On January 15, 1943, the Pentagon was opened for use for the very first time, having broken ground less than two years prior.
As Hitler’s army marched through Europe, Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt the need to consolidate command of America’s armed forces in a single headquarters.
The Department of Defense was originally called the War Department, and in 1941, it had 24,000 employees spread out across 17 buildings in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon was built at a mindboggling speed.
The Pentagon is shaped like it is because head architect G. Edwin Bergstrom was required to fit the building in between existing roads at the original site, and a five-sided, asymmetrical design was the only way to do that.
The building also needed to remain relatively low due to the scarcity of steel caused by World War II and to prevent it from blocking the views of Washington, D.C. After protests erupted about its proximity to Arlington National Cemetery, the construction site was moved to its current location, but Bergstrom stuck with the five-sided shape to prevent delaying construction.
The Pentagon contains more than 6.6 million square feet of floor space, making it one of the largest buildings in the world. To put that into perspective, it has three times the floor space of the Empire State Building.
The Pentagon is five stories tall (with two basement levels) and is made up of five internal rings, intersected by 10 corridors. From the center out, these rings are named “A” through “E” (with “F” and “G” in the basement). There are 131 stairways, 19 escalators, and 70 elevators needed to navigate all of the floors.
According to the official Pentagon tours website, 26,000 employees, both military and civilian, work there, which is why it needs 16 parking lots to handle 8,770 commuter cars. In addition, more than 106,000 tourists visit the Pentagon every year.
The total walking distance of the building is about 17.5 miles, but if you speed-walk through the center courtyard, you can move between the building’s furthest points in under ten minutes. The DOD also provides workers with motorized scooters that cruise along at three miles per hour.
All that walking around can get a person hungry. Luckily, there are a number of food options at the Pentagon, including five different food courts that have outposts of almost every fast food restaurant you can think of: Baskin Robbins, Subway, KFC, McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Popeyes—and of course, Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks to keep everyone well caffeinated.
At the center of the Pentagon is a five-acre park that houses a now-closed hot dog stand.
“Rumor has it that during the Cold War, the Russians never had any less than two missiles aimed at this hot dog stand,” DOD Communications Officer Brett Eaton told the Stars and Stripes in 2010. “They thought this was the Pentagon’s most top-secret meeting room, and the entire Pentagon was a large fortress built around this hot dog stand. They thought the officers were going to get their top-secret briefings in a protected area, but really they were just going to get lunch.”
Construction began on September 11, 1941—exactly 60 years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks that sent American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon. The plane’s impact smashed through the first floor of three of the Pentagon’s rings and caused a fire that took 36 hours to extinguish. The lives of 184 people were lost at the Pentagon on that awful day, including 120 Pentagon employees.
