Old Post Office (Washington, D.C.)
The Old Post Office, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Old Post Office and Clock Tower, is located at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. in Washington, D.C. It is a contributing property to the Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site. It is adjacent to the Federal Triangle station on the Washington Metro. The building's 315-foot high clock tower houses the "Bells of Congress," and its observation level offers panoramic views of the city and its surroundings. A historic federal office building, it now serves as a hotel.
Construction began in 1892 and was completed in 1899. The building is an example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture, popular in the late 19th-century United States. Its bell tower is the third tallest structure in Washington, D.C., excluding radio towers. It succeeded an earlier 1839 building, the General Post Office, which was built in Classical Revival style on F Street NW. It was used as the city's main General Post Office until 1914 at the beginning of World War I.
The Pennsylvania Avenue landmark functioned primarily as a federal office building. It was nearly torn down during the construction of the surrounding Federal Triangle complex in the 1920s and 1930s, and 1970s. Instead, major renovations to The Old Post Office Building were made in 1976 and 1983. The 1983 renovation added to the office structure, a food court, a retail space, and a roof skylight over the building's central atrium. It was upon this rehabilitation that the building acquired the name of the Old Post Office Pavilion. A glass-walled annex on a former adjacent parking lot was added to the structure in 1991.
In 2013, the U.S. General Services Administration leased the property for 60 years to a consortium headed by "DJT Holdings LLC", a holding company that Donald Trump owns through a revocable trust. Trump developed the property into a luxury hotel, the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C., which opened on September 12, 2016 and closed on May 11, 2022, after its sale to CGI Merchant Group. It reopened as the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC on June 1, 2022.
History
Construction and opening
The United States Congress approved construction of a new post office for Washington, D.C., on June 25, 1890. The site, at the southeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street, was chosen by Senator Leland Stanford in 1888 in the hope that the building would revitalize the Murder Bay neighborhood between the Capitol building and the White House. Willoughby J. Edbrooke, Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, designed the structure in the tradition of the Romanesque Revival architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson. Construction began in 1892, and the building was complete in 1899. The total cost of construction was $3 million.At the time of its completion, the Post Office Building contained the largest uninterrupted enclosed space in the city. Its clock tower reached into the air. It was also the city's first building to have a steel frame structure, and the first to be built with electrical wiring incorporated into its design. The structure featured elevators with cages of highly intricate wrought iron, a glass covered atrium and mezzanine level, and floors, moldings, railings, and wainscoting made of marble. The atrium was high, and 10 floors of balconies looked out onto the space. It boasted more than 39,000 interior electric lights, and its own electrical generator. Girders and catwalks spanned the atrium at the third floor level to allow post office supervisors to look down on the workers. The fifth floor housed executive offices in the corners. Each office had a turret, ornately carved wooden moldings, and red oak paneling. But there were problems with the structure. The Washington Star reported that the skylights and windows leaked air and water, the marble floors were poorly laid, and much of the construction was shoddy. The ninth floor was to have served as a file room, but a post-construction inspection showed it could not accommodate the weight. Technological advances in electricity and electrical wiring, mechanical engineering, heating, and movement of air made the building out of date as soon as it opened. The anticipated economic development, however, never occurred.
19th century
At the 1898 meeting of the American Institute of Architects, the structure was criticized as supremely ugly during a plenary address by New York City architect George B. Post. That same year, Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley called it "a cross between a cathedral and a cotton mill". By the time it opened, the building was also too small to accommodate the government agencies which occupied it. The city postmaster had advocated a building with a footprint, but only were purchased. The post office used the main floor and mezzanine, but these were already too crowded by January 1900. Treasury Department offices were to have taken over the eighth floor, but the structure was so overcrowded that this move was suspended.A year after the building opened, an accident there took the life of Washington, D.C. Postmaster James P. Willett. On September 30, 1899, Willett fell down an open elevator shaft. Nothing more than a flimsy wooden barrier prevented access to the shaft. Willett died a day later.
In the early 1880s, Senator Justin Smith Morrill and Senator John James Ingalls proposed razing all the structures between Pennsylvania Avenue and B Street to the south to create a park. The influential McMillan Plan of 1902, however, proposed retaining the structure. Nonetheless, the same year the Washington Post editorialized in favor of its demolition. In 1906, discussing plans to beautify Washington, essayist Sammuel E. Moffett disparagingly called the building a "Kansas City emporium so utterly out of keeping with the general atmosphere of official Washington that it sets the teeth of architects on edge". Later that year, Senator Weldon B. Heyburn introduced legislation to authorize the federal government to purchase all the land between Pennsylvania Avenue, the National Mall, 15th Street N.W., and the Capitol grounds for the construction of an architecturally "harmonious" set of massive office buildings. Heyburn's plan retained the architecturally dominating Post Office Building of 1899 with its commanding tower, but adjusted its Pennsylvania Avenue side to be parallel with the street.
The clock in the building tower was originally mechanical in nature, and kept accurate time via gravity. A cable was wrapped around a drum, and a large weight attached to the end of the cable. As the cable unwound due to the force of gravity, the clock hands turned. The cable was rewound once or twice a day.
