The Pentagon: A History (15 page)

A hot time in the old town

As the southbound train pulled out of Washington’s Pennsylvania Station on the afternoon of May 30, 1904, a handsome young mustachioed man with the blazing eyes of a zealot emptied several bags into the aisle. The contents spilled out, revealing a small arsenal of axes, sledgehammers, and sawed-off shotguns. The man distributed the weapons among a party of twenty men accompanying him. Other passengers were terrified, believing it to be a holdup. But the men were not planning to stay aboard for long. By arrangement with the conductor, the train was to slow down for them to jump off immediately after crossing the Potomac River and reaching Virginia.

The man was Crandal Mackey, the newly elected Commonwealth’s Attorney for Arlington—then known as Alexandria County—and he was on a mission to restore law and order. In the years since the Civil War, parts of the county formerly under control of Union troops had fallen into disorder and lawlessness. Along the Potomac River, near the bridges connecting Virginia to the District, communities of sin had sprung up. Criminal elements, protected by venal politicians, had set up gambling houses, saloons, brothels, and racetracks serving the citizens of Washington. Two of the very worst areas were Jackson City and nearby Hell’s Bottom.

Jackson City, at least, had grand beginnings. Old Hickory himself, Andrew Jackson, laid the cornerstone in 1836. The city was dreamed up by New York speculators who envisioned a bustling port and industrial center across the river from Washington. They chose what was then Alexander’s Island, a large tract of land along the Potomac, separated from the Virginia shore by marshland. Its location at the foot of Long Bridge made it a natural setting for commerce, promoters said.

On a raw and blustery January day, President Jackson led a procession of thousands across the bridge. Despite the cold, the old general refused to wear a hat, thrilling those able to capture a glimpse of his famed snow-white head. At the appointed moment, Jackson knocked a ceremonial stone three times with a small gilt hammer, and cannons thundered in celebration. George Washington Parke Custis, owner of the grand Arlington House, gave a speech enthusiastically welcoming the venture, and so many toasts were drunk that police made several arrests.

It was all downhill from there. Facing opposition from Georgetown merchants and lacking support in Congress, the enterprise soon flopped. Jackson City was sold at auction in 1851. The promoters had been right about one thing, though: It was an ideal spot for commerce. A horse track established on the island did a flourishing business. In the 1870s, promoters from New Jersey found it a perfect place for commercial vice after gambling and racing were outlawed in their home state. By 1892, the
Evening Star
referred to Jackson City as “the miniature Monte Carlo on the other side of the river.” The neighborhood was particularly raucous late at night and on weekends, when bars in the District closed and the weak-willed strolled across the bridge to quench their various thirsts.

Just inland, occupying low ground off Columbia Pike, sat Hell’s Bottom, sprung from the same general atmosphere of lawlessness and vice. There were no streets or sidewalks, just a sordid collection of gambling dens, stills, shacks, and murder traps populated by poor blacks. “Hell’s Bottom was described fully and accurately by two words, ‘Hell’s Bottom’ because it was the very bottom of Hell, you couldn’t get any lower,” Frank Ball, then a young ally of Mackey’s, recalled years later. Victims with names like Dusthouse Dan were found with crushed skulls, shot full of bullets, or both after arguments over dice games or disputes over bootlegging territory.

Further up the river, across the Aqueduct Bridge from Georgetown, sat Rosslyn, a village packed with saloons and lewd women servicing visitors from across the bridge. Nearby was Dead Man’s Hollow, where at times it was not uncommon to find a body a week. “Some committed suicide, some were killed by the gamblers and liquor people, some got in fights, and a little bit of everything happened,” said Ball. “I would not have gone up Dead Man’s Hollow after dark for all the money in the world and I was a pretty big boy by that time.” Farmers returning to Alexandria County after selling their produce at market in Washington would form armed convoys before crossing the bridges.

By the turn of the century, the respectable citizens among the 6,400 residents of the county were determined to end the lawlessness. They just needed the right man. Mackey, the son of a Confederate officer, had fought in the Spanish-American War, started a law practice in Washington, and established a sterling reputation. Meeting at the home of Frank Ball’s father, the Good Citizens’ League in 1903 nominated Mackey to run for Commonwealth’s Attorney against Dick Johnson, the candidate backed by the gamblers. “They had the doggonest knockdown dragout fight you ever saw in your life,” Ball said. In the end, Mackey beat Johnson by two votes.

Taking office on January 1, 1904, Mackey declared war on the gambling interests, vowing to close every saloon in the county. When he had trouble getting the sheriff to cooperate, he took matters into his own hands. Mackey obtained a warrant and quietly formed a posse made up of “the better people of the county.”

Jackson City was the prime target. It was easiest to approach from Washington. Mackey’s ax party gathered at the train station shortly before 4
P.M.
and made its final plans. “After crossing the Long Bridge the train rattled on and the men had a bad moment when it looked as though the conductor had forgotten them,” one account related. But the train soon slowed, and the posse hopped off.

The raiders worked their way back to Jackson City. Bursting into the first establishment, they found a healthy contingent of gamblers playing poker and shooting craps. The miscreants quickly scattered. “It did not bother them whether they left through the open doors or the closed windows,” the
Star
reported the next day. Most high-tailed it across the bridge back into Washington, leaving the posse to its work.

Mackey’s men were nothing if not thorough. They cut garish paintings down from the walls, busted ornate tables, destroyed chairs, and hacked in walls. “Glassware was smashed and the contents of the bottles, demijohns and decanters was allowed to flow, giving the room the appearance of having passed through a Potomac flood,” the
Star
reported. A nickel-a-song jukebox was jarred in the ruckus and, by one account, started playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” repeatedly.

Jackson City never really recovered from Mackey’s ax party. Not long afterward, a disgruntled gambler set the place ablaze, and all traces of it disappeared from the earth.

The place where fish are caught

The land where the Pentagon would be built had a long history; it already had been inhabited by Indians for perhaps twelve thousand years when Captain John Smith sailed past it in July 1608. A year after founding Jamestown, Smith had taken fourteen men in an open sailboat to explore the Potomac River, looking for gold and a passage to the South Seas. On the site Franklin Roosevelt would choose 333 years later for Somervell’s building, Smith and his men spotted a village consisting of several longhouses constructed of woven grass mats. The inhabitants spoke an Algonquian dialect similar to that of the natives living near Jamestown. The village was called Namoraughquend, a name Smith understood to mean “place where fish are caught.”

The plentiful supply of fish had attracted Algonquian tribes to the area, as did abundant waterfowl and deer and nearby quarries of quartzite that could be chipped into weapons and tools. The site was mostly low-lying river bottom, a mixture of sands, silts, and clays, with a long way to bedrock. Farther inland the land started to roll and rise.

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.