WashingtonPost.com: Ronald Reagan Building

Reagan Building Nears Its Debut

The Reagan Building's entrance at 13th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. (Photos by James M. Thresher/TWP)

The capital's newest monument -- the mammoth Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center -- will open its doors next month at the Federal Triangle on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, eventually creating a new home for 7,000 federal employees and new hope for the District's economic revival.

Shortly after July 4, the first 483 employees will move in, relocating from the Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters in Southwest Washington. But they will be sharing the site with nearly twice that many construction workers who are still laboring to finish the

3 million-square-foot complex, the nation's second-largest federal building, topped only by the Pentagon. The project has jammed 14th Street in downtown D.C. since construction began five years ago.

It will be another year before the entire building is complete, with its offices, public conference facilities, exhibit halls, food court and restaurant. Today, most of it is still a labyrinth of concrete, cables, ducts and piping.

In June 1998, if schedules are met, Washington's tourists will have a new destination to visit, a soaring glass atrium 125 feet high at its peak that crowns the 14th Street entrance and rivals Union Station in its head-craning vastness. Below the atrium will be a public food court with an underground connection to the Federal Triangle Metro stop on the Blue and Orange lines. The building's basement will contain 1,900 parking spaces, including some for tourists and evening visitors to downtown D.C.

Details on the building.

Security concerns following the Oklahoma City bombing have led to other alterations by the building's landlord, the General Services Administration. While the public will be permitted to park in the building, elaborate scanning devices will be in place and the GSA has tripled the number of guards it plans to have on duty.

Despite these changes, the District's government and business leaders are hailing the building as a vital addition to the District's hard-pressed economy.

"It is another key linchpin in the revitalization of our downtown," said Kenneth R. Sparks, executive vice president of the Federal City Council, a D.C. business and civic association that has lobbied for the project.

To Sparks and other District leaders, the Reagan building forms part of a new triangle of downtown attractions, along with the MCI Center at Gallery Place, where the District's professional basketball and hockey teams will play, and the planned convention center at Mount Vernon Square.

"It symbolizes the partnership" between the Clinton administration, Congress and the District "that is really necessary to make the nation's capital alive and vibrant," Sparks said.

In addition to the federal employees from EPA, the Agency for International Development and the Customs Service, the building is intended to provide leased office space for U.S. and foreign corporations that want a centralized place to carry out trade promotion activities.

Officials hope that trade conferences and exhibits held in the building will attract hundreds of thousands of U.S. and foreign attendees a year, generating several millions of dollars in annual sales tax receipts for the District government and millions of dollars more in revenue for vendors and restaurant operators inside the building, and hotel operators and merchants nearby.

Private firms, according to GSA officials, are being counted on to provide one-fifth to one-quarter of the lease payments needed to cover the building's $65 million in annual mortgage payments. Making good on that plan will require the successful leasing of 160,000 square feet of public office space in the building and 45,000 square feet of food service, restaurant and retail space.

Private tenants will be charged as much as $43 per square foot in annual rent, according to Robert A. Peck, head of the GSA's public buildings service. That is a top-of-the-market figure, he acknowledged, necessitated by the project's costs, which have escalated from an initial estimate of $362 million in 1987 to GSA's current $738 million target.

"Although we have a very significant amount of interest for the office space, we do not have signed leases for any of the office or retail spaces," said Brian Dacey, managing director of Trade Center Management Associates, which will lease and operate the nongovernmental space in the building.

Dacey said he hopes to announce the first leases next month.

Some commercial office brokers in the District say Dacey will have his hands full.

"Private-sector tenants going there will pay an exorbitant amount of money to be there," said Trip Howell, senior vice president for leasing at Grubb & Ellis, a District-based office brokerage firm.

"They'll have a splendid location and view, but it's inefficient to be there unless they have to. If it wasn't inefficient, it would be leased by now."

The location will make the difference, Dacey predicted.

The Reagan building, which fills what used to be a dusty parking lot adjoining the John A. Wilson Building, now shares the center of the District with the Willard and J.W. Marriott hotels and the restored National and Warner theaters.

The project culminates 30 years of work to restore Pennsylvania Avenue, launched by President John F. Kennedy's reaction to the street's aged, dingy storefronts during his inaugural ride from the Capitol to the White House in 1961.

In the century before that, the site's fortunes rose and fell with the District's economic and political evolution.

During the Civil War, the neighborhood was known as "Hooker's Division," in recognition of Union Gen. Joseph Hooker, whose troops patronized its saloons and brothels.

After the Civil War, it became a working-class community of row houses and businesses, including a brass foundry, bakeries and restaurants.

Remnants of such activities were found among the 110,000 truckloads of dirt excavated from the site.

Although the building will shelter thousands of federal regulators whose work Ronald Reagan often decried and its size embodies the "big" government he opposed, its trade-promotion mission was one he supported.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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