Where the United Nations Was Born

The grand hall on your right hosted the opening and closing sessions of the conference that founded the United Nations, in the spring of nineteen forty five, with delegates from fifty nations filling the seats where opera audiences usually sit. The War Memorial Opera House was built as a monument to the dead of the First World War, and barely a decade after it opened, it became the stage where the world's nations tried to make sure a third one never happened.

The actual language of the United Nations Charter, though, was not drafted or signed inside this building. That work happened next door, in the smaller Herbst Theatre inside the Veterans Building, where delegations hammered out the Charter's text in committee rooms before carrying the finished document back here for the ceremonial votes. The opera house provided the plenary sessions and the spectacle; the theater next door did the drafting and, on the conference's final day, hosted the actual signing. It is a detail easy to get backwards, since most people who know the story at all assume the signing happened wherever the grand ceremony took place.

Six years later, the two buildings hosted a second major diplomatic moment: the treaty that formally ended the state of war between the Allied powers and Japan was drafted and signed across these same two buildings. Between them, this single block of Van Ness Avenue has hosted the founding of the postwar international order not once but twice, a concentration of diplomatic history that most drivers passing the opera house's columns today have no reason to suspect.