Two Tenleytown residents think President Donald J. Trump is out of this world — but they won’t be receiving a dinner invite anytime soon.
Affixed to the facade of 4615R 42nd Street, Northwest, is a plaque dedicated to the White House that reads: “The residents of this house were the first to identify an insidious alien plot to destroy the Earth: The 2016 presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.”
Investigations by this author suggest that owners Barbara Jennifer Pacheco Shubash and John Shubash II are not part of any UFO societies; in fact, the pair doesn’t have much of a digital footprint at all. One of the sole documents confirming their residency is a home sale list from the Washington Post. Randolph Adams, a broker who briefly owned the home himself, sold the property to the Shubashes back in 2016. Adams is not familiar with the origins of the plaque and tells Washingtonian the sign wasn’t there at time of sale.
The sign isn’t an official historic designation — but there’s a chance that it could be in the future. According to the Office of Planning, a DC property is eligible for inventory as a historic site if it possesses significance, retains integrity, and can be judged from a historical perspective.” If the owners could prove that they were “associated with the lives of persons significant to the history of the District of Columbia or the nation”—in other words, if they were the first to identify a sitting President as the pawn of aliens—they may have a solid argument.
Current officials are not confident that will happen. The plaque “is in no way governed by the District’s historic preservation law,” Associate Director of DC’s planning office Edward Giefer tells Washingtonian in an email.
Housing experts explain that DC residents are in full authority to post plaques to their homes if they’re small enough. (Yes, you can install a “Home of DC’s Most Eager Bar Trivia Contestant” sign, even though you’d be wrong, because that’s me.) If you own a property, it’s yours to decorate at will.
Brittany Shepherd covers the societal and cultural scene in political Washington. Before joining Washingtonian as a staff writer in 2018, Brittany was a White House Correspondent for Independent Journal Review. While she has lived in DC for a number of years now, she still yearns for the fresh Long Island bagels of home. Find her on Twitter, often prattling on about Frasier.
