Location: 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW
Readers’ pick: Watergate Complex
The first four lines of a “National Historic Place” plaque at the Washington Hilton hotel would have you believe March 30, 1981, was a pretty chill day.
Those lines explain that on that day, then President Ronald Reagan visited the hotel to speak to a union, marking the 100th time a president had visited the hotel. So many Oval Office occupants had stopped by the Washington Hilton to speak to interest groups that the hotel had a hallway called “President’s Walk.”
But as Reagan stepped outside at 2:27 p.m., the day took a turn: John Hinckley shot Reagan and three others. Hinckley was delusional, convinced he had to kill a president and become famous so actress Jodie Foster would fall in love with him.
The then-president, seriously but not fatally wounded, was rushed to GW Hospital to recover. The media descended on campus, turning Ross Hall into a temporary briefing room where reporters broadcasted constant coverage of the event. The assassination attempt launched GW into the spotlight.
“The coverage put the University on the map, so to speak. I think the University should try to use this in our best interests,” sophomore Wayne Johnson said in a March 31, 1981, special Reagan-assassination edition of The Hatchet.
If Johnson’s day-of reaction to a presidential assassination seems in slightly poor taste, I’ll confess I had a similar train of thought when I went to see the 2024 film “Reagan” on opening night with my mom. When a shot of GW Hospital came on screen, I excitedly whispered to her that “I live right next door to there.”
I first found out about the Reagan assassination attempt when I went to see a production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical about presidential assassins called, well, “Assassins,” in eighth grade. The musical’s climactic ballad is a love song Hinckley sings to Foster. Sondheim’s 1990 musical may have been prophetic: Since being released from a mental hospital in 2016, Hinckley has become a traveling folk artist. Traveling may be an overstatement: He’s repeatedly had venues cancel on him once they find out that he tried to kill Reagan.
Despite my fascination with the assassination attempt and Hinckley, I had never actually been to the Washington Hilton, the site of the failed assassination attempt. So last week, with the sun finally out, I made the half-hour trek to the hotel, which sits on the border of Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan. A block before I reached the hotel, a massive mack truck in an alleyway repeatedly honked at a DoorDash motorcycle blocking its escape. I worried for a moment I was about to see another assassination.
Once I reached the hotel — the ultimate brutalist structure, with a curved front featuring hundreds of identical concrete-outlined rectangular windows — I began my hunt for the assassination site. I pulled up the applicable Wikipedia page, and looked at photos from the event, which showed Reagan collapsing to the ground in front of a rocky wall. I spotted the wall next to the hotel lower’s entrance and wandered down.
The site itself is, well, underwhelming. There’s a tiny gold-and-black plaque that takes a while to talk about Reagan’s assassination on the wall above some dying vegetation and rounded overhang. A man in a blue AFL-CIO shirt — the same union Reagan was talking to before he was shot — walked by me. The similarity to March 30, 1980, worried me, and I shot a nervous glance around me but was reassured to not see any aspiring folk artists near me.
I wondered if listening to Hinckley’s music might unlock the secrets of the otherwise underwhelming historical site, so I opened Spotify and put on his 2023 album “Redemption.” While I stood there, looking at the tiny plaque and blocky monstrosity above it, Hinckley crooned the phrase “Nobody knows the places I’ve been.” Well, I guess I now do.
