WASHINGTON — A Twitter user and a popular local Instagram account shared a photo of a new perspective of the District, saying: “Pretty wild that the War Department was on The National Mall before there was a Pentagon," but the comment section is skeptical. Turns out it's a real photo, and the truth is much more interesting than a photoshop job.
THE QUESTION
So let’s Verify: Is this a real photo of the mall? And what are these buildings?
THE ANSWER
Yes, this is a photo of the National Mall – and it actually looked like that for another two decades after the picture was taken.
OUR SOURCES
- The National Park Service
- The Library of Congress
- The Naval History and Heritage Command
- The Department of Defense
- The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
WHAT WE FOUND
A reverse image search brings you to several official government and historical sources sharing this photo. So what is it really showing?
The National Park Service shares the story of two large buildings constructed between Constitution Avenue and the reflecting basin of the Lincoln Memorial during the first World War, meant for temporary service to house a rapidly-expanding Navy.
Well, "temporary" turned into much longer – during World War II, they were joined by more of these “tempos” on the southern side of the reflecting basin and the Washington Monument grounds.
Some have believed the photo is fake because the Washington Monument isn’t pictured. Well, that’s because this photograph was taken from the top of the monument, looking west, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command footnotes.
These buildings were widely known as strictly practical and efficient and, as the Park Service describes, not very attractive.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described in a 1941 press conference why they were built – and how he felt guilty over it.
He said when he was assistant secretary of the Navy in 1917, Roosevelt asked then-President Woodrow Wilson for some short-term extra space near the White House, but they ultimately selected that location to avoid too much construction noise near the President’s office.
“I said I didn't think I would ever be let into the Gates of Heaven,” the president is quoted as saying in this transcript, “because I had been responsible for desecrating the parks of Washington.”
Even after Roosevelt’s terms as president were over, and long after the Pentagon was built, the tempos were in use.
The National Park Service says it actually wasn’t until the Kennedy administration in the early '60s that the buildings started to come down, and the National Mall as we know it began to take shape.
According to the NPS, the building housing the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is the last "tempo" still standing and in use.