by Steve Vogel
Smith received a generally friendly reception from the Indians in the area, but later white settlers faced hostilities. Warfare with Indians prevented the land from being settled until the 1690s, when the natives abandoned the area. Tenant farmers worked pieces of the land in the 1700s, though much of it remained woodland. John Parke Custis, stepson of George Washington, bought the land in 1788, and it was thus part of the estate inherited by George Washington Parke Custis.
In comparison with the noble hilltop where Custis constructed Arlington House, the low-lying ground a mile to the south was scarcely worth noticing. But the land’s importance increased markedly in 1808 with the construction of the Long Bridge, a 5,300-foot timber truss span connecting Alexandria County to Washington near the location of the present 14th Street Bridge. Three turnpikes were built around the same time leading out from Long Bridge, converging on the future Pentagon site. The Alexandria Canal, a seven-mile waterway to connect the Virginia port city with westward canal traffic, was begun in 1833, following a route that took it directly through where the Pentagon now stands.
The Civil War transformed the land, turning it into a military reservation, some of it forever. As a strategic transportation hub leading into Washington, the grounds were occupied almost immediately by Union troops and heavily defended with entrenchments, encampments, and two large forts. The land was no longer rural farmland; two busy brickyards made use of the abundant clay in the ground. Union troops took control of the kilns to make bricks for the forts’ foundations, chimneys, and wells. After the war, a construction boom in Washington gave birth to more brickyards, and by the 1880s the county was the largest manufacturer of bricks in the country.
A community of escaped slaves, Freedman’s Village, had been established on the Arlington estate during the war, and its boundaries reached the present Pentagon grounds. The families lived in a neat horseshoe-shaped village with a hundred homes, two churches, a hospital, a school, and farmland. “The village is quite lively…and the place presents a clean and prosperous appearance at all times,” Harper’s Weekly reported in 1864. For the former slaves it was a life almost too good to be true, and in the end it was. The village became increasingly crowded and disease-ridden. The Army, seeking to expand Arlington Cemetery, ordered the residents to leave the grounds in 1887.
Some residents of Freedman’s Village resettled nearby and created a new community known as Queen City, on the north side of Columbia Pike. It was a tight-knit neighborhood anchored by two Baptist churches. More than a hundred families lived in well-kept modest frame houses; many of the residents worked at the nearby brickyards. Even Crandal Mackey had no complaints. “The residents of Queen City rarely, if ever, give the county trouble,” he said.
That was not the case with Hell’s Bottom—down Columbia Pike toward the river from Queen City—which remained home to seamy murders and occasional bootlegger wars. The Ku Klux Klan chose Hell’s Bottom to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary on May 6, 1926; more than two thousand members from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington gathered to induct new members amid flaming torches and a burning cross.
Nearby, on the old site of Jackson City and its racetrack, sat the main airfield for the nation’s capital. Washington-Hoover Airport, as it was known beginning in 1930, was grossly inadequate even by the standards of the day. A busy road bisected the 2,400-foot runway, with a siren and signal light for alerting automobile drivers to aircraft landing or taking off. The system was hardly foolproof and the sheriff occasionally had to be dispatched to shoo cars off the runway.
Constant burning at a commercial dump in Hell’s Bottom left the airfield cloaked in an almost permanent layer of smoke. “I’ve seen better ones in Siberian wastes,” Wiley Post groused upon landing in Washington a year after flying solo around the world in 1933. Navigation was a bit primitive, consisting of a windsock nailed to a pole atop a roller coaster at the neighboring Arlington Beach Amusement Park. The field was flanked by high-tension electrical wires, telephone poles, smokestacks, and an eighty-foot high radio tower. Adding to the hazard was the Airport Pool near the foot of the bridge. By one account, the large pool “played host to frolicsome bathing beauties of the area—their antics providing still one more distraction for the pilot trying to set his plane down between telephone wires on a postage-stamp field.” No one even knew if the airport land really belonged to Virginia. The Jackson City site was technically an island and Virginia jurisdiction began at the high-water mark of the Potomac; police from all jurisdictions used the confusion as an excuse not to patrol the area. It was known variously as “The Last Mile” and “No Man’s Land.”
Legislation for a new airport had been mired in Congress for over a decade while legislators argued where to put it. In 1938, tired of waiting for Congress to act, Roosevelt chose the mud flats along the Potomac at Gravelly Point, about a mile south of Washington-Hoover, as the site for a new airport.
FDR, as usual, could not resist meddling with the design of the terminal and to the horror of the architect added a portico inspired by George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. The builder—once again John McShain—moved with typical verve and finished well ahead of schedule. Roosevelt presided when National Airport, the world’s most spacious, officially opened on June 16, 1941. There was only one problem, from McShain’s standpoint: Dissatisfied that the cornerstone did not bear his name, he sent a crew of eight men to the airport at 3 A.M. one morning to place an aluminum plaque in the terminal carrying the name, “John McShain, Builder.”
Hell’s Bottom, 1941
Much change was afoot for the land by the summer of 1941. The opening of National Airport spelled the imminent demise of Washington-Hoover, and in July the War Department, covetous of such a large open tract so close to Washington, bought the land for $1 million. Nearly a half million dollars more were spent buying several brickyards and adjoining properties totaling ninety acres.
