“Deep Throat” Parking Garage

Today, it’s a place for parking cars.  Forty-five years ago, it was a place for parking cars and leaking secrets.

The parking garage at 1400 Key Boulevard and 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia, may look like a run-of-the-mill garage, but it actually played a key roll in presidential history, one that resulted in not only the resignation of a president, but years and years of the media giving seemingly every political scandal a name with a suffix of “-gate.”

As presidential scandals go, Watergate is definitely one of the most well-known.  To quickly recap, in 1972, Richard Nixon was running for a second term.  One night, some people broke into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Hotel to do spy things.  They got caught.  Turns out, they were hired by Nixon’s re-election committee and there were other shady goings-on too.  There was an investigation.  There were court battles.  There were secret tapes and a coverup.  High-level officials left their jobs (some voluntarily, some not), and eventually Richard Nixon himself resigned the presidency.  It was a whole thing.

An important element of all this was reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post that uncovered a tangled web of “dirty tricks” and criminal activity.  A key source of information was “Deep Throat,” a source high up in the government with insider knowledge.  A Post editor came up with this moniker because the source provided “deep background” to Woodward.  Oh, and also because of porn.  In 2005, Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI at the time of the scandal, revealed that he was the source known as Deep Throat.

Fast forward to today: the parking garage where Felt and Woodward would rendezvous is still a parking garage, but perhaps not for much longer.  In June 2014, the Arlington County Board voted to demolish the garage to make way for a new multi-use development.  There was a flurry of news articles in January 2017 (the earliest possible start date for the project as determined by the Board) about the upcoming demolition, so when I visited in March of that year, my brother suggested we go before it was too late.  That was 17 months ago, and as far as I can tell, the garage is still standing (it’s still listed on the operator’s web site as having parking available).  But I’m not sure how long that will be the case.

When visiting the garage, there isn’t all that much to see.  It’s a parking garage, not an intentional tourist attraction.  There is a historic marker outside, which I understand will remain even after the demolition.  I snapped a quick pic (displayed at the top of this post) and then we headed inside.

Since we had taken the Metro there and did not have a vehicle, we entered the garage on foot and began our search for D32, the parking spot where it all happened.  It wasn’t too difficult to find, especially since a helpful stranger had marked the spot.  This consisted of a short article stuck on a column, protected by some plastic wrap and safety tape.  While a trained curator might scoff at the presentation (not to mention the poor archival qualities of Saran Wrap), it was nice someone did this.  The parking spot deserved recognition.

Once we located the spot we goofed off a bit pretending to share scandalous secrets about the president as we posed for photos.  Fortunately, this was around 9:15 PM so there weren’t other people around to witness our historical irreverence.  Even today, the garage seems like a low-key place that would be a good meeting spot to hold confidential exchanges undetected.

So that was that.  One of the best parts of the visit actually came 45 after we left.  When I posted our pics online, Facebook asked me to provide some details to help fill out their profile on this location.