Sometime in the 1980s(I don't remember the exact date)there was a fire at The Shorham Hotel in Washington D.C. It was never reported in The Washington Post. It happened like this.
Some Howard University students rented a suite for a Saturday night. They did not tell the hotel they were going to have what the Howard Students call a "Cabaret".
What that means is they were going to sell tickets to come to a party at the room they rented. That is not something the hotel allows so the people that rented the room just kept quiet about that.
The party got going and the music got loud and then louder. It was after midnight and the party was still going strong. The hotel assistant manager called Security and told them to go tell the people to knock off the noise. The assistant manager lived with his family in a room nearby where this party was going on.
The Security Officer(a friend of mine)went and told the students to be quiet. That did not work. It got later and later and the party got louder and contiued.
So the assistant manager called again at 2am and told the Security Officer to call the police to come and shut the party down. He could have avoided what happened by moving himself and his family to another room but he chose not to.
The D.C. police arrived. They went up around 3am and shut the party down. They unplugged the music after arguing with the students who claimed they had rented the room and were going to continue the party.
When the police left they found their car on fire in front of the hotel. It was a brand new police car parked under the entrance to the hotel. The fire burned the car completly up and set fire to the roof above the entrance to the hotel.
The incident was ignored by the Washington Post. It never appeared in any newspaper as far as I know. And I never read of any students going to court over it either.
The other hotel story is about a party at The Washington Plaza in D.C. This happened again on a weekend. Chuck Brown and The Soul Searchers were playing a dance at the hotel on a Sat. night. A large number of young people came and I guess everybody had a good time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Brown
There is plenty of Chuck Brown on Youtube. Just go to YouTube and type in Chuck Brown.
Here is one. Double click on the video to go to YouTube and see many other Chuck Brown videos. One you can find there is his big hit "Bustin' Loose".
The hotel had been renovated just recently and the ballroom had brand new carpets.
On Sunday morning when I came to work I found hundreds and hundreds of cigarette burns in the new carpet. Maybe thousands of cigarette burns in the new carpet.
It was totally ruined. Now this has always perplexed me. Did they do it on purpose? Or did they do it just because they did not care or know any better. I suspect they just didn't care. Or maybe they had never seen carpet before.
