The Pentagon: A History (16 page)

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 The battles between the Arlington Good Citizens’ League and the Jackson City gamblers had been replaced by spats between new suburban residents and old-timers raising chickens in their yards.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 particularly 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.”

Bergstrom agreed to make revisions, but made it clear he was determined to keep the pentagon. After the War Department architects left the meeting, Cret declared that the commission should appeal to the president. Roosevelt already had invited Clarke to the White House that afternoon to discuss the plans. Cret drew pencil sketches of a rectangular building to show the president in hopes of persuading him to change the shape.

Somervell beat the commissioners to the punch. At 12:15, the general, nattily dressed in a bow tie and a seersucker suit, strolled into the Oval Office, accompanied by Bergstrom, who was carrying a large sheaf of blueprints. Roosevelt, just back from Hyde Park, reviewed the plans carefully, asking questions and directing a few changes, and approved the design. When he left the Oval Office, Somervell was “smiling affably and appearing in better humor than he has since the President directed him last week to re-study the building plans,” the
Star
reported. Everything was “coming along fine,” Somervell told reporters.

At 2:15
P.M.,
it was the commissioners’ turn. Clarke, Cret, and Lamb were ushered in to see the president. The mustachioed, dignified old Frenchman presented the case against the pentagonal design, arguing a rectangle made more sense. Cret also appealed to Roosevelt’s sensibilities as commander in chief, suggesting that it would be even better to disperse the War Department in several buildings rather than in one single great mass. This pentagon-shaped War Department building, Cret said, would make the world’s largest bombing target.