Photo by Paul Frederiksen.

A grand, still-standing mansion on 16th Street in Dupont Circle was in the news this week as ANC 2B voted against the Republic of the Congo’s request to designate it as a embassy chancery. After reading about the current state of the building, I was naturally curious about its past.

The mansion was built in 1894 for U.S. Supreme Court justice Henry Billings Brown. Designed by William Henry Miller, the mansion has 18 rooms, 12,000 square feet, and a main staircase with hand-carved griffins. Brown lived in the house until he died in 1913. Following his death, the house changed hands many times. From 1924 to 1927 it served as the home to the Persian Delegation to the United States. In 1942, the Zionist Organization of America purchased the mansion and it served as the organization’s headquarters until 1947.

The home is called the Toutorsky mansion because Basil Peter Toutorsky, a concert pianist, purchased the property in 1947. Toutorksy was Russian-born with quite a life: he survived the explosion of the battleship Empress Maria in 1916 and fought for the White Russians who tried to overthrow the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He came to the United States in 1923, and bought the house with his wife, Mexican opera singer Maria Ignacia Howard Toutorsky. They opened the Toutorsky Academy of Music and ran it out of their residence for nearly four decades. Toutorsky, who died at the age of 93 in 1989, bequeathed the house to Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory of Music.

Johns Hopkins rented rooms in the mansion to students for $1 a month. The university eventually sold the mansion for $808,000 in 1990 and used the money to endow a piano studio and a scholarship fund named for Toutorsky. The buyer renovated the house and used it for various fundraising events and rented out it from time to time.

In 2001, Humberto Gonzalez bought the property for $2.2 million. He wanted to run it as bed-and-breakfast inn and event venue, but neighborhood residents objected. He rented out 6 bedrooms in the building. Now, following ANC 2B’s vote against the Republic of the Congo turning the building into a chancery (which is not the final say), we wait to see what will come of this gorgeous, imposing mansion on 16th street.