1806 I Street, NW
“Dear PoPville,
I work down the street from the Alibi Club on I Street NW. There has been construction going on for many months, and now they’ve put up scaffolding.
1806 I Street, NW
Two construction workers have told me that it will remain a club. The most recent one I spoke with said they were preserving “lo antiguo” but ripping out “lo viejo.” In other words, keeping the historic stuff but ripping out the merely old.”
From Wikipedia:
“The Alibi Club is a traditional gentlemen’s private club in Washington, D.C. Its members consist of the Washington elite, including presidents, senators, and diplomats, among other prominent figures.
In 1884, seven Washingtonians founded the Alibi Club, a private social club of prominent political and social figures. Its name derived from the club’s practice of providing an alibi when the member’s family questioned the whereabouts of a member. The club’s founding purpose was to foster “mutual improvement, education, and enlightenment” and to “to relieve the mind of what some call the monotony of domestic life and the routine and toil of business” among members of Washington society.
Membership is limited to fifty, with new members admitted upon unanimous vote after the death of a previous member. Membership is not revealed to outsiders, and the first public notice of membership is often in a member’s obituary.
Some of the Alibi Club’s most prominent members have included: President George H. W. Bush, his father, Senator Prescott Bush, Supreme Court Justices Potter Stewart and Stanley F. Reed, Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, Speaker of the House Nicholas Longworth, and General George C. Marshall.”