Same View One Year Later, Showing War Buildings Constructed in the Meantime
Measuring approximately from four to six hundred feet by from two to four hundred, each of these great structures covered from three to five acres of ground space, while its floor space, if two stories high, was between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet, but from eight to fifteen acres if higher. Its long corridors, stretching out in separate wings in parallel lines from the front section, or “head house,” with rows of offices upon each side, if set end to end would have measured a mile, a mile and a half, three miles, in length. Office boys had to use roller skates up and down these hallways in order to economize time. Last and most enormous of these structures were the huge Army and Navy buildings, standing side by side, of steel and concrete, three stories high, containing forty-three acres of floor space and affording accommodations for 10,000 employees. The Navy Department building has a front section or “head house” 860 feet long with nine wings extending from it each 500 feet long and 60 feet wide, while the “head house” of the War Department building is 784 feet long and its eight wings of similar size. The contract for these two buildings was let at the end of February, 1918, and by the middle of the following August the occupants had begun to move in and six weeks later their offices were fully occupied. The cost of the entire building program for the housing of war activities at the capital was $15,000,000.
The work to be done required as much expansion in personnel as in buildings. From all over the country people went to Washington to put their hands, their heads, their shoulders, to the rushing forward of the Government’s war program. There was something almost magical in the suddenness of their appearance and the steadiness with which this stream of humanity poured into the capital. From East and West and North and South came these thousands of men and women, from the seaboards and the mountains, from the middle plains and valleys—business men, captains of industry, lawyers, physicians, bankers, clergymen, college professors, magazine editors, scientific and technical experts, artists, authors, journalists, librarians, welfare workers, stenographers, secretaries, clerks, and each and every one of them found all that his or her hands could do. A great many of them, more than will ever be known, gave their services and the rest received salaries that were hardly more than sufficient, as prices were in wartime Washington, to cover their expenses. They were representative Americans, the cream of America in ability, training, character, patriotism and devotion to democratic ideals, and to see them at their work, to come into touch with their enthusiasm, their eagerness to render service, their teeming ideas, their resourcefulness, their efficiency, energy and determination and to witness the effective running and vast achievements of the huge organizations they were inspiring and directing was to watch the steady, sure beating of the very heart of the nation.
In April, 1917, Washington had a population of 360,000, with scant facilities for receiving and caring for the army of workers that almost at once began to stream into it. At the end of the next seven months a careful census that did not include transients nor men in camps within the city showed that 50,000 people had been added to the population. And they were still coming in answer to the need of departments and boards and commissions for more, and more, and ever more workers to carry on every phase of the planning, directing and speeding of the war. The War Department alone had 25,000 civilians in its employ. Each of the other great war agencies was using two, three, five or six thousand men and women, and each of them was still expanding. At the end of the first year of war the population of Washington had been increased by 90,000, and probably twenty or thirty thousand more were added before the signing of the armistice. Thus the capital’s population was increased during the year and a half by about one-third of its initial size. And, altogether, the expansion in building and population during that brief time makes a story more sensational than that of any mining town which ever leaped suddenly into world-wide fame.
This rapid increase in population led to serious housing problems and difficulties. House to house canvasses for the listing of available rooms, the seizing of vacant buildings and such emergency measures were not sufficient to provide even the most temporary and crowded of homes for all of the hundred thousand new residents. The problem could be met only by Government assistance and $10,000,000 was appropriated for the building of dormitories and apartments for the housing of the newcomers. Experts on apartment house and residence hall construction, on women’s welfare work, on heating, lighting and sanitation were consulted and buildings that would afford comfortable living accommodations for several thousand people were under construction when the armistice was signed.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation errors have been corrected.
Page [29]: “Ameriman Expeditionary Force” changed to “American Expeditionary Force”
Page [38]: “to the serivce” changed to “to the service”
Page [49]: “debarkation hosiptals” changed to “debarkation hospitals”