This week, Tidbits steps into the halls of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense.
• The Pentagon, the world’s largest low-rise office building, houses 26,000 military and civilian employees who park in 16 different parking lots. There are 7,131 stairways, 19 escalators, and 70 elevators in the building’s 6.5 million sq. ft. It’s all about the number five – five sides, five floors above ground, five food courts, and five ring corridors per floor. There are 17.5 miles (28.2 km) of corridors and 7,754 windows.
• In 1941, the DoD was known as the War Department, a branch of the government with 24,000 employees distributed across 17 different Washington, D.C. buildings. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a new military complex and several sites came into consideration. A site east of Arlington Cemetery was selected. The site was bordered by roads on five sides, so architects set to work designing a five-sided building. FDR didn’t like that the location would block the view of Washington from the cemetery, and chose a different site, the former home of Hoover Field, Washington, D.C.’s first airport. The architects’ five-sided design was kept.
• Ground-breaking took place on September 11, 1941, ironically, exactly 60 years before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. More than 15,000 workers labored around the clock. The 689,000 tons of sand and gravel needed for the building’s concrete came from the nearby Potomac River. As the nation prepared for war, there was a steel shortage, leading builders to construct concrete ramps throughout the building rather than steel-enforced elevators. (In fact, until 2011, there was only one passenger elevator in the building, reserved for the defense secretary!)
• Construction time was estimated at four years, with an initial budget of $35 million, but the Pentagon was completed in record time, just 16 months after groundbreaking. The speedy completion wasn’t without a price, however. The final cost reached $63 million, upwards of $900 million in today’s money.
• The structure was built wedge by wedge, with each occupied immediately upon completion while the remaining sections were being built.
• By 1990, the Pentagon was deteriorating, badly in need of a renovation. The building contained asbestos and required new mechanical, electrical, plumbing, IT and security systems, and fire sprinkler systems. The massive project began in 1994 and was still in progress when terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the building on September 11, 2001. The plane hit Wedge 1, where 4,500 people would have been working if the renovation hadn’t been in progress. Only 800 had moved back into their offices. All 64 plane passengers were killed, and 120 Pentagon employees. Newly-installed blast-resistant windows in that wedge saved many additional lives.
• The fire from the crash burned for nearly three days. Almost immediately, plans were put in place for the reconstruction, called the Phoenix Project, symbolic of rising from the ashes. The first step was the demolition of 400,000 sq. feet of the damage at the crash site. By August, 2002, some workers were already moving into new offices. More than 3 million man-hours were put into the reconstruction, which was completed in February, 2003 at a cost of $5 billion.
• A memorial at the Pentagon opened to the public on September 11, 2008, a grouping of 184 illuminated benches, one for each of the lost lives.
