Dorchester House is a storied Art Deco apartment block in Northwest DC, noted for being John F. Kennedy’s first address in the capital. Fast forward a few decades and the building appears to offer far less glamor: a number of residents have complained about repeatedly finding urine and feces in the building’s stairwells. One resident told Cockburn he encountered excreta in the stairwell “daily during the winter.”
The waste is cleaned up “usually within a few hours after I contact the front desk,” says the resident, “but in rare cases it can remain for days. There is still some dried feces in one of the stairwells that has never been cleaned up.”
“I have to use the flashlight on my phone to avoid stepping in it,” he added. “When it comes to behavior and public decency in this apartment building, anything goes.”
What’s more, residents believe much of this to be human in origin. The first resident Cockburn spoke to blames “homeless people who stay in the stairwells.” Others suggest a more sinister culprit. “Recently in our building groupchat, people have shared that they have seen a woman urinating in the stairs while recording herself with a Ring light,” a second resident tells Cockburn. “Two or three people have corroborated that.”
Some residents in the chat attempted to justify the woman’s actions due to the possibility that selling fetish content online could be her source of income. Others are less, er, sympathetic. “I wish we had cameras in the stairs to discourage this kind of behavior and hold people accountable,” says the second resident. “In a beautiful, historic neighborhood in the nation’s capital, there should be higher standards of living.”
Dorchester House residents have been forced to take the stairs more than usual over the past few months. One of the building’s elevators is out of commission following a gruesome incident last year where a disabled resident’s arm was severed when the elevator door closed on her dog’s leash.
Cockburn asked building management a number of questions over email – about building security, what contact had been made with residents to discourage the use of the stairs as a toilet, and if they had investigated whether people are filming fetish pornography there. They did not respond to requests for comment.
The original 1941 advertisement for Dorchester House says the complex is “close to everything that is Washington.” But these days the building seems a little too approximate to some of the worst aspects of DC life. Yet neither of the residents Cockburn spoke to are planning to leave at the end of their leases: at $1,650 a month for a studio apartment, the building remains competitively priced for Northwest DC. “The location and price per square footage is hard to find elsewhere in DC,” the second resident says.
On our radar
SUMMER CAMPFIRE Wildfires in Canada are pouring smoke across the US, with DC peaking this morning as the third most polluted major global city, behind Detroit and Chicago. A “CODE red” air quality alert is in effect.
LOSE THE LICENSE President Trump criticized ABC and NBC for refusing to air his primetime address on supposed election vulnerabilities last night, claiming evidence of a larger “plot” to “protect the radical left” and suggesting they should lose their government-issued broadcast licenses.
ALL ABOUT PRESENTATION Trump will attend Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has said Trump will present the World Cup trophy to the victors.
Sophie Cunningham’s Political Philosophy 101
Data center construction faces opposition for everything from light pollution to AI paranoia. But farmers perhaps have the largest ax to grind: the massive swaths of land purchased for the centers often used to be farmland. Enter WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, a woman notorious for pointing things out.
“So how do we save our farm land and stop all these dumb data centers?” the Indiana Fever guard asked yesterday on X. Cunningham grew up on a farm and was highlighting the tension between farmers, data centers and the policies the administration has been instigating that frustrate both.
But posting on X can only take a cause so far. Petitions have worked in some situations – two weeks ago in Bonner, Montana, an online petition attracted 50,000 signatures and halted the construction of a data center.
What’s the long-term solution? Stopping the expansion of AI is not on President Trump’s to-do list. He said last year that the US must do “whatever it takes” to win the global AI development race.
Cunningham also appeared as a UFC ring girl at the recent bouts in Las Vegas.
God and man at New Guard’s summer reception
Christian online magazine New Guard Press hosted its summer reception at the Heritage Foundation last night, complete with beer, wine, sliders and other carb-heavy hors d’oeuvres. Also served up: lots of very buttoned-up-looking young people, long tradwife dresses – and confusion around whether the crisis of America was secularization or immigration from countries that happen to be Catholic.
New Guard’s founder Bradley Haley, a rising senior at Hillsdale College, presented awards and C.C. Pecknold, a professor of historical and systematic theology, gave a speech. Pecknold highlighted the importance of courting the middle of the aisle, that is, people who are as he said, “not necessarily our enemies,” and moved on to the need for a new guard of Christian statesmen. The word “enemies” came up probably 20 different times.
Despite Pecknold’s credentials as a theology professor, his theological chops came across a touch hacky. “History proves that when a group of people cooperate with the grace of God, the greatest wonders of the world unfold in real time,” he declared, “Not just Christianity per se, but the Great Christian empires.”
Not just Christianity, you say. These accomplishments included: the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages (in general?), the reconquest of Spain (he got really excited about this one) and… England, of course.
Sponsors for the event included a conservative environmental organization pushing free markets and conservation. A campaign-style video about the organization featured fields and young men wearing stiff blue jeans.
Pecknold said that Christians on the right should “overcome our fears and doubts – being canceled, being cut off, being assassinated.”
The award for editorial excellence went to Elizabeth Martin, who works for the press. The article of the year went to Cal G. Kildow, for an essay about how people on the right are too negative. In that spirit, Cockburn likes that Kildow has a mustache in his author photo.
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