TRAVELING IN STYLE : CORRESPONDENTS’ CHOICE : HISTORICAL HANGOUTS

Five Times correspondents from around the world offer thumbnail sketches, from cities they have covered, of places where people gather and memorable things happen.

THE WILLARD INTER-CONTINENTAL HOTEL, Washington, D.C.

NO SINGLE PLACE BETTER EMBODIES THE history of the rise, fall and rise again of our nation’s capital city than the Willard Hotel, a beaux-arts beauty past whose facade inaugural processions and riot troops, celebrants and demonstrators have paraded for 150 years.

Stroll down the hotel’s ornate Peacock Alley, where generations of FBI agents have learned how to shadow spies through public places. Take a seat in the ornate lobby where President Ulysses S. Grant dubbed the favor-seekers who rose from their chairs to greet him “lobbyists”--and the name stuck.

By the 1960s, urban decay had nearly killed downtown Washington, and the Willard with it. By the time Martin Luther King Jr. stayed here in August, 1963, to work on his “I Have a Dream” speech, the hotel had faded to a shabby shadow. In 1968, it closed--and Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign took over the property temporarily for its headquarters.

The Willard barely escaped the wrecker’s ball. But now it is back as a hotel, part of an extensive redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue. And once again, tourists and lobbyists and maybe even an occasional President can stroll its halls, sip tea in the afternoon and inhale a bit of history in the air.