All the President's Men|The Watergate Office Building — Where a Piece of Tape Started Everything

The film opens without a word of dialogue worth remembering: five men in surgical gloves moving through a darkened office suite, and a security guard finding tape laid across a door latch. Alan J. Pakula shot that sequence inside the real building. The guard who found the tape on 17 June 1972, Frank Wills, was hired to play himself, walking the same corridors three years later for a camera instead of a flashlight beam.

The Democratic National Committee had its headquarters on the sixth floor of 2600 Virginia Avenue NW, one of six curved concrete slabs that Luigi Moretti finished between 1965 and 1971 on the old Washington Gas Light works beside the Potomac. Moretti's design was meant to be Roman and civic — scalloped balconies, a stepped skyline, a private town of apartments, offices, a hotel and shops. Nobody involved imagined the name would become a suffix attached to every political scandal for the next fifty years.

Walk the complex from the Virginia Avenue side and the geometry does the work. Those saw-toothed balconies were what the burglars' lookout counted floors against. The office building is still an office building. The hotel reopened in 2016 after a long renovation and leans hard into the story, from the room-key cards to the staff who will point you toward the sixth floor without being asked.

Stand on the sidewalk at the corner of Virginia and New Hampshire and look up. The scandal that ended a presidency began with a door that would not stay latched, in a building that from the outside still looks like the future somebody planned in 1965.