The Pentagon: Built in Sixteen Months, Partly Segregated
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Ground was broken on September eleventh, nineteen forty-one, eighty-seven days before Pearl Harbor. The war the Pentagon was built to manage had not yet started, and the building was already under construction.
The project was extraordinary by any measure. The design called for the world's largest office building: five concentric pentagon-shaped rings covering twenty-nine acres, with seventeen and a half miles of corridors and space for forty thousand workers. Engineers chose the unconventional shape partly because of a quirk in the available land and partly because a square building of the required size would require elevators too slow for efficient operation. The concrete rings were faster to reach by foot.
At peak construction, thirteen thousand workers were on site simultaneously. Among them were a large contingent of Black laborers who were housed in a segregated camp on the construction grounds and paid lower wages than white workers performing comparable work. The original building design included segregated bathrooms and cafeterias.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, under pressure from civil rights organizations and aware of the symbolic problem of building the center of America's war against fascism with the tools of American racial apartheid, issued an order that segregated facilities in the Pentagon be eliminated. His order was implemented unevenly. The building opened in January nineteen forty-three with some segregated facilities still in place.
The Pentagon was complete sixteen months after groundbreaking, a construction speed record for a building of its scale that has not been matched. The land it sits on was Arlington Farms, an experimental agricultural station whose own labor history reaches back to the era of the Freedmen's Village a mile to the north.
The building repaired from the September eleventh, two thousand one attack within a year. The structural engineering that made it possible to rebuild that fast was a direct legacy of the speed-construction methods developed during the original build.
