There are two separate entrances in which people come in for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel.
There’s the entrance that’s at the front of the building, and then there’s a side entrance, through which VIPs are often brought, as they are allowed to bring their cars right up to there.
This is still a fully functioning hotel. There are people who are staying there — visitors to Washington, D.C., who just happened to have hotel rooms in the Washington Hilton on this particular night.
Stefani Reynolds / Bloomberg via Getty Images
But in order to get past that entrance point, you had to show some form of credential: a ticket or perhaps a hotel key card if you were staying in the hotel separately.
I had my ticket, and you had to show that to people before you walked through the entrance, and they checked every single person that walked by. They had bike racks kind of lined up along the roundabout before you walked in. You had to show them the credential, but there were no magnetometers there.
Then you walk into the Hilton itself, and there was no sort of security screening when you walk in from there — it’s kind of a wide-open situation. There are a number of different organizations that have three parties at different ballrooms and different spots around the Hilton.
The ballroom itself is downstairs, so you have to go down a set of escalators or stairs to get to essentially the basement level of the Hilton, and that’s where the main red carpet is, as well. There is a parade of people coming through in front of the red carpet, getting their pictures taken.
It’s not until you get to the ballroom itself that you actually go through any sort of metal detector or magnetometers, and that is on the same level as the ballroom. So, once you get passed through that magnetometer, there’s another little reception area, and then there’s another set of stairs that then get you into the ballroom itself.
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