The mile-long span of Pennsylvania Avenue, NW connecting the White House to the U.S. Capitol campuses is lined with monumental buildings that represent both a timeline of American architecture and the famous (sometimes infamous) people associated with them.
Discover why since its earliest history, Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue has served as the national stage for ambitious initiatives, outsize personalities, and landmark achievements such as:
- The magnificent Old Post Office Building, constructed in 1899 and, when threatened with demolition in the 1970s, the structure that inspired D.C.’s local preservation movement.
- The Brutalist-style J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building–perennially unloved for its design and its controversial namesake.
- I.M. Pei’s National Gallery of Art East Building--considered the pinnacle of High Modernism and a work of art itself.
- The soaring headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women, named for Dorothy I. Height, the prominent Civil Rights and women’s rights activist who led the organization for forty years.
Accounts of every variety of military revue, inaugural parade, and march for causes as righteous as women’s suffrage and as debased as white supremacy come alive along Pennsylvania Avenue as do stories of notable Americans Marion Barry, Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Mellon, and Francis Perkins.