The latter site—originally planned for the quartermaster depot but by the end of August slated for the new War Department headquarters—was hardly a prime location. Over a century, the brickyards had stripped much of the topsoil for clay, leaving a large marshy area. Two oil refining companies were operating adjacent to the brickyards. A terrible, constant stench arose from a plant east of the brickyards, near the intersection of Columbia Pike and Route 1, where meat scraps and bones were rendered into fertilizer. Further ambience was provided by several flourishing pawnshops, a pickle factory, gas stations, and an igloo—marked by inverted icicles on its parapet—from which frozen custard was sold. The site also included what was left of Hell’s Bottom, which had lost most of its aura of danger and was now a pathetic place where squatters lived in tarpaper shacks. “They would put up a shack from old piano boxes and cardboard, anything they could find,” a resident of nearby Queen City remembered.
The whole county was in the midst of a great transformation. Arlington had changed its name from Alexandria County in 1920, adopting the name of the mansion on the hill to differentiate itself from the independent city of Alexandria, bordering on the south. Arlington’s 1940 population of 57,040 was more than double what it had been a decade earlier. Fueled by the growth of the federal government, Arlington, Alexandria, and neighboring Fairfax County made up the fastest-growing area in the country. Farms and woodland were giving way to residential developments. The battles between the Arlington Good Citizens’ League and the Jackson City gamblers had been replaced by spats between new suburban residents and old-timers raising chickens in their yards.
Faced now with the prospect of hosting the world’s largest office building, the leaders of Arlington County were quite bullish. They had recovered from initial dizziness upon learning of the building in July and now hackles were raised over the furious controversy that followed. “We are 100 percent behind anything that the government wishes to do in this regard,” Arlington County Board chairman Freeland Chew told a Senate committee. “It is my government, it is our government, and particular
ly if it is a defense effort…we are all the more behind it.” The massive influx of jobs, money, and new residents that would accompany the building was not lost on anyone either. Yet county leaders had remarkably little concern about the strains that it might place on a county that had eighteen paid firefighters, forty-two police officers, and an already overloaded sewage system.
Somervell’s building would require an enormous amount of land. The ninety-acre quartermaster depot site was not enough. The building alone would need about forty acres, and another twenty-four acres were needed for a separate sewage treatment plant and a power plant. At least fifty-nine acres would be required for two enormous parking lots. Considerably more would be needed for the network of access roads planned for the building.
The engineers and architects puzzled over where exactly to place the building. The first trick was to meet the legal requirements of the bill passed by Congress. In order to make Roosevelt’s sleight of hand work, at least some of the building had to be located on Arlington Farm, immediately north of the quartermaster site. Some fifty-seven acres of the four-hundred-acre farm were incorporated into the site. Most of it was slated for parking and roads, but the northern edge of the building was placed within the farm boundary, meeting the letter of the law. The southern and western portions of the building would be located on the quartermaster depot site.
Somervell also ordered the 146 acres of Washington-Hoover Airport added to the project grounds. Much of what was once Jackson City would provide land for parking, sites for the sewage and power plants, and fill for other portions of the project. An eastern sliver of the building would rest on the former airport.
The site as it now stood was 320 acres, bordered on the south by Columbia Pike, on the west by Arlington Ridge Road, on the north by an annex of Fort Myer, and on the east by Boundary Channel, an arm of the Potomac River. Ironically, the building would cover so much land that parts of all three Arlington locations that had been proposed—Arlington Farm, Washington-Hoover Airport, and the quartermaster depot site—would be used to hold it.
A new pentagon
The original rationale for Edwin Bergstrom’s pentagonal design was gone. The building no longer would be constructed on the five-sided Arlington Farm site. Yet the chief architect and his team continued with plans for a pentagon at the new location.
Just as the original idea for the five-sided shape was guided by the necessity of fitting the building into the land, the decision to keep the design boiled down to a practical reason: There was no time to change it. Somervell’s forced-march pace for constructing the building meant there was no going back to the drawing board.
Besides that practicality, the pentagon design worked. From a purely geometric standpoint, a circle made the most sense for such a large and low building; walking distances within the building would be much shorter than in a square or rectangle. Circular walls would be a nightmare to build, however, and would greatly slow the pace of the construction. A pentagon had many of the benefits of a circle by shortening distances within the building—30 to 50 percent less than in a rectangle, architects calculated—but its lines and walls would be straight and therefore much easier to build.
The architects had been refining the irregular pentagon ever since it was cooked up the weekend of July 18. The original design—two independent five-sided rings with comblike wings—remained awkward. The move from the odd-shaped Arlington Farm site freed the architects from the need to make the building asymmetrical. In August, the architects began experimenting with multiple concentric pentagons placed inside one another, interlaced with corridors and light courts, surrounding a pentagonal courtyard. The advantages gained—a smoother pedestrian flow, better space arrangement, and easier distribution of utilities around the building—“proved startling,” the architects concluded, especially compared with a more conventional rectangular design. The inner ring would serve as a quick way around the building, with ten radial corridors leading to destinations in the outer rings.
