The Pentagon: Arlington's Largest Building, Largest Employer and Strangest Landmark
Five sides, five rings, 6.5 million square feet — and a Metro stop named after it. The world's most famous office building is, before anything else, an Arlington neighbor.
It rose in sixteen months out of a swampy tract called Hell's Bottom, and it has defined Arlington ever since. The Pentagon — headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, completed in 1943 — is the largest office building in the world by floor area, holds some 26,000 workers on a busy day, and sits entirely within Arlington County.
Its scale remains absurd in the best way: five sides, five rings, five floors above ground, 17.5 miles of corridors, and a famous design that lets a person walk between any two points in the building in about seven minutes. The five-acre courtyard at its center holds a small shop that generations of officers have joked was mistaken for something more sinister by Cold War satellites.
For Arlington, the building is an economy before it is a symbol. The defense and federal workforce it anchors supports the county's hotels, restaurants and Metro lines; its renovation after the September 11, 2001 attack — a hijacked airliner struck its western side, killing 184 people — is marked by the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial on its southwest corner, where 184 illuminated benches honor each victim.
Most days, though, it is simply the neighbor that never sleeps: lights on around the clock, buses cycling through its transit center, flags over the river entrance. Arlingtonians give directions by it, run races past it and watch fireworks over it. Other cities have landmarks. Arlington has the Pentagon — and treats it, correctly, as both.
