CONSTITUTION HALL
The society’s administrative and editorial offices, at Sixteenth and M Streets NW., were enlarged by an addition which extends its handsome and dignified headquarters along a 214-foot frontage. A commodious and modern office building at Third Street and Randolph Place NE., is used for mailing its magazine, maps, and communications to its world-wide membership.
In its editorial, research, technical, photographic, and clerical departments, and in the publishing of the National Geographic Magazine, the society now employs more than 800 persons. It is the largest non-Government user of the National Capital’s post office facilities.
The society’s members, numbering 1,150,000 (December, 1938), represent every community of 100 or more persons in the United States, while its foreign membership of 183,709 includes residents in every country, colony, principality, and mandated area of the world which has any semblance of a postal system.
To each member goes monthly the National Geographic Magazine, which has been called the foremost educational periodical in the world; each member also receives every map and panoramic illustration as issued. Thus the society has distributed among its more than a million member homes some 20,000,000 wall maps, in color, in addition to the numerous sketch maps which accompany articles in the magazine.
The society’s weekly lectures, which are held in Constitution Hall, have become a part of the intellectual life of the National Capital. Since their inception more than 1,400 explorers, statesmen, and world travelers of note have addressed the Washington meetings. Such explorers as Rear Admiral Peary, Sir Francis Younghusband, Capt. Roald Amundsen, Colonel Lindbergh, and Rear Admiral Byrd have related their findings to the society’s members; also such noted travelers as the late Viscount Bryce, former Ambassador Jusserand, the late William Howard Taft, and Colonel Roosevelt, after his return from his African game hunt and his Amazon expedition.
When these lectures are of general interest they are reprinted and illustrated in the magazine for the society’s entire membership.
At its Sixteenth Street headquarters the society maintains a library of up-to-date geographic information, comprising some 20,000 volumes, in addition to maps, periodicals, and reports from foreign governments and geographic societies.
The leading universities of the city, such as Georgetown University, founded 1789; George Washington University, founded 1821; Catholic University, founded 1889; American University, founded 1893; Howard University, founded 1867; Columbia Institution for the Deaf, founded 1857; and Trinity College, Brookland, founded 1897; also have their monumental buildings.