Somervell liked it. “I believe that what [Bergstrom] has is the answer,” he told one of the planning commissioners. The new design “seems to give much the shorter and better circulation,” the general added.
The symmetrical design also had a dramatic effect on the look of the building, so ugly in its first permutation. Seen from above, the concentric rings of pentagons, if not beautiful, were at least pleasing to the eye, conveying a sense of coherence.
Something else about a pentagon appealed to Somervell and other Army officers. The five-sided shape recalled a traditional form of fortification. It was reminiscent of a seventeenth-century fortress, or a Civil War battlement; indeed the first shot of that war, a mortar shell that burst with a glare at 4:30 in the morning of April 12, 1861, illuminated the dark, five-sided shape of Fort Sumter.
I should absolutely refuse to live in a building of that type
Roosevelt made the first foray at changing the design. At the end of the cabinet meeting on Friday, August 29, the president proposed a new design for the building, an idea so “bizarre,” in Henry Stimson’s view, that it made temporary allies of Somervell and Gilmore Clarke. “The president suddenly sprung the plan of having a cubic block of a building in which there would be either no windows or very few and which would be entirely lighted by artificial light and ventilated artificially,” Stimson wrote despairingly in his diary.
Stimson, thoroughly a product of the nineteenth century, was dumbfounded by Roosevelt’s suggestion. He had no intention of working in a banana warehouse, the secretary remarked out of the president’s hearing. “It struck me as so fantastic that I did not express myself to him, but I told Somervell afterwards that he was to stand fast against any such proposition because I should absolutely refuse to live in a building of that type,” Stimson wrote.
Roosevelt had picked up the idea from his uncle. Frederic Delano, endlessly interested in new trends in city planning, had reported seeing such buildings on his recent trip out west. Advances in air conditioning and fluorescent lighting had made it feasible to build even large buildings without interior windows and courts, saving space and money.
Roosevelt’s vision was for a solid, square building running a fifth of a mile in each direction; the only windows, if any, would be on the exterior. “Suppose it was one thousand feet long, and one thousand feet wide, you would have only four outside walls,” he told reporters. “Think of all those rooms on the inside.” By his own admission, the idea was “a trial balloon,” but the president was enthused about the futuristic possibilities.
Somervell and Bergstrom did their best to dampen the president’s enthusiasm, and even Clarke, despite his dislike of the five-sided shape, spoke against the idea. “Well, Mr. President…somebody might throw a monkey-wrench into the air-conditioning, and maybe they wouldn’t all get out before they suffocated,” Clarke told FDR.
“You know, I never thought of that,” Roosevelt mused.
By the end of the day, Roosevelt retreated from his suggestion but did not give it up altogether, proposing that perhaps one wing be constructed without windows as an experiment.
I like that pentagon-shaped building
The pentagonal design next came under attack from Clarke and the Commission on Fine Arts. Complying with Roosevelt’s instructions, architect Edwin Bergstrom appeared before the commission on the morning of Tuesday, September 2, for a special hearing to review plans for the new building.
Bergstrom arrived for the 11 A.M. hearing at the Fine Arts Commission offices in the Interior Department building with his hair slicked back and a handkerchief peeking out of the pocket of his dark suit. He was accompanied by his Californian coterie—chief deputy David Witmer and top architects Pierpont Davis and Robert Farquhar—who were carrying preliminary drawings of the pentagonal building.
Gesturing to the drawings, Bergstrom explained the plans. The building would be 960 feet long on each of five sides and made of reinforced concrete. The outer ring of the building
would be three stories and sixty feet high, while interior wings and corridors would be two stories high. In the middle was an interior pentagonal court measuring 360 feet on each side. Access roads would be built around the building and a plaza constructed in front of the main entrance. Buses would come into the building through a basement entrance on the south side.
The commission’s reception was decidedly cool. “A pentagonal has never worked out well and great confusion is apt to result in the circulation of the building,” said commission member William H. Lamb, an architect used to loftier plans—he was a partner in the firm that designed the Empire State Building. A rectangular building would be preferable, Lamb said.
His suggestion was endorsed by a most formidable commission member, Paul Philippe Cret. French-born and an internationally renowned practitioner of the Beaux Arts style, Cret was one of America’s most distinguished architects. Among many structures to his credit were the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C., the Valley Forge Memorial Arch in Pennsylvania, and the University of Texas Tower in Austin. Roosevelt considered him one of the century’s finest architects and was beholden to him as well; it was Cret who took Roosevelt’s rough sketch and designed the president’s pet tower at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda in 1938. Two years later Roosevelt enthusiastically appointed Cret to the Commission of Fine Arts. His opinions could be expected to carry great weight with the president.
Cret, somewhat deaf from his service in World War I and at sixty-four suffering from ill health that made it difficult for him to speak, nonetheless made it clear he was appalled by the plans. In such a huge building, a pentagonal design would confound visitors. “If one gets into the wrong corridor, he is lost,” Cret said. He and Lamb also wanted Bergstrom to rework plans for the façade and “do away with the monotonous appearance.”