Besides innumerable "businessman's lunches", the DeeCee Diner must have served many an early morning cup of coffee to revellers homeward bound from the nightclubs like Merryland Club or the Robin Hood Room that clustered near the corner of 14th and K streets.
But in the end, just one generation of Washingtonians grew up calling ST-8298 for an egg salad on rye with black coffee to go. During the fifties, the neighbood gradually lost fashion as a residential and business address. The diner barely survived the Portland Flats, which, after being converted to office space in 1940, was replaced by a building with street-level retail in 1962. By then, the hotels and office buildings were beginning to share a seedy cachet.
By the mid-1970s, K Street near Vermont Avenue and adjoining blocks had become nightly parade routes for flamboyantly-undressed hookers screaching invitations at passing drivers. Even after the McPherson Square Metro station opened in 1977, it took years for the neighborhood to recover respectability and redevelop as modern office space. By the early 1990s, almost all the pre-war office buildings, the Burlington Hotel, and Scholl's Cafeteria Building were gone. Today the footprint of the DeeCee Diner is covered by the "1100 Vermont Avenue" office building.