The District Building has seen much in its first 100 years. But most important was the slow transformation from a government run by appointed commissioners to one with a modicum of Home Rule, D.C. leaders said Wednesday as they celebrated the centennial.
“It is a dedication to those who built democratic government in the District of Columbia,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the city’s nonvoting representative in Congress. “That’s what’s important about this building.”
The building opened on July 4, 1908, after six years of construction — at a cost of about $1.5 million — at 1350 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.
The center of city government is midway between the White House and the U.S. Capitol on a tract once partially owned by Benjamin Stoddard, the first secretary of the Navy.
The building, said D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, was renamed for the “unique, incomparable, unmatched” John A. Wilson in 1994, a year after the D.C. Council chairman committed suicide.
The Wilson Building now features modern amenities such as cameras in hearing rooms, monitors and information kiosks. A glass and steel addition was integrated into the building’s classic architecture in the late 1990s.
But there’s a lot of history there.
Most famously, perhaps, was the Hanafi Muslim siege. In March 1977, two members of the Muslim sect stormed the building, taking hostages, killing reporter Maurice Williams and injuring Mayor Marion Barry and security guard Mark Cantrell. The hostage crisis ended two days later after Muslim ambassadors joined the negotiations. Over the next 15 years the building fell apart. It was leased to the federal government in 1995 because the city couldn’t afford its renovation, then reacquired four years later. A complete renovation followed.
“We now have this building,” Gray said, “hopefully in perpetuity.”
Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh said she prefers the classic architecture to the “cold, gray, glass and steel” addition. At-large Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, first elected in the 1980s, also said she prefers “classic over the modern.”
“This has got class to it,” Marge Francese, longtime aide to former Ward 6 Councilwoman Sharon Ambrose, said of the original building. “Being here for nine and a half years, it’s a place you always want to come back to.”
Among the dignitaries on hand for the celebration were former Council Chairs Linda Cropp and Sterling Tucker, former Mayor Sharon Pratt, current Mayor Adrian Fenty, former Councilman Bill Lightfoot and most of the current council.
