Hotel Harrington, a landmark hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., that once claimed to be the oldest continuously run hotel in the nation's capital, is closing its doors next month.
The 242-room hotel, arguably best known by city residents for its insignia, one that is reminiscent of the Batman emblem or the Wu-Tang Clan symbol depending on the viewer, is slated to close on Dec. 12 after being sold, CoStar News has confirmed with the hotel. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and no sale has been filed in the city's recorder's office.
Also slated to close is Harry's Restaurant & Bar, a ground-floor restaurant that opened at the hotel in 1993. The gathering place drew attention in 2020 when the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, made Harry's and the Hotel Harrington its unofficial headquarters during its Capitol Hill protests contesting the election of Joe Biden as president.
A follow-up email to the hotel for additional information on the sale and subsequent closing did not receive a response before publication. News of the hotel's closing was reported earlier by Allison Papson of Fox 5 DC.
Harrington Mills, a hotelier, and business partner Charles W. McCutchen opened the Hotel Harrington in 1914 roughly five blocks from the White House at 436 11th St. NW, according to the hotel.
Designed to meet the "popular one-room-and-bath-demand," an unusual concept at the time, according to the Washington Post, the original six-story hotel designed by the architecture firm Rich & FitzSimons included 80 rooms as well as a dining room and a two-story lobby with a mezzanine, all appointed in marble.
Due to its popularity, Mills and McCutchen in 1918 doubled the size of the lobby and built a 12-story annex along E Street that included a two-story ballroom and 100 additional hotel rooms, an expansion that placed the hotel among the city's largest at the time. A final expansion in 1925 that included a 12-story wing with another 125 rooms filled in the rest of the E Street block to 12th Street. In 1938, the hotel reportedly became the city's first to include air conditioning.
The hotel opened the Pink Elephant Cocktail Lounge following the end of Prohibition in 1933 and later converted the white-tablecloth dining room to the self-service Kitcheteria following a boom in downtown workers during World War II. The Kitcheteria reportedly served more than 1 million meals annually during its run from 1948 to 1991.
Harry's Pub opened in the former Pink Elephant Lounge in 1993, and Harriet's Family Restaurant opened in 2005 in the former Kitcheteria.
The Harrington was also home to the city's first television station and transmission tower in 1946 and transmitted a teen dance television show called The Milt Grant Show from 1956 to 1961, regarded as a cultural icon of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Washington.
The pending closure comes as the Washington hotel market has turned the corner after a challenging recovery from the pandemic. Key performance indicators downtown have improved significantly this year thanks to the ongoing recoveries of business travel and group meetings, according to CoStar data. More than 1,200 rooms opened in 2022, the most since 2017, but supply-side pressures have eased in 2023.