The former hotel was a refuge for more than one disgraced politician.
The Watergate's apartment buildings were chock-full of residents who served on Nixon's cabinet—many of whom were indicted following the scandal of '72. By then, there was already some precedent for the trend. In 1968, the president of Panama was said to have taken up residence on the hotel’s ninth floor after being overthrown by a junta.
It was also the site of a lobbyist sex scandal.
In 2005, the San Diego Union Tribune got a scoop that lobbyist Brent Wilkes had systematically “greased the wheels” of his political friendships, exploiting them for personal and professional gain. Besides wining and dining his powerful allies, the newspaper reported that he also bribed lawmakers by offering them access to a “hospitality suite” at the Watergate. In the multiple-bedroom suite, they'd find a rotating cast of escorts that amounted to a lobbyist-backed prostitution ring.
A mob of 300 activists stormed the Watergate two years before Nixon was accused of any wrongdoing.
In protest of the conviction of the Chicago Seven, demonstrators “broke windows and splattered paint of the Watergate Hotel, where Attorney General John Mitchell and other officials of the Nixon Administration resided,” according to historian Daniel Burton-Rose’s book, Guerrilla USA.
Nobody wanted to buy the Watergate—or its deeply discounted relics.
“This is an opportunity to invest in one of the city's most famous landmarks,” said the president of Alex Cooper Auctioneers in 2009, as he was kicking off the Watergate’s most significant estate sale. But nobody cared. A previous sale should have been a good indication of the failure that was to follow. In 2007, every last Watergate-emblazoned platter, wine glass, and bed was sold in a sort of open house. The event was predicted to raise $700,000, but many pieces went for under $10. Perhaps it should have been no surprise that when the building itself was listed for $25 million two years later, the bidding opened to a chorus of crickets.