A Virginia county board has voted to tear down one of the most infamous sites in the history of American politics and journalism: the parking garage where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met with the source known as "Deep Throat" in the early days of the Watergate scandal.
The five-member Arlington (Va.) County Board voted unanimously Saturday to allow developer Monday Properties to move ahead with a plan to replace the 1960s-era office building in Rosslyn, Va., across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., with a 28-story residential building of 274 units and a separate commercial building housing office and retail space. Monday Properties has said it hopes to start construction by 2017.
Board members told The Wall Street Journal that they would keep a historic marker added to the site in 2011 and work to find other ways to memorialize the site.
"The Rosslyn of the '70s allowed street-level garage walls and was, in fact, not a very nice place for people," Board vice-chairwoman Mary Hynes told the paper. "So we will mark the historic nature of the site while creating a fabulous new plaza where people will gather."
"Deep Throat" was the name given to Woodward's source by Washington Post deputy managing editor Howard Simons, after a celebrated pornographic move of the time. According to the marker, Woodward and "Deep Throat" met six times at the garage between October 1972 and November 1973 as the source revealed information about the Nixon White House's obstruction of an FBI investigation into a break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Watergate complex.
Two years after Richard Nixon resigned, "Deep Throat" was immortalized by actor Hal Holbrook in the 1976 film "All The President's Men." In 2005, W. Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI, ended over three decades of speculation and rumor by revealing that he had been Woodward's source.
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