A sign, posted by the hotel's entrance, from more optimistic days
After attending yesterday's auction, I went down to the Watergate Hotel itself to check out the not-so-desirable goods.
For the record: There were interested parties at yesterday's auction—just none that wanted to surpass the lender's initial bid of $25 million.

When the Watergate Hotel gets auctioned off, people show up. Nearly ten TV cameras, a whole bunch of real-estate types, and your favorite Housing Complex reporter packed into a Wisconsin Avenue office for the event.
Then we sat in the ultimate state of real-estate/legal boredom, as a functionary read aloud about 15 pages of technical stuff [...]