ENVIRONS: Betty's Moving to Georgetown

The noted feminist Betty Freidan has moved out of her grand Kalorama apartment and is moving across the park. Her apartment in The Wyoming is listed at nearly $2 million. Her personal assistant tells the Reliable Source that the 83-year-old writer needs a smaller place. Her new digs? The Georgetown retirement home on Q Street, just west of the Dumbarton Bridge.

Earlier this year in a piece for The New York Times Magazine the writer Claire Messud reminisced about her old apartment in The Wyoming.

From The New York Times Magazine:

I am wistful, more wholeheartedly, for the graciousness of my former home, an apartment building called the Wyoming, which sits conveniently on the corner of Columbia Road at Connecticut Avenue: built, like many of the city's grand establishments, at the turn of the last century, it has an unsurpassable lobby, a cavernous and impeccably maintained confection of polished mosaic floors, luxuriously veined marble pillars (with a few trompe l'oeil pillars in plaster, for good measure) and chinoiserie murals, amounting to what one visitor likened, not unreasonably, to a bathhouse in Budapest. The Eisenhowers lived there, as do a number of contemporary writers and public figures, and it is said that the C.I.A. long kept an apartment overlooking the Russian Trade Federation across the road.

The Oculus would like to know whether residency at The Wyoming automatically qualifies you as a distinguised writer. And does anyone know what "chinoiserie murals" are? At least when you live there you get a great view of the Bloomberg White House Correspondents Dinner afterparty.

"Who Needs the Housework? Friedan's Moved to Smaller Digs" [The Washington Post]