The Army Raises a Ghost

The fastest-growing city in the U.S. is also the most rigidly planned. That situation makes for trouble, and last week Washington got it--a sizzling row over the War Department's scheme to move to Virginia and build itself the "largest office building in the world."

Booming Washington knows no boom like the Army's. Its 24,000 clerks infest office buildings in every cranny of the capital. For major bureau headquarters it has had to get along with the Munitions Building, a temporary warren built during World War I. Long ago a piece of land next to the Naval Hospital was earmarked for a great new War Department building, and the first building was already complete and occupied. But last month, impatient to get all its workers under one roof, the War Department got Congressional approval for a $35,000,000, 35-acre structure to be built at once on the Arlington lowlands across the Potomac.

Immediately the air was blue with protests. The space had been reserved for expansion of nearby Arlington National Cemetery. The Army scheme would require new roads, new utilities, thousands of new houses in already crowded suburbs in northern Virginia. It would disrupt the east-west axis running from the Capitol through the Washington Monument across the Potomac. It would break up a fine vista.

Growled one protestant: "Imagine, a building with 35 acres of roof and they say it won't spoil the view. Hell, you could put a line of garbage pails in front of a house and it wouldn't 'spoil' the view, but by God it wouldn't be very pleasant!"

The city plan that the War Department was trying to upset was not the plan that Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant presented to President Washington in 1791, but it was still based on that celebrated original. For actually getting today's Washington built, Andrew Mellon was as responsible as any man. As Secretary of the Treasury he fostered the famed Triangle Development, 50 acres of marmoreal bureaucracy between Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues, in the city's most congested quarter. Following many of the suggestions of the McMillan Commission, which revitalized neoclassic Washington in 1902 and revived the basic plan, Mellon proclaimed that he too built in the tradition of L'Enfant. But L'Enfant's broad, radial avenues were meant to siphon off horse-drawn traffic as handily as possible. MelIon's Triangle blocked off some streets, bunched the biggest buildings at points where few traffic-discharging arteries flowed off.

The Roosevelt Administration has kept undeviatingly to the Mellon-sponsored plan. By 1936 L'Enfant's Mall was finished, though the Major's Gallic eyes would have popped at the huge neo-Grecian temples battlementing its northern length. Business houses, even churches near certain Federal areas now conform to the plan.

The War Department was somewhat taken aback to find how deeply Washington is attached to its L'Enfant-Mellon plan. Senators rumbled. The President wrote an admonishing letter. The press said: You can't do that. Someone suggested that the Department move to the 550-acre grounds of the Soldiers' Home in north Washington. It began to look as though the War Department had raised a potent ghost.

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