Local Stories in District Of Columbia
10 places
Entertainment
Au Pied de Cochon
Au Pied de Cochon, a French bistro at 1335 Wisconsin Avenue NW in Georgetown, is where the KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko walked away from the CIA on the evening of Saturday 2 November 1985. Yurchenko had defected at the American embassy in Rome on 1 August and been brought to the United States for debriefing. Over dinner he told his CIA escort that he was going for a walk, and that if he did not come back it would not be the escort's fault. He did not come back.
History
Fanne Foxe's Plunge
Fanne Foxe's Plunge was the night in 1974 that began the end of the reign of Wilbur Mills, the Arkansas congressman who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the nation's tax laws. At about 2 a.m. on Monday 7 October 1974, U.S. Park Police stopped a speeding car with its lights off near the Jefferson Memorial. Mills, 65, was a passenger.
History
Hoover's Birthplace
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI and the Bureau of Investigation before it for 48 years, was born on 1 January 1895 in a house at 413 Seward Square SE on Capitol Hill, then numbered 413 C Street, on the block where Capitol Hill United Methodist Church now stands. The house is gone, and the church on the site was built in 1967. No birth certificate was filed when he was born; one was registered only in 1938, when he was 43.
History
The Ames Mailbox
The Ames Mailbox was a postal box at the corner of 37th and R Streets NW, on the northern edge of Georgetown, that the CIA officer Aldrich Ames used to signal his Soviet handlers. A chalk mark on it, at a site called SMILE in his own files, told the KGB that he was coming to a meeting. Ames, a counterintelligence officer, had been selling secrets to Moscow since 1985, and his information exposed Soviet officials secretly working for the United States, at least ten of whom were executed.
Military
The Fort Reno Tower
The Fort Reno Tower is the brick tower in Fort Reno Park in Tenleytown, built to look like the two water towers beside it, which researchers of Cold War communications identify as part of a secret network linking the White House to emergency relocation sites outside Washington. The park holds the highest natural ground in the District, about 409 feet above sea level. Little about the tower is officially documented.
Military
The Mount Alto Tunnel
The Mount Alto Tunnel is the eavesdropping tunnel the FBI and the National Security Agency are reported to have dug beneath the Soviet, now Russian, embassy compound on Mount Alto, at 2650 Wisconsin Avenue NW. Its existence became public on 4 March 2001, when the New York Times reported that officials believed it had been betrayed to Moscow by Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent arrested as a spy two weeks earlier.
History
The Navy Yard Bridge
The Navy Yard Bridge carried 11th Street SE across the Anacostia River to Good Hope Road, and it was John Wilkes Booth's way out of Washington on the night he shot Abraham Lincoln, 14 April 1865. Booth reached the bridge before eleven, within about half an hour of leaving Ford's Theatre. The sentry, Sergeant Silas T. Cobb of the 3rd Massachusetts Heavy Artillery, had not yet heard of the assassination.
History
The Seward House
The Seward House stood at 717 Madison Place, on the east side of Lafayette Square, where the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building now stands. Built by Commodore John Rodgers about 1831, it later became the Washington Club, a gentlemen's club. On 27 February 1859 Congressman Daniel Sickles shot Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, in the square a few steps from the club, and bystanders carried Key inside, where he died.
History
The Vista Hotel Sting
The Vista Hotel Sting was the arrest of Washington's mayor, Marion Barry, in a seventh-floor room of the Vista International Hotel at 1400 M Street NW, on Thomas Circle, on the evening of 18 January 1990. The FBI and the city's police had set it up with Hazel Diane Moore, known as Rasheeda, a former model and former girlfriend of Barry's who was cooperating with them.
History
The Watergate Lookout
The Watergate Lookout was Room 723 of the Howard Johnson's motor lodge at 2601 Virginia Avenue NW, across the street from the Watergate Office Building, where Alfred C. Baldwin III kept watch on the night of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee, 16 to 17 June 1972.