The Watergate Hotel has always been a powerhouse. Originally, quite literally.
Rewind the history tapes back—way back—to the 1840s and '50s (and don't hit the erase button). Foggy Bottom, the Northwest D.C. neighborhood on the Potomac, was a capital of industry and an enclave of immigrants, its skies clouded with fumes by day and illuminated with oil lanterns by night. There, on the site of the future Watergate complex, emerged the Washington Gas Works, which provided safe, clean-burning, and reliable energy to an area ranging from the National Mall to the city outskirts.
Ever since, though, that particular slice of Foggy Bottom has had a checkered history. The site was mired in controversy even before the Watergate was conceived. The unlucky streak didn't take much of a break between groundbreaking and the era of Deep Throat, smoking guns, and “I am not a crook.” Perhaps it will finally end now.
On the heels of a nine-year, $125 million renovation by Euro Capital Properties, the Watergate reopens its doors on Tuesday as a luxury hotel with 336 rooms and two presidential suites. (Trump and Clinton can each set up shop, sans spies, should they be so bold). In its new incarnation, the Watergate is trying to reclaim the glitz and glamour of its pre-Nixon era—when Stevie Wonder would play tunes on the lobby piano and Andy Warhol threw parties in his private residence. Among the lavish details: Zebrano marble bathrooms, a heated rooftop lounge with views of the river, and a 12,000-square-foot Argentta spa. The going rates? $359 for a standard double, $800 for one-bedroom suites, and up to $12,000 for one of the presidential penthouses.
If none of it sounds particularly reminiscent of the 1970s, that’s intentional. A spokesperson told Bloomberg that the hotel is trying to harken “back to its glamorous heyday, pre-scandal” and has preserved little more than an original staircase and a 45-foot-long saltwater pool. A few cheeky exceptions: hotel keycards emblazoned with the words “No Need to Break In” and pens that say “I stole this from The Watergate Hotel.”
In other words, you can’t stay in the infamous Room 214, where police found key evidence of the White House-led burglary. (The hotel has been re-keyed with a whole new layout.) And no, you can’t cut your two-inch-thick filet mignon with vintage steak knives from the Nixon era. (They were all sold years ago.) Still, nobody will stop you from streaming All The President’s Men from the comfort of your goose down-topped bed. And no matter how much the hotel tries to whitewash its past, you can still savor the fun of sleeping on scandal-riddled ground by reading up on these seven secret scandals.
The Watergate stood for government corruption well before Richard Nixon came along.
In the 1920s, a Naval hospital on the site of the Watergate became emblematic of the divide between the private and public sector that persists to this day. Though the neighborhood was home to some of Washington’s most impoverished unskilled-labor communities, its residents had no access to the sprawling health-care compound in their back yards.
Years later, an additional round of controversy erupted around the Watergate’s oversized architectural plans. With backing from an Italian developer (and thus, the Vatican), the monumental design sparked heated debates about the separation of church and state—and which had the upper hand in shaping the city’s skyline. Ultimately, the building height was revised as to not compete with that of the Kennedy Center next door.
The architect was also a convicted Fascist.
Among Luigi Moretti’s best-known buildings is Rome's sprawling sports center, the Foro Italico—formerly called the Foro Mussolini. It's as good an indication as any that Mussolini was one of the architect’s biggest patrons. Throughout World War II, Moretti supported Mussolini and identified strongly with the National Fascist Party and its leaders; he was imprisoned briefly as a result of his ties to that party.
There was more than one Watergate break-in.
The hotel burglary of 1972 needs no introduction. But three years prior, in the Watergate apartment complex across the street, another incident raised eyebrows about the complex's security standards. In 1969, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods—a full-time Watergate resident and the woman later accused of deleting the smoking gun portion of the Oval Office tapes—arrived home to find that her jewelry box had been burglarized. According to records from the Washingtonian, damages amounted to thousands of dollars. To this day, the burglary is considered a coincidence, unrelated to the subsequent Nixon scandal. Then again …
The former hotel was a refuge for more than one disgraced politician.
The Watergate's apartment buildings were chock-full of residents who served on Nixon's cabinet—many of whom were indicted following the scandal of '72. By then, there was already some precedent for the trend. In 1968, the president of Panama was said to have taken up residence on the hotel’s ninth floor after being overthrown by a junta.
It was also the site of a lobbyist sex scandal.
In 2005, the San Diego Union Tribune got a scoop that lobbyist Brent Wilkes had systematically “greased the wheels” of his political friendships, exploiting them for personal and professional gain. Besides wining and dining his powerful allies, the newspaper reported that he also bribed lawmakers by offering them access to a “hospitality suite” at the Watergate. In the multiple-bedroom suite, they'd find a rotating cast of escorts that amounted to a lobbyist-backed prostitution ring.
A mob of 300 activists stormed the Watergate two years before Nixon was accused of any wrongdoing.
In protest of the conviction of the Chicago Seven, demonstrators “broke windows and splattered paint of the Watergate Hotel, where Attorney General John Mitchell and other officials of the Nixon Administration resided,” according to historian Daniel Burton-Rose’s book, Guerrilla USA.
Nobody wanted to buy the Watergate—or its deeply discounted relics.
“This is an opportunity to invest in one of the city's most famous landmarks,” said the president of Alex Cooper Auctioneers in 2009, as he was kicking off the Watergate’s most significant estate sale. But nobody cared. A previous sale should have been a good indication of the failure that was to follow. In 2007, every last Watergate-emblazoned platter, wine glass, and bed was sold in a sort of open house. The event was predicted to raise $700,000, but many pieces went for under $10. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that when the building itself was listed for $25 million two years later, the bidding opened to a chorus of crickets.
