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D.C.'s longest-operating hotel, infamous and beloved, to close its doors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/11/dc-hotel-harrington-closing-harrys-ollies/
No one has stayed at the Hotel Harrington in downtown Washington because it is luxurious, elegant, or, for that matter, especially nice.
Mostly it’s the Harrington’s bargain rates and stellar location — a few blocks from the White House and National Mall — that has drawn tourists from across the United States and Europe for more than a century.
“We go up to our room and my brother touches the closet door and it falls off,” Linda Levine of Raleigh, N.C., said the other day, recalling a stay at the Harrington in the late 1990s. “There was a stain of unknown origin in the bathroom.”
Still, Levine added, “It was an affordable way to see the city.”
The Harrington’s recent announcement that it’s closing on Tuesday after 109 years will end its reign as the city’s longest continuously operating hotel, an accomplishment inspiring testimonials, as well as wonder that something so profoundly meh could last so long.
The Harrington also has the distinction of belonging to a subset of Washington hotels that have achieved infamy, a group that includes the Vista, where the FBI videotaped then-Mayor Marion Barry smoking crack, and the Mayflower, where Eliot Spitzer’s rendezvous with a prostitute led to his resignation as New York’s governor.
In the case of the Harrington, at 11th and E streets NW, hundreds of Proud Boys turned it into a de facto clubhouse for election-denying Donald Trump supporters in 2020 and camped out at Harry’s, the hotel’s in-house dive bar.
No one has stayed at the Hotel Harrington in downtown Washington because it is luxurious, elegant, or, for that matter, especially nice.
Mostly it’s the Harrington’s bargain rates and stellar location — a few blocks from the White House and National Mall — that has drawn tourists from across the United States and Europe for more than a century.
“We go up to our room and my brother touches the closet door and it falls off,” Linda Levine of Raleigh, N.C., said the other day, recalling a stay at the Harrington in the late 1990s. “There was a stain of unknown origin in the bathroom.”
Still, Levine added, “It was an affordable way to see the city.”
The Harrington’s recent announcement that it’s closing on Tuesday after 109 years will end its reign as the city’s longest continuously operating hotel, an accomplishment inspiring testimonials, as well as wonder that something so profoundly meh could last so long.
The Harrington also has the distinction of belonging to a subset of Washington hotels that have achieved infamy, a group that includes the Vista, where the FBI videotaped then-Mayor Marion Barry smoking crack, and the Mayflower, where Eliot Spitzer’s rendezvous with a prostitute led to his resignation as New York’s governor.
In the case of the Harrington, at 11th and E streets NW, hundreds of Proud Boys turned it into a de facto clubhouse for election-denying Donald Trump supporters in 2020 and camped out at Harry’s, the hotel’s in-house dive bar.
Maybe we'll get fewer Proud Boys if they have no place to stay. Hotel Harrington has been a dump for decades. Trump should buy it and make it the new Trump hotel.
https://www.hotel-harrington.com/
3 replies
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