20th century
In 1914, the District of Columbia's General Post Office moved to a larger Beaux Arts/Classical Revival building constructed next to recently completed Union Station of similar impressive style, taking advantage of heavy use of the national railroad system for speedier mail delivery. Although only 15 years old, the building at 12th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue was now commonly called the "old" post office. For the next forty years, the building served as office space for several government agencies.The Old Post Office Building was slated for demolition during construction of the Federal Triangle. In 1926, the United States Congress enacted the Public Buildings Act, which authorized the construction not only of the Federal Triangle complex of buildings but also a new U.S. Supreme Court building opposite the east front of the United States Capitol on the site of the Civil War-era Old Capitol Prison, and north of the Library of Congress's Thomas Jefferson Building, completed in 1897. Government officials, other experts, and the press believed that the demolition of the 1898 District Building and the Old Post Office Building, and the closure of many streets in the area, would follow. A Board of Architectural Consultants was created on May 19, 1927, to advise the federal agencies developing the Federal Triangle on how to proceed.
By July 1927, the board had fashioned a general plan for the area, but did not address whether the Old Post Office Building, the District Building, or the Southern Railway Building should be torn down. Planning for the complex was deeply influenced by the City Beautiful movement and the idea of creating a civic center to achieve efficiency in administration as well as reinforce the public's perception of government as authoritative and permanent. For the architectural style of the buildings, the board adopted the McMillan Plan's recommendation of the Neoclassical style. Rather than a mass of tall, imposing buildings, two unifying open spaces would be utilized. The first would be a Circular Plaza bisected by 12th Street NW, and which would require the demolition of the Old Post Office Building.
By 1934, however, although the government had cleared land around the Old Post Office Building, Congress was increasingly opposed to demolishing the structure. Tearing down a structurally sound 35-year-old building during the Great Depression seemed foolish. But the executive branch agencies overseeing the Federal Triangle's construction still wanted it gone. Yet, it was not demolished. Four years passed. Although a push was made in 1938 to remove the Old Post Office Building, Senator Elmer Thomas defended it and attacked the erection of a Neoclassical office building in its place as financially unacceptable.
The effort to remove the building in 1938 was the last one for 30 years. Various reasons have been suggested for why the Old Post Office Building survived. A common claim is that the federal government, fighting the Great Depression, simply did not have the money. Press reports at the time, however, noted that voters would have punished congressmen who tore down a perfectly good building. Architectural historians have also argued that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not interested in completing the expensive complex of white marble office buildings or making the Federal Triangle architecturally harmonious.
The Old Post Office Building's tower slowly became an iconic one in the city. The United States Information Agency often used it as a backdrop for propaganda films to be shown in foreign countries. In one instance, a portion of a film about Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn was filmed in the tower.
By the 1950s, and Eisenhower era, the neighborhood around the Old Post Office Building had also declined. Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. was marked by deteriorating homes, shops, and office buildings on the north side and monumental Neoclassical federal office buildings of the 1920s-30s era Federal Triangle on the south.
On October 10, 1956, the weight of the clock came loose from the cable and plunged through two floors, narrowly avoiding killing a man, who had just gotten up from his desk. The mechanical clock was later replaced with an electric one.
After observing the poor state of the Avenue during his inaugural parade from the United States Capitol to the White House, 35th President John F. Kennedy appointed a President's Council on Pennsylvania Avenue to study ways to improve the area. The council's draft plan was ready for Kennedy's approval almost two and a half years later when he was assassinated in Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963. The draft plan retained the Old Post Office Building.
Kennedy's successor, 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson, agreed to move forward with the plan and appointed a Temporary President's Commission on Pennsylvania Avenue, although it did not hold its first meeting until May 21, 1965. The new commission recommended that the Old Post Office be torn down in favor of completing the plan for the Federal Triangle. The temporary commission managed to prevent development of the avenue which was contrary to the draft plan, but it never was able to win congressional approval for its plan. It ceased to function on November 15, 1969, due to lack of funds. A permanent Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation was finally created by Congress on October 30, 1972.
An attempt to demolish the Old Post Office Building began in February 1970. The National Capital Planning Commission, a federal agency with legal jurisdiction over major building projects in the Washington metropolitan area, agreed. Within days, Wolf Von Eckardt, the influential architectural critic of The Washington Post, began campaigning for the structure's preservation. No action was taken on the demolition project in 1970, and Von Eckardt continued to press for the building's preservation in 1971. By early 1971, a group of local citizens and architects formed a group known as "Don't Tear It Down". The group's members included Nancy Hanks, the politically influential chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Don't Tear It Down began heavily lobbying the PADC, the GSA, White House, Congress, and D.C. city government to stop the demolition. Opposition to the demolition began to grow in the U.S. Senate, which held hearings on the buildings in April 1971. Preservation forces received a major boost in May 1971 when the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation recommended retaining it.
The Nixon administration, however, continued to seek its demolition so that Federal Triangle could be completed in time for the United States Bicentennial in 1976. But by this time, Senator Mike Gravel, chair of the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds of the Committee on Public Works was strongly opposed to the effort. Gravel sought allies in the United States House of Representatives, and in June 1972, the House Committee on Appropriations voted down Nixon's request for money to demolish the Old Post Office.