Pink Palace

The Inter-American Defense Board headquarters, located at 2600 16th Street, N.W., is a monumental Venetian Late Gothic Revival residence constructed in 1905 as part of a plan to create a grand entrance into the nation's capital along 16th Street. Constructed to the plans of noted local architect George Oakley Totten, Jr., it stands as one of Washington's most interesting and elegant residential structures. Sited prominently at the height of the 16th Street hill, the building was part of an ambitious design by Mrs. John B. Henderson, a local real estate magnate, and socialite, to create a grand official entrance to the city leading down 16th Street, N.W. to the White House. The house, in its style, siting, and scale is illustrative not only of Mrs. Henderson's grand intentions to turn what she considered to be an architecturally uninteresting town into an elegant city but also of the federal government's renewed interest, in the turn of this century, in creating a city worthy of being the nation's capital. This building, popularly known as the Pink Palace, is an excellent example of the type of grand, in-town estate envisioned and constructed by Mrs. Henderson along 16th Street.