The Mayflower Renaissance Washington DC Hotel, known locally as simply The Mayflower, is a historic hotel in downtown Washington, DC located on Connecticut Avenue NW.
It is the largest luxury hotel in the U.S. capital and the longest continuously operating hotel in the Washington D.C. area, and a rival of the nearby Willard InterContinental and Hay-Adams Hotels.
The Mayflower is known as Washington, D.C.’s “Second Best Address” (second to the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), a reference attributed to President Harry Truman during his stay at the hotel during White House renovations. The hotel is recognized as one of the Historic Hotels of America by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
The Mayflower was built by Allen E. Walker, the land developer behind Brookland and other residential neighborhoods of Washington. Nicknamed the "Grande Dame of Washington" at its opening in 1925, the hotel was said to contain more gold trim than any other building except the Library of Congress. An extensive renovation completed in 1988 uncovered decorative effects, including a skylight, which had been covered up due to blackout regulations during World War II.
The original interior design included four over life-sized portraits of the first four presidents by painter and muralist Louis Grell of Chicago.
Shortly after opening, the Mayflower hosted a ball for the presidential inauguration of Calvin Coolidge. Although Coolidge himself never arrived, the hotel has sponsored a ball every Inauguration Day since. Franklin D. Roosevelt worked on his famous "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" inaugural address while a guest. His successor Harry S. Truman declared his intention to seek a full term in 1948 at a dinner at the Mayflower, and resided there for the first 90 days of that term while the White House was undergoing renovations.
The Mayflower's lounge, Town & Country, has long been a social center for Washington's elite. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was said to lunch there daily with Clyde Tolson for over twenty years.
The hotel came into the spotlight several times in relation to political-sex scandals. President Kennedy's supposed mistress Judith Campbell Exner was established in the hotel and supposedly sneaked into the White House when his wife was away.
Monica Lewinsky was staying there when her affair with Bill Clinton was in the news. The Mayflower was also the location where Lewinsky had been photographed with President Clinton at a campaign event not long before the 1996 election; this photograph would become an iconic component of the media coverage of the scandal.
On March 10, 2008, The New York Times reported that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had on the evening of February 13 patronized a high class prostitution service called Emperors Club VIP and met for over two hours with a $1,000-an-hour call girl in room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel, where Spitzer registered under the pseudonym George Fox, but with his own Fifth Avenue Manhattan address. The resulting scandal caused him to announce his resignation on March 12, 2008.