01 April 2001

This was written on a day of some minor significance. It was April Fools, first of that month, and we were getting ready for summer. Not quite the same this morning. Back then, the cherry blossoms were coming out around the Tidal Basin, across the placid Potomac from the grand old wreck of a building sprawled in geometric elegance. The Pentagon has slipped, and I don’t just mean the part that is collapsing into the river. There are zones lost in a time-warp, building noire, naked light-bulbs hanging in musty corridors. Paint peeling. Ancient asbestos insulation sagging out of broken plaster panels. Ominous rattles and clunks emitting from archaic plumbing. Odd smells, whiffs of old corruption. At night, large things scuttled about. And we don’t just mean Defense Contractors.

It took the giants of yesteryear eighteen months to build it, and it is going to take fourteen years to refurbish it. It’s a historic building, one of the most recognizable symbolic targets in the world. The rebuilding task is staggering, they are taking the whole thing down to bare metal and starting over within the concrete shell. Mr. Roosevelt- the second one- decreed there would be no marble in the Pentagon Building. He didn’t want the Admirals and the Generals getting any more inflated delusions of grandeur than they already had.

Big as it was, they knew it was too small before it was finished. They added a fifth floor on top of the four originally planned. Now it is five of everything. Five sides, five rings, five floors. The afterthought floor accounts for the feeling of dislocation as you try to get there. Stairwells end at the fourth floor. You can only access the fifth floor from staircases at the E and A rings.

The Building has a lot of nicknames. “Pentagon” isn’t what they called it to begin with. It was more stodgy and bureaucratic: “The National Military Establishment.” In the vernacular: “Fort Fumble.” “The Five-sided Wind Tunnel.” “The Geometric Adult Care Facility.” “The Puzzle Palace.” But it also just Home.

The Pentagon Military Reservation is set on 583 acres of former swamp (“protected wetlands”) next to the Potomac River, once known as Hell’s Bottom. It has been disintegrating since it opened for business in 1942. The haste of construction and wartime exigency shows in construction residuals. There are no frills, no passenger elevators. The elegance is in the scope. Each of the five sides is nearly 1,000 feet in length- nearly a mile around. You hear the statistics from the crisp young enlisted kids who have memorized the script of the Pentagon Tour. “Eighteen miles of passageway” they say. “24,000 workers.” “Largest Federal office building.” “6.5 million square feet of space in five floors above the ground.” “10,000 parking places, some in the same zip code.”

In 1942, it might have been the World’s Largest Building, if you don’t count the Great Wall of China. The tour guides with their polished medals walk backward in the wide halls, heel plates clicking crisply on the polished composite flooring. Another crisp Soldier walks behind as chaser to ensure none of the visitors escape into the labyrinth.

They would never emerge alive. I worked there for years before the day arrived when I didn’t get lost at least once in the course of an average day of work.

There is magnificence in the old gray lady’s scale. The corridors are wide enough to drive two trucks side-by-side. Ramps curve elegantly all the way to the fourth floor. Ceilings are fourteen feet, suitable for Titans. Where the wedges meet, there are vast public spaces that give you perspective. Shabby though parts of it are, it is still an impressive edifice. We burn ten tons of classified waste a day. We eat nearly 18,000 meals a day, in six cafeterias, a nine stand-up snack-bars and a dozen executive hideaways. The SECDEF has a private mess, as do all the Service Chiefs, and the Secretaries. In the days before fraud, waste, & abuse became issues, every General, Flag Officer and self-important appointee had a driver, too. Black sedans lined up for blocks in front of the entrances. And the heliport buzzed with aircraft running officers out to Andrews AFB, fully fifteen miles away. The flights are fewer now, but still they fly.

You get the feeling of World War Two when you walk the halls. There are no passenger elevators, omitted in deference to wartime shortage due to the frantic construction. The inner C-ring features four parsimonious single-file escalators. The escalators run uphill most of the day, but around 4:00 PM one of the crack custodial crew comes along with a key and makes them run down. So if you have a meeting on the fifth floor late in the day, you are going to walk five flights up and arrive out of breath.

The Pentagon is a social experiment, after all, and when Jimmy Carter came to town they turned the escalators off altogether to save energy. When the Reagan people ordered them turned back on, they found the wear and tear from use as staircases forced their complete replacement.

