble-floored, and each apartment's outside door handle is a marble orb. Apartments have exposed red brick walls, and range in size from small studios to multi-level 2- and 3-bedroom units.

Today, The Cairo is in the center of the Dupont Circle neighborhood and its rooftop deck provides one of the most expansive views of the District's NW skyline with views of the Washington National Cathedral, Georgetown, the Washington Monument, the Capitol, The Catholic University of America and many other landmark sights. It sits three blocks east of the Dupont Circle metro station, near the strip of restaurants, bars and shops along 17th Street.

On September 2, 2007, the Board of Directors of the Cairo Condominium voted to approve a $2.1 million brick repointing project. Atlantic Company, a construction and restoration engineering firm will conduct this brick repair work from November 2007 through March/April 2009. Atlantic Company will replace deteriorated, defective and mismatched brick masonry, remove and repoint all mortar joints of all exterior walls, install control joints in certain locations to address wall expansion movement, patch and repair exterior stonework, etc. The owners of the individual Cairo condominiums were each assessed a special fee proportional to the size of their units, to pay for this construction. This fee ranged from $7,980 to over $25,000 per owner. It is not a public building, so the costs were entirely privately financed. Work began on the brick restoration and repair in January 2008 on the west side of the structure.

About 11:15pm on May 29, 2007, for the first time in recent memory, a fire emptied the Cairo of its roughly 400 residents. At least nine emergency vehicles responded to the blaze. The fire damaged one of the central units of the 10th floor, damaging it heavily, while some nearby units were left with water damage. Because each unit is isolated from the others with firewalls, the fire was entirely contained to a single unit.

External links

• Metro Weekly feature article, High Times: A Brief History of 17th Street's Tallest Resident
• Washington Post: D.C.'s Fear of Heights
• Cultural Tourism DC: facts about The Cairo
• Google Maps satellite view of The Cairo
• Thomas F. Schneider, architect of The Cairo, biographical notes
• The Cairo: Tower of Style and Elegance, Washington Post review, 1996
• Testing the Upper Limits of D.C. Building Height Act, Washington Post, an architect's view
• Turning Points: Moments in DC's History, Washingtonian Magazine, "No Tall Buildings" section