Qualla: Federal Triangle

Federal Triangle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Schumin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the limestone arrived, the place was called Murder Bay. The seventy acres between the White House and the Capitol that we now call Federal Triangle were, in the early twentieth century, a swampy floodplain along the buried Tiber Creek, almost completely unpaved, without functional sewers, malarial in summer, and dominated by what contemporary newspapers called Washington's underworld. There were brothels and saloons. There were gambling houses. There were tenements where the laborers and the longshoremen and the cooks who actually kept the federal government running lived without running water. Then between 1926 and 1938, the federal government bought it all, knocked it all down, and replaced it with seven enormous neoclassical office buildings faced in Indiana limestone, all designed by the same Board of Architectural Consultants, the largest single building project in Depression-era America.

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Image: Ben Schumin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Federal Triangle: The Public Buildings Act of 1926

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0. The federal government's office space had been a problem for decades. Departments rented buildings ad hoc all over the city, with no coordination, while the McMillan Plan of 1902 imagined a more rational arrangement of executive offices that no Congress had been willing to fund. ...

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Image: UpstateNYer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Federal Triangle: The Bonus Army and the Demolition

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 4.0. Clearing the land took until 1931. The Center Market, an enormous covered farmer's market that had stood on the future Archives site since 1872, was demolished. Railroad tracks that converged on the market site had to be lifted and rerouted. Hundreds of buildings were condemned a...

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Image: Daniel Schwen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Federal Triangle: The Seven Buildings

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mdy66, CC BY 4.0. The Internal Revenue Building, designed by Louis Simon, was the first finished. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon laid its cornerstone on May 25, 1929. It opened in June 1931, a year ahead of schedule. The Department of Commerce Building opened January 4, 1932, with 1.6 million sq...

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Image: Mdy66 | CC BY 4.0

Federal Triangle: The Style Wars

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0. From the moment the first buildings opened, the architectural press was split. The Washington Post called the Internal Revenue Building's marble work some of the most beautiful in the United States. Younger architects called the whole complex elitist, pretentious, and anachronist...

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Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke | CC BY 3.0

Federal Triangle: The Reagan Building

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographer: Nicko Margolies, CC BY 2.5. The original plan had called for an eighth building at the center of the complex, the Apex Building's opposite, but the project was abandoned during the Depression and the central block became a parking lot for decades. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York senator who took a perso...

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Image: Photographer: Nicko Margolies | CC BY 2.5