Walking defines the Building. We are proud of saying that no office is more than 1800 feet from any other, and with a brisk walk you can be anywhere in six or seven minutes. The place is so big that a fleet of golf carts, utility wagons and bicycles is constantly flowing through the halls. It is hazardous to be a pedestrian. You see the action officers rushing from meeting to meeting, folders and pouches flying. Look out as you round a corner with your Vente Starbucks: you are liable to get flattened by an Iron Major late for his Joint Staff meeting.

The Building is a relic of a different America. A long line of mad-bombers has made the denizens of the most potent symbol of America’s might a little edgy. In addition to re-building, they have decided to harden the Building. The Metro and the bus entrances are being moved hundreds of feet away. New window glass is going into the outer E-ring that will stop casual small-arms fire. There was talk- brief talk – of moving the highest ranking people to interior offices, but it died fast. No one is willing to give up an E-ring window. The building looks inward. Every window in the place, save the outer E-ring, looks at gray concrete. The inner A ring, surrounding the courtyard, is a wide passageway, so no one can use them for musing, or contemplating what the seasons might bring. I had an E-ring window one time. It was a thing of wonder. I could tell what the weather was like out there. I could make rude gestures to people in South Parking. I knew what the traffic was like before I left my desk. It was a miracle.

But we all share the Concourse. It’s our strip mall. We enjoy banks, bakeries and a barbershop. That used to be a military affair, now it’s unisex. We have a florist to support our many ceremonies. We have a jeweler and an optometrist and a computer store. No PX or Commissary. Pentagonians pay the same prices as regular civilians. Once upon a time the Concourse was open to all comers, guards posted only at the ramps to the Third and Fourth floors.

Now the Building is completely access-controlled. The Defense Protective Service has the contract- you wouldn’t want armed Sailors on watch- trust me on that- and soldiers or Marines are more expensive than the doughnut munching DPS. Lockheed has the contract for automated badge control. You swipe your security badge and voila! The bar code is checked against the computer registry for complete security. Unless the computer has crashed. Which it does with predictable regularity. The mob that forms when it happens is purely for your convenience.

When they started the reconstruction they did the basement first, going right down to the 41,192 pilings on which the Building rests. The explosions that went with the demolition were unnerving to those above. There were delays and cost over-runs and the project went way over budget. When they turned their attention to the above-ground reconstruction they were both late and short, two common programmatic occurrences in the Building.

The rest of the work- the most visible part- will be performed under the gun. Renovation managers divided the building into five wedges, and began an elaborate ballet to shift people around to evacuate the first wedge to be stripped. The rest of the Building goes on working as construction moves slowly, wedge by wedge, clockwise from the heliport. National Defense never sleeps, and the Building has to go on functioning regardless.

Three years ago they evacuated Wedge One, throwing up walls across the corridors to seal it off. Then they took it down to bare concrete. The Building had originally been open bay office space, and so it will be again. We snuck in through an unlocked door last year after the last of the asbestos, floor tile and plaster were hauled away. Tons if it. It was surreal, soft gray light flooding in through empty window frames, concrete pillars marching off into the distance. It was supposed to be complete last summer, but someone noticed that the workforce was comprised mostly of illegal aliens. The speculation around the working part of the building was how many listening devices were going into the new wallboard.

In the end they all were deported, and work literally came to a standstill until they could find documented replacements, many of them actual citizens. They say Wedge One is to be completed before this Fall, which was the 9/11 attack, so they could even be right.

Mine is one of the happy organizations that is going to move into “temporary” spaces for eight years. We are scheduled to clear space to accommodate those who must move from Wedge Two, next to be demolished. They assure us our new spaces will be light and airy and we will have new modular furniture. We had a chance to go look at how it was going last week.

We wore hard-hats and heavy shoes. It is enough to take your breath away. They have put a new building inside the Building. The ceilings are lower, more human scaled. The space is more efficiently used. There is drywall everywhere. Elevators have been installed. The perspective has changed, the heroic open space is gone. You could be in any corporate office anywhere. Nowhere did I see evidence that this was the Building that defeated Hitler, or stared down the Evil Empire.

At the current rate, they are going to be done with the remodeling in only another eleven years. They are going to spend several billion dollars to refurbish a building that originally cost $83 million. And we will have something that, well, doesn’t feel at all like the Pentagon.

But there is one thing that is going to make it all worthwhile, and my employees love it. They did it again and again, giggling. At the C-ring they found a brand new toy, sparkling and new and just like the ones at the Mall.

Escalators. Real escalators. They come in pairs, both directions, and get this- they go all the way to the fifth floor.

Copyright 2001 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com