Alexandria Ballroom

The City Hotel and Tavern

View of Gadsby’s Tavern. Library of Congress

The City Hotel was constructed in 1792 on the corner of North Royal and Cameron Streets in Alexandria, Virginia. Tavern keeper John Wise (1738–1815) commissioned it as an addition to his adjacent tavern, which was already a popular meeting place for locals and travelers alike. In 1793, following the completion of the building, he advertised a “new and elegant Three-Story Brick-House…which was built for a Tavern, and has twenty commodious, well-finished Rooms in it.” The three-story, four-bay facade reflects the eighteenth-century American preference for symmetrical, classically inspired English architectural design. The hotel was on the mail stage and coach lines that traversed the mid-Atlantic region and provided a continuous flow of customers traveling to and from the nation’s capital in Washington, D.C.

English-born John Gadsby (1766–1844) leased the property from Wise in 1796 and assumed operation of the establishment until 1808. Under his management, Gadsby’s Tavern became the center of social and political life in Alexandria. The dual structure continued to operate as a hotel under various proprietors until the late nineteenth century.

Setting

Situated on the Potomac River, Alexandria was established as a British colonial fort in the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century, it had developed into a sizable town with a large population of merchants and craftsmen.  It was also a robust trading port for tobacco, wheat, and imported goods. The agricultural commodities traded out of Alexandria were largely harvested by enslaved people on the nearby plantations owned by Virginia’s elite class of landed gentry, including George Washington, who resided about ten miles south at Mount Vernon.

In 1789, the city was included among the lands Virginia ceded to form the District of Columbia, the nation’s new capital.  When John Wise constructed his new hotel, Alexandria boasted a population of just under three thousand people, about one-fifth of whom were enslaved. As the premiere port on the Potomac River, the city continued to grow in subsequent decades; however the physical destruction of the District of Columbia by British troops during the War of 1812, along with later economic recessions, prevented the municipality from keeping up with the nation’s other booming ports, such as nearby Baltimore, Maryland. Alexandria and the other lands on the southern shores of the Potomac River were ultimately returned to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1847.

Image: Plan of the town of Alexandria in the District of Columbia, 1798. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division 

Interior

View of the Alexandria Ballroom

Tavern ballrooms, like the one at Gadsby’s Tavern, were meant to be multi-purpose and flexible. Often the most elegant room in an establishment, it hosted balls, concerts, lectures, auctions, club meetings, and other large gatherings. An 1802 inventory of the ballroom reveals that among its sparse furnishings were objects related to lighting (chandeliers, looking glasses) and heat (fireplace implements) as well as curtains and blinds. Chairs, tables for dining, and other furniture could be brought in or taken out as needed.  The raised balcony provided a gallery for musicians that both maximized the space in the ballroom and amplified the sound of the music. 

Although it was the site of refined entertainments, the plastered walls and chair-rail-height dados reflected the practical side of the room’s function. Higher up, away from the scuffs and kicks of furniture, hands, and feet, the room’s richly carved ornament is ordered, almost perfectly symmetrical, and reflects the principals and motifs of Georgian decoration, a waning style in the 1790s when the room was built and Neoclassicism was on the rise in America. 

English interpretations

Left: Plate L from Abraham Swan’s The British Architect (1745). Right: Chimney-breast in the Alexandria Ballroom

The rich woodwork of the ballroom reflects the continuation of the Georgian decorative tradition into the early Federal period. The scrolled pediments over the doors and mantels, the flared moldings that embellish the doorways, windows, and mantels, the fretwork chair rail, and the dentil-molded cornice are similar to examples popularized by English pattern books of the 1740s and 1750s. The room’s two chimney-breasts are a simplified version of a design from Abraham Swan’s The British Architect (1745). Though Swan was most popular in the colonies in the period preceding the revolution, an American edition of his book was published in Philadelphia in 1775 and his classically inspired designs remained in use in the decades following American independence.

Social gatherings

George Cruikshank. Dos-a-dos – Accidents in Quadrille Dancing, 1817. England. Hand-colored etching on paper. Art Institute of Chicago

The ballroom at the City Hotel and Tavern offered Alexandrians a large meeting space that served a variety of functions for different occasions. Newspaper advertisements record that the ballroom, often referred to as “the assembly room”, hosted club and society meetings, instrumental and vocal concerts, lectures, and individual entertainers such as ventriloquists. Dance assemblies were common. The tavern also served as a ticketing vendor for other such events hosted in the city.  

Although Gadsby’s Tavern maintained a well-regarded reputation, the patrons that taverns attracted also made them possible places of misdeeds and indulgence. In 1798, Gadsby explicitly advertised in the Alexandria Advertiser that his tavern was “supplied with every article requisite for the comfort of those who honor him with their custom…It shall be his peculiar duty to merit their favor by preserving order and propriety.  For the more effectually carrying this his intention into execution, no species of gambling whatever will be allowed….”

George Washington’s birthnight alls

Jean-Léon Gerome Ferris, The Victory Ball, 1781, ca. 1929. Virginia Historical Society, Lora Robins Collection of Virginia Art

The most remembered events to occur at Gadsby’s Tavern were annual birthnight balls for George Washington. Following the English tradition of celebrating the birthday of the monarch, the public celebration of George Washington’s birthday began in 1778 at Valley Forge. Washington, who was noted for his skill in and love of dancing, attended the parties held in his honor at Gadsby’s Tavern in 1798 and 1799, after he had retired from the presidency in 1797. He recorded in his diary on February 11, 1799; “Went up to Alexandria to the celebration of my birth day. Many Manœuvres were performed by the Uniform Corps and an elegant Ball & Supper at Night.” It was to be the last birthnight balls he attended. In November of that year, the Alexandria General Assemblies organization invited Washington to an upcoming series of dances. Washington declined stating, “Mrs Washington and myself have been honoured with your polite invitation… But alas! our dancing days are no more.” He died about a month later on December 14, 1799.

Image: Gilbert Stuart (American, 1755–1828). George Washington, begun 1795. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 25 1/4 in. (76.8 x 64.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1907 (07.160)