When an owner no longer has use for a building, they'll typically put it on the market for sale. But what if the owner is a foreign country — and one that's lost diplomatic ties with the United States?
That's exactly the situation of the former Iranian Embassy and the former Iranian ambassador's residence, two mansions that sit along the prominent stretch of Massachusetts Avenue known as Embassy Row.
The buildings have been empty for decades, but they're not for sale. A WAMU listener who regularly drives past them was therefore surprised to notice construction activity around the properties recently. "I thought about just dropping by and asking one of the construction workers what's really going on there, but I thought they may see me as a security risk," she said. So instead, she submitted her question to WAMU's What's With Washington.
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If you shake the massive wood doors of the former Iranian embassy at 3003 Massachusetts Avenue NW, you'll find them locked shut. WAMU tried to get a tour and an interview about the property for this story, but was denied access by the State Department.
But from photos and newspaper clippings, we know that those doors used to open wide for Hollywood starlets, Washington socialites, international diplomats and American politicians in the 1970s.
The embassy was known for hosting lavish parties — we're talking bowls of caviar. Former guests included the Nixons, Kennedys, Reagans, Kissingers and stars like Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand.
At the center of the party was always one man: Ardeshir Zahedi, the Iranian ambassador to the U.S. from 1960-1962 and again from 1973-1979. He had dark hair, nice suits and a devil-may-care attitude. He even dated Elizabeth Taylor for a time. (When I reached him at his home in Switzerland, he called her his "special girlfriend.")
"He put champagne in one of her shoes and drank from it," said Hossein Askari, a professor emeritus of business and international relations at George Washington University who knew Zahedi back then. Askari didn't attend the parties — not his scene — but he would read about them in the newspaper the next day.
"Iran had gotten all this money all of a sudden," Askari said, "and it went on a shopping spree."
Zahedi oversaw the embassy's construction during his first stint as ambassador. It helped that he was very close to the Shah of Iran, which meant he essentially had an open checkbook at a time when Iran was flush with oil money.
"It's like Persepolis," Zahedi said from Switzerland, as he described the interior of the Embassy's famous Persian room. "A beautiful house."
The Party's Over
The good times ended abruptly in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. The overthrow of the Shah and the Iranian hostage crisis contributed to the total disintegration of the diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and Tehran.
Both countries' embassies became symbols of the times. Iranian students held Americans hostage inside the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days, and the embassy now houses an anti-American museum.
In the States, Zahedi and the rest of the Iranian diplomats moved out of the dozen or so Iran-owned buildings in D.C. and other cities like New York and Houston. They haven't been back since.
Local real estate agents familiar with the Embassy Row area today estimate that the former Iranian ambassador's residence could sell for as much as $12 million — if it were on the market. It sits right on the edge of Kalorama, one of the city's most high-end residential areas, where the Obamas, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and Jeff Bezos all own property.
"I think it's one of the best neighborhoods in the world," said Bobbie Brewster, a longtime resident and real estate agent with experience selling diplomatic properties. "It has a sample of the best architects in the world right here."
Buildings Frozen In Time
All those Iranian-owned buildings are now caught in a strange real estate limbo. When the U.S. suspends diplomatic relations with a country, the U.S. State Department must protect that country's U.S. properties under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. It gets the money for maintenance from renting them out. It also helps that diplomatic properties are tax-exempt.
The State Department has, at one time or another, had custody over properties owned by Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. Its Office of Foreign Missions (OFM) currently rents out Iranian properties in San Francisco, New York and other cities.
However, the process doesn't always run smoothly. According to a 2010 State Department report, OFM isn't adequately staffed to maintain all the buildings. It's also had several issues with tenants getting behind on rent to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here in D.C., a tenant was evicted from the former ambassador's residence in 2002 because she owed about $750,000 in rent. A similar situation occurred at the former Iranian consulate in San Francisco's posh Pacific Heights neighborhood last year, when the landlords decided to pull the building off the rental market.
What's Next For These Properties?
According to the State Department report, the former ambassador's residence needed more than $1.17 million in renovations to get it ready to rent. But that was in 2010.
Then, last spring, the State Department submitted plans to renovate the 18,000-square-foot building. Two weeks ago, contractors were putting in new windows; they confirmed to WAMU that they'd been hired by the department.
Next door, however, the former embassy also sits empty. The 2010 report noted it need between $10 million and $14 million in renovations to be functional again, but renting it would not offset those high costs. Instead, it was mothballed.
According to real estate agent Bobbie Brewster, it'd be almost impossible to find a suitable tenant for the building. It just looks so much like an embassy – an Iranian embassy. That means it could remain empty until Iran and the U.S. restore diplomatic ties.
"The best that you could get out of that building would be to have it come back to life and have relations brought back together again," she said, somewhat optimistically. "Washington is a builder of relationships. Parties were here, and relationships were built."
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