Shovels hit dirt at Hoover Field; the War Department breaks ground on a five-sided headquarters
The War Department's staff had outgrown the Munitions Building years earlier, scattered across seventeen locations around Washington. On September 11, 1941, construction began on a new headquarters across the Potomac in Arlington County, Virginia, on the site of the old Washington-Hoover Airport. Contracts totaling $31,100,000 were finalized the same day. Architect George Bergstrom's design kept the five-sided shape President Roosevelt preferred, even after the site itself was relocated from its original location at Arlington Farms. Workers cleared the Hell's Bottom neighborhood to make room for it.
Built under wartime steel rationing with concrete ramps instead of elevators, the Pentagon's name became shorthand for the Defense Department itself. The Pentagon was also the only building in Virginia where segregation laws went unenforced, a change forced by a cafeteria protest and Roosevelt's direct order to remove segregation signage, not by wartime necessity.
QWhy did a Black draftsman's cafeteria protest in 1942 force Somervell's hand at the Pentagon?
In May 1942, ordnance draftsman Jimmy Harold refused to eat in the Pentagon's Blacks-only cafeteria and kept eating alongside white workers for several days until a white security guard beat him. Judge William Hastie, the Black civilian aide to Secretary Stimson, got an investigation authorized, and General Brehon Somervell ordered the "discontinuance of any enforced segregation of negro employees in the cafeterias." When Roosevelt later toured the building before its dedication, he ordered the Whites Only signs torn down entirely. When Virginia's governor objected, the administration simply replied that the Pentagon sat on federal jurisdiction. Those segregation laws stood elsewhere in Virginia until 1965.
QHow much floor load did Somervell demand the Pentagon be built to withstand, and why?
Somervell required the structural design to bear up to 150 pounds per square foot, far beyond ordinary office use, in case the building needed to become a records storage facility once the war ended and the War Department shrank back down. Engineers used cast-in-place piles to handle the site's poor floodplain soil, since the Potomac floodplain elevation swung between 10 and 40 feet above sea level across the property, requiring two separate retaining walls just to level the grounds. The building was designed for a bureaucratic contraction that never actually came.
QWhat forced chief architect George Bergstrom off the Pentagon project before it was even finished?
Bergstrom resigned in April 1942, midway through construction, after being charged with unrelated improper conduct while serving as president of the American Institute of Architects. David J. Witmer took over as chief architect on April 11, just months after the Pearl Harbor attack had pushed Somervell to demand a million square feet of usable space by April 1943. Design work and construction were running simultaneously at that point, with crews sometimes building ahead of finished drawings and substituting materials never specified in the plans, so Bergstrom's exit landed at the project's most improvised stretch.
