Our History

1229 NINETEENTH STREET, NW WASHINGTON, DC 20036

Located just south of historic Dupont Circle, 1229 Nineteenth Street was built in 1880 by D.W. Zantzinger as a typical row house facing N Street, with 1824 N Street as its address. In 1901, New York Senator Chauncey M. Depew purchased the home as a wedding gift to his niece, Ann Depew Paulding.

Senator Depew, who was Chairman of the Board of the New York Central Railroad and the Vanderbilt Family’s representative in Washington, hired the prestigious Washington architecture firm of Ludlow & Valentine to redesign the home. Ludlow & Valentine shifted the entrance to Nineteenth Street, added a garden room, and renovated the entire home in the Colonial Revival style popular at the turn of the century.

Senator Depew was also a mentor to Theodore Roosevelt and it is believed that the Senator came to know the house when it was rented by Roosevelt during his time in Washington between 1889 and 1897, as a member of the Civil Service Commission and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Miss Paulding did not marry, however, and leased the home for several years. Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler purchased the home in 1924 and lived there until his death in 1939, using it as his chambers until the Supreme Court building was finished in 1935.

Justice Butler gained fame as one of the “Four Horsemen” on the Court who opposed all of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal measures and was one of the targets of Roosevelt’s ill-fated “court packing” scheme. Justice Butler, however was a staunch defender of personal liberties, having voted in dissent against the use of wiretaps without warrants and having stated in another case that “abhorrence, however, great, of persistent and menacing crime will not excuse transgression in the courts of the legal rights of the worst offenders.”

The house remained a private residence through the years of World War II and even saw service as a boarding house during the Washington housing shortage after the war.

In 1947, the building was purchased by three ex-New Dealers, Judge Thurman Arnold, future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and Paul Porter, who used the building as the principal office of their law firm until 1979.

Henry Goldberg acquired the building in 1985 and it became the home of Goldberg, Godles, Wiener & Wright. After considerable renovation and landscaping, the distinctive property has been restored to the style and beauty it had upon completion of its renovation in the first years of the 20th Century.