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. Baldwin, a former FBI agent and Marine, had been hired by James McCord, security chief of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, and from the seventh-floor room he monitored bugs planted in the committee's sixth-floor offices that May, typing logs of what he heard.
That night he watched the offices with a walkie-talkie linked to the burglars and to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were waiting in the Watergate Hotel. Police in plain clothes answered the call, and Baldwin's warning came too late: five men were arrested inside the offices early on 17 June. Hunt came to the room afterwards and told Baldwin to get the equipment out. Granted immunity, Baldwin became a key witness for the government and was never charged, and his account in the Los Angeles Times that October helped open the story. He later taught school, served as a Connecticut prosecutor, and died in 2020.
The hotel opened in 1962. George Washington University bought it in 1999 as a residence hall and kept Room 723 as a small Watergate shrine until 2001, when the memorabilia went to the university archives. It became the Boathouse Apartments in 2020.
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38.9003, -77.0553
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