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You are all so nice!
Ikicihan, yardım için teşekkür ederim!
The Islamic Center opened in 1957. Part of its mission is to promote a better understanding of Islam in the United States, but it is also an active mosque.
The Turkish Embassy moved near it in 1999. Before that, the embassy was a few blocks away in what is now the Turkish ambassador´s residence (a photo is on my profile). Turkey began renting this building in 1932 and then bought it in 1936. It was built in 1910 for an American industrialist by George Oakley Totten Jr., an American architect who had briefly been the official architect for Sultan Abdülhamid II. (I find this all so interesting!) Evidently, the residence has Ottoman touches inside. This from Cornucopia magazine:
"The man who built the mansion, Edward Hamlin Everett, was a mogul from Cleveland, Ohio who had invented the bottle top, earning the nickname “the Bottle-Top King." ... His chosen architect, George Oakley Totten Jr, was a graduate of the Paris École des Beaux-Arts and, like many from that school, a master of the eclecticism popular in the first decade of the 20th century. Uniquely, however, he had spent time in Istanbul, in the employ of both the sultan and the grand vizier. Totten had travelled to the Ottoman Empire in 1908 to construct the chancery of the American embassy – an annex to the Palazzo Corpi that is still visible today. While there he was commissioned to build a grand residence for Izzet Pasha, a prominent figure in the court of Sultan Abdülhamid II, later to be grand vizier. Abdülhamid himself then employed him as “Private Architect to the Sultan”, but before Totten could accede to this position, the sultan was ousted in the Young Turk Revolution of 1909. Returning to Washington DC, Totten quickly became the darling of those seeking statement architecture in the city’s fashionable Northwest."
If you would like to read more from this article, which tells about Mehmet Münir Ertegün, the first ambassador to live in the residence, and his family:
http://www.cornucopia.net/magazine/articles/the-bottle-top-mansion/
Edited (12/11/2012) by trip
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