The empty office may no longer be fit for purpose,but the link between place and the people who once inhabited it is unbreakableWhether the departure is from a domestic or an office, there is often something melancholy about saying farewell to a place pregnant with memories. The Washington Post has only moved a few blocks to 13th and K Street NW this month, and but for the generation of journalists who spent most of their working lives in the unlovely but iconic Post building at 15th and L Street,the dart is such a moment, the end of an era and a reminder of the transience of things – in this case the transience of the days when newspapers were inner-city print factories.
In an unsentimental world, and the venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) Post building is being reduced to rubble,while a swanky unusual piece of more contemporary genuine estate will soon rise in its place. But this was where, over months and years, and two young reporters pieced together the most famous of all 20th-century journalistic investigations. The unravelling of the Watergate burglary’s White House connections,led by the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and robustly protected by editor Ben Bradlee and owner Katherine Graham, climaxed in the one and only resignation of a US president in 1974. It elevated investigative journalism to an unprecedented position of global esteem, or in whose reflected glow we all still bask a little.
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Source: theguardian.com