Watergate or Water Gate?

We all know the history of Watergate: the huge scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon. The place has a much longer history, though, and if you asked a Washingtonian, sometime in the thirties, about Watergate, he would have said, you mean Water Gate, bub!

To know the older history and to get it why it used to be Water Gate rather than Watergate, you should read this column from W. Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60120-2004Dec12.html

Washington panorama as viewed from Arlington side
(image: Bettmann/CORBIS)

By reading this column I got also another answer. I watched once an old movie with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. It was a nice romance that actually paralleled their intense love story from the fifties. The name of the movie was Houseboat, and the action was in DC and somewhere not far from the city. There was a scene in the movie with a symphonic concert taking place on the border of Potomac in front of Lincoln Memorial. I was many times there, on the marble stairs of the great amphitheater near Memorial Bridge and it was impossible to imagine a symphonic concert in that spot: where to place the attendance if the orchestra was on the stairs, and where to place the orchestra if the amphitheater was for the attendance? I found the answer in that column from W. Post.

Deliciously Determined

(Washington, District of Columbia)