The Treasury building, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, was located by President Jackson just east of the White House so as to obstruct his view of the Capitol, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is said that he grew tired of the little differences of opinion between the commissioner and the architect, Robert Mills, and one day in ill humor he struck his staff in the earth and said: “I want the chief corner-stone of the Treasury building placed just here!” You may be sure it was placed just there.
The Secretary of the Treasury superintends the collection and disbursement of all government revenue from every source, except the Post-Office Department. It takes many buildings to provide for the work of the Treasury Department.
The Congressional Directory says:
The Secretary of the Treasury is charged by law with the management of the national finances. He prepares plans for the improvement of the revenue and for the support of the public credit; superintends the collection of the revenue, and prescribes the forms of keeping and rendering public accounts and of making returns; grants warrants for all moneys drawn from the Treasury in pursuance of appropriations made by law, and for the payment of moneys into the Treasury; and annually submits to Congress estimates of the probable revenues and disbursements of the Government.
He also controls the construction of public buildings; the coinage and printing of money; the administration of the Revenue-Cutter branch of the public service, and furnishes generally such information as may be required by either branch of Congress on all matters pertaining to the foregoing.
The routine work of the Secretary’s office is transacted in the offices of the Supervising Architect, Director of the Mint, Director of Engraving and Printing, and in the following divisions: Bookkeeping and Warrants; Appointments; Customs; Public Moneys; Loans and Currency; Revenue-Cutter; Stationery, Printing, and Blanks; Mails and Files; Special Agents, and Miscellaneous.
A few minutes’ thought on the above will show that this is the very heart of the government of our country. Its pulsations send the currency through all the avenues of commerce; if it became bankrupt, disaster would follow in every other department of the government, and the prosperity of other nations would be unfavorably affected.
The Treasury building was completed in 1841. It has undergone considerable enlargement and many modifications since that time. It is 460 feet on Fifteenth Street, and has a frontage of 264 feet on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is Grecian in architecture. On each of the four sides are large porticoes with most graceful yet massive Ionic columns. The flower gardens about the Treasury are among the most beautiful in the city.
It would greatly surprise Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, if he could see every day at 4 P.M. the 3,000 workers pour out of the 300 rooms of the great building at Fifteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and be told that this is only the central office of the Secretary of the Treasury. The salary list of this building alone is about half a million dollars annually.