The Garage Where ‘Deep Throat’ Spilled Watergate Secrets Will Be Demolished

It very well may be the most important parking garage in America, or at least the only one instrumental in the end of a presidency. But by 2017, the Rosslyn, Va., facility where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward received covert tips on the Watergate scandal — informing the news stories that played a large role in prompting President Richard Nixon’s resignation — will be gone.

On Saturday, the five members of the Arlington County Board voted unanimously to allow Monday Properties, a major real-estate-development firm, to demolish the parking garage and its adjoining office building and construct both a shopping center and a high-density apartment building in its place, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The pre-existing structure, the demolition of which was announced by Monday Properties in August, was built in the 1960s — a time, according to Arlington County Board vice chairwoman Mary Hynes, when Rosslyn was “not a very nice place for people.”

But it was in this “not very nice place” that Mark Felt, a top FBI agent better known by the moniker Deep Throat, would meet Woodward, providing him with classified information surrounding a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office complex in June 1972. Over the course of two years, Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein were able to trace the burglary to a complex web of corruption that ultimately led to the White House.

Nixon resigned in August 1974 after a prolonged scandal; dozens of other federal officials were implicated in the process.

For its operative role in uncovering the Watergate controversy, the garage earned a historical marker from Arlington County in 2011, which will stay intact even after the structure has been razed.

“We obviously view the whole Watergate situation as a significant event in the history of our country,” Tim Helmig, chief development officer of Monday Properties, said last year. “It would be our hope that we preserve that plaque and incorporate it in our redevelopment.”