The Watergate Hotel history

The third building (Watergate South) opened in June 1968 and the fourth building topped out on August 16, 1968.

January 1969 Richard Nixon is inaugurated as the 37 President of the United States.

By 1970, problems at the complex led the press to dub it the "Potomac Titanic.". A lawsuit, filed in February 1970, sought exclusive access to the underground parking garage Watergate East claimed as its own, and demanded that the developer stop selling spaces in the residents' parking area.

Watergate Office Building - 600 New Hampshire Avenue, NW (signed first lease in 1971).

In 1972, Les Champs opened.

That contention was thrown melodramatically into doubt by Dean on June 25, 1973, in a nearly seven-hour statement to the Ervin committee, watched by a huge portion of the American television audience, followed by five days of intense cross-examination.

Early in 1974, the cover-up and efforts to impede the Watergate investigation began to unravel.

In 1977, one of the Watergate's financiers (Nicholas Salgo) and Continental Illinois Properties bought SGI's stake in the development for $49 million.

And in 1979, Watergate scored a different kind of coup: bringing acclaimed French chef Jean-Louis Palladin not just to the United States, but to D.C., then a culinary backwater, to open a restaurant at the hotel.

By the time Ronald Reagan took office, swank replaced scandal at the complex, which became “the unofficial headquarters for Republican partying,” the Washington Post wrote in 1981.

Two years later, Continental Illinois sold its interest to the National Coal Board Pension Fund in the U.K. Salgo did the same in 1986.

The coal board pension fund put the Watergate complex up for sale in 1989, and estimated the complex's worth at between $70 million and $100 million.

Several buildings were sold in the 1990's.

The property was valued at $278 million in 1991.

The building underwent a renovation of its office spaces in 1994.

Watergate East tenant' cooperative refinanced its mortgage some time after 2000, and bought the land beneath its building.

In 2004, the hotel was purchased by a company planning to turn it into luxury co-ops.

The office building was sold in 2005 by Trizec Properties to Bentley Forbes, a Los Angeles-based real estate investment firm for $500,000.

BentleyForbes put the office tower up for sale on March 12, 2009.

After their development firm, Euro Capital Properties, bought the property for $45 million in 2010, they brought on Ron Arad, an Israeli designer, to rework the space and bring the hotel back in line with Mr.

Knight helped compile a remembrance for the 50th anniversary of the complex in 2015.

Until, that is, its $200million reinvention in 2016 brought back the glamour alongside a healthy sense of irony about its place in political history.

She purchased her 14th-floor Watergate East apartment before the building opened and died in her penthouse at age 94 at the end of March 2018.