Clause 9 Takes Away The Landlord's Key. Here Is What A Safe House Costs.

WASHINGTON, United States — Clause 9 of a seven-year lease signed in Washington on 24 August 1961 does the thing a landlord almost never does. It gives away the key.

"The Lessor covenants that neither he nor his agents shall enter upon the demised premises, for inspection, for repair, or for any other purpose whatsoever, save upon seven days' prior written notice and in the company of a representative of the Lessee."

The demised premises are the top two floors of a row house in the 1400 block of Kestrel Street NW: 2,100 square feet, one street door shared with the family below. The tenant of record is the Ashfield Foundation for Human Ecology, a charity whose own filings report four employees and a grant programme in psychology.

The lease, eleven contractors' invoices and a utility meter card came out of a strongbox in an attic in March 2026, when the Delahunt family sold the house.

The four riders

The lease itself is an ordinary Washington form of its period: $3,900 a year, quarterly in advance, seven years to 31 August 1968.

The riders are typed on different paper and initialled twice. There are four of them and they do all the work.

Clause 9 removes the landlord's right of entry, which is the right every landlord keeps.

Clause 11 puts the fit-out at the tenant's cost, to the tenant's design, with no landlord approval of drawings.

Clause 14 has the tenant indemnify the landlord against any claim arising from "alterations to interior partitions", and waives reinstatement at the end of the term. The landlord never has to know what came down, and never has to have it put back.

Clause 19 lets the tenant end the lease on twenty-four hours' written notice, without penalty, rent apportioned to the day.

"Any one of these I have drafted," said Perpetua Manalo-Reisz, who read the file with the parties masked. "Together they are a different instrument. Nine and eleven mean he cannot see the works. Fourteen means he is not liable for what they are. Nineteen means the tenant can be gone by Tuesday and he cannot ask why."

What the invoices say was built

Marchetti & Croom, general contractors, billed the Foundation eleven times between June and November 1961. The total is $19,412, or five years of the rent.

Sound-attenuating partitions, two layers of board on staggered studs, four walls of one room: $4,780. A second door at the head of the third-floor stair, solid core, an inch and three quarters, with closer, cylinder and astragal: $214. Acoustic lining to a closet, six surfaces, no shelf or rail or hook: $340. Sixteen duplex outlets on two dedicated circuits in one rear room: $612. One partition taken down and rebuilt thirty inches south of its old line: $1,105.

Halvard Ozoemena-Reyes read the schedule with no address, tenant or decade attached.

The meter

Electricity account 4-1179 opens in the tenant's name in August 1961 and closes in September 1968. The utility's bound ledgers for the square survive, so we can put it beside its neighbours.

It draws 5.6 times the median of the twelve comparable upper-floor accounts on the same square, every year, for seven years.

The shape is stranger than the size. The curve has no summer in it. Month to month it varies by under eleven per cent — in a Washington building with no central plant, leased to four people.

The join

Four of Marchetti & Croom's invoice numbers — 1147, 1152, 1163 and 1178 — appear again in the released index to federal voucher series 14-B-129, against four payments in the same amounts to a payee recorded only as a contractor in the District.

The index survived a destruction order the substantive files did not, a pattern this desk has reported before. The vouchers behind it are withheld. We have appealed.

What the trust says

Marguerite Lascelles-Obuya, counsel to the Foundation's residual trust, replies below and her reply is the best-argued thing on this page. Every clause has a lawful reading. A charity holding confidential material has an obvious reason to bar a landlord with a plumber in tow.

Then she volunteers a sentence nobody asked her for: that no person was ever accommodated overnight on those premises, and that the Foundation held no licence for the care or custody of any person.

We had asked about a lease.

What this desk takes from it

Survivors of these programmes have described rooms like this for forty years, and have been asked, every time, for paper. Here is paper. It does not name them and it does not need them.

A controlled setting, in 1961 dollars, cost $19,412 and four riders. The riders are the cheaper half and they are the half that matters: a landlord who cannot come in, a fit-out he never sees, a partition he is indemnified against, and a door out of the whole arrangement that opens in a day.

Nobody writes twenty-four hours into a seven-year lease unless somebody has already thought about the morning the rooms have to stop existing.