He rode the crest of Coolidge Prosperity to fashion a fortune in the Washington building boom of the 1920s, but lost virtually all of it with the crash of the stock market in 1929.

IT IS NOT TOO MUCH OF AN EXAGGERATION to say that Harry Wardman built Washington. Wardman had redesigned the residential and commercial landscape of Washington, but he was left entirely out of the picture he had helped create by a single, apparently unwitting, stroke of the pen. He did not then realize, he told the committee, that he was surrendering all rights to control the vast array of properties he had assembled over more than 25 years of hard work - a business at one time valued in excess of $30 million.

As he fidgeted with a Panama hat balanced on one knee, Wardman recounted his version of how “gangsters, gunmen, and three-shell men” had pulled the rug out from under the real-estate empire he had built in the nation’s capital.įive years earlier, on the evening of August 25, 1930, Wardman had been in New York City to sign some financial papers. He had come down to Capitol Hill to set the record - or at least his end of it - straight, before a congressional panel with the imposing title of House Select Committee on Investigation of Real Estate Bondholders’ Reorganizations. AS HE FACED CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS in an eleventh-hour attempt to salvage his reputation, if not his fortune, Harry Wardman swayed nervously in the witness chair.Įven at 62, though slightly florid, the one-time kingpin of the Washington real-estate business had not lost the vitality and vigor that had compelled him so often to work 20-hour days.

The first tycoon