There is a building on Ashmun Street in Monrovia that refuses to fall down. The Edward J. Roye Building -- ten stories of reinforced concrete, with shattered stained glass above its entrance and sculpted panels by Liberian artist Vahnjah Richards still embedded in its facade -- has stood empty for decades. Built as the headquarters of the True Whig Party, which ruled Liberia without interruption from 1878 to 1980, the tower was the physical embodiment of a century-long political dynasty. When that dynasty ended in a bloody coup, the building lost its purpose but kept its place on the skyline.
The True Whig Party constructed its headquarters in the 1960s and renamed it the E.J. Roye Memorial Building in 1964, honoring Edward James Roye, the True Whig Party's first member to serve as president of Liberia. Roye's story is itself a remarkable arc: born in Newark, Ohio in 1815, the son of freed slaves, he emigrated to Liberia in 1846 with $1,000 in capital, became a prosperous merchant, served as Chief Justice, and was elected the country's fifth president in 1870. He was overthrown the following year and died under mysterious circumstances -- some accounts say he drowned attempting to reach a British ship in Monrovia harbor. The building that bears his name was designed to project the TWP's dominance: a grand auditorium, government meeting spaces, and a tower tall enough to be seen from across the city.
To understand the Roye Building, you have to understand the True Whig Party. From 1878 until the 1980 coup, the TWP governed Liberia as a de facto one-party state, its power rooted in the Americo-Liberian elite -- descendants of the freed American slaves who founded the country. The building hosted sessions of the Legislature in 1975 and conventions like the Liberian Federation of Trade Unions in 1977. It sat in the heart of Monrovia's commercial district, near the former offices of the American Colonization Society, the organization that had brought the first settlers to Cape Mesurado. Power radiated outward from this block. President William Tolbert delivered addresses here; party officials plotted strategy in its upper floors. The skyscraper was less a building than a statement: we are permanent.
On April 12, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a group of indigenous Liberian soldiers into the Executive Mansion, killed President Tolbert, and ended over a century of Americo-Liberian political dominance. The True Whig Party's reign was over. Its headquarters on Ashmun Street -- the physical seat of that power -- became a target for the anger of those who had been excluded from power for generations. The building was looted and abandoned. During the civil wars that followed (1989-2003), rebel factions occupied and further stripped the structure, tearing out its interiors, vandalizing what remained. The grand auditorium fell silent. The stained glass cracked. The sculpted panels, somehow, survived.
By 2013, the Liberian government closed the building for construction, recognizing its ruined state demanded intervention. But even this act proved contentious. Leaders of the rump True Whig Party -- which still technically exists -- filed suit, claiming they remained the rightful owners of the property and that government officials should be barred from further possession or construction. The legal dispute captures something essential about Liberia's ongoing reckoning with its own history: who owns the symbols of a regime that ruled for a hundred years? The Roye Building stands today as one of the tallest structures in Monrovia, a hollow tower on a street that once defined political power in West Africa, awaiting a verdict on its future.
The Edward J. Roye Building sits at 6.317N, 10.803W on Ashmun Street in central Monrovia. As one of the tallest structures in the city, the ten-story tower is identifiable from altitude, particularly from approaches over the Atlantic to the west. It stands in the commercial heart of the city, near the waterfront. Nearby airports: Spriggs-Payne Airport (GLSP) is approximately 1 nm to the northwest; Roberts International Airport (GLRB) is about 30 nm southeast near Harbel. Tropical climate with haze common year-round; the building's height makes it visible even in moderate atmospheric conditions.