Early news reports believed the eastern apex of Federal Triangle extended as far east and south as the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in front of the United States Capitol.

[15][16] But the rapid expansion in the size and number of executive-branch agencies in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s made the McMillan Plan's development of Lafayette Square impractical,[15][17] and Congressional and local support for the project waned.

[20] The plan called for a complex of buildings to be built at Murder Bay, a muddy, flood-prone, malaria-ridden, poverty-stricken region lacking in paved roads, sewer system, and running water and almost exclusively home to numerous brothels and an extensive criminal underclass.

On May 6, an ad hoc committee composed of Olmsted; Medary; Charles Moore, chair of the Commission on Fine Arts; and Louis E. Simon, Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury, recommended relocating the Justice building from 15th Street NW to a lot further east so that traffic congestion at 15th and Pennsylvania might be alleviated.

The Board of Architectural Consultants approved the construction of the Commerce and Internal Revenue structures as stand-alone buildings on the sites last proposed in late June.

[83] The Board of Architectural Consultants met to consider ways in which the construction program might be sped up, and devised plans to have four approved buildings (Commerce, Internal Revenue, Justice and Labor) completed by 1932.

[85][86] Plans for the memorial hall did not move forward, however, so the Association joined with the Smithsonian Institution to build a similar structure on the former site of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad's Pennsylvania Station.

[22][85] In 1929, even as the Federal Triangle project was moving forward, the George Washington Memorial Association was conducting fund-raising for the construction of the building at the proposed National Archives site.

The McMillan Plan was developed before the widespread use of the automobile, and now the Board of Architectural Consultants had to decide how to accommodate the "horseless carriage" while also making Federal Triangle pedestrian-friendly.

[20][26][66][68] But planning for the complex was also deeply influenced by the City Beautiful movement and the idea of creating a civic center to achieve efficiency in administration as well as reinforce the public's perception of government as authoritative and permanent.

[109] The October 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression led newly elected President Herbert Hoover to increase spending on existing public works as a means of stimulating the economy.

[166] The great depth of the building's foundation meant that the crane operator lifting the steel beams into place was out of sight in the basement, and a series of telephone links from observers on the street relayed instructions to him.

[140] To protect the Federal Triangle from flooding by the Potomac River (as had happened in 1871), the north and west grounds of the Washington Monument were raised in the summer of 1938 by about six feet (two metres) in order to form a dike against any future floodwaters.

[176] Patton personally led a cavalry charge (with sabers drawn) into the mass of homeless people, and several hundred rounds of vomit gas were launched at the marchers.

The first problem occurred in July 1930, when the lathers union went on strike to win a $2 per day (16.7 percent) pay increase, halting work for a short period of time on the Archives, Interstate Commerce, Justice, Labor, and Post Office sites.

[184] Two weeks later, the operating engineers and steamfitters unions engaged in a jurisdictional strike against one another, stopping work at the Post Office construction site, but the AFL intervened and arbitrated a solution to the dispute.

The first event was when the Journeyman Stonecutters Association of North America walked out on a jurisdictional strike against the iron workers' union on August 21, idling 225 men working on the Post Office building.

[199] On September 18, a third jurisdictional strike occurred when the boilermakers' union walked off the job at the Federal Triangle central heating plant to protest the use of iron workers in the erection of smokestacks for the facility.

[200] A fourth jurisdictional strike erupted on September 20, when 80 members of the bricklayers' union walked off the job at the heating plant to protest the use of laborers to caulk windows, stone, and roof tiles.

[226] The carpenters rejected the arbitration attempt,[227] and bands of roving picketers moving among construction sites led to traffic tie-ups, frightened citizens, and rumors of violence.

[229] The final labor dispute to affect the Federal Triangle complex construction was a jurisdictional strike over the installation of library shelving at the National Archives building in November 1935.

[260] The idea received support from Democrats in Congress as well, especially from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former Kennedy administration aide who had long championed completion of the Federal Triangle.

[268] Preliminary design specifications required that the final building be no taller than the existing Federal Triangle structures, be constructed of similar materials, emphasize pedestrian traffic, and have a "sympathetic" architectural style.

[269] The preliminary design specs were criticized for not more clearly specifying the architectural style,[269] for bringing another 10,000 new workers to Federal Triangle each day, and for reducing the required number of parking spaces by 30 percent to just 1,300.

[270] The five public members of the design committee were named on April 6, 1988, and were former Senator Charles H. Percy, chair; Harry McPherson, president of the Federal City Council; Donald A.

Brown, chair of the Federal City Council's International Center Task Force; Michael R. Garder, a member of the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation; and Judah C. Sommer, a local attorney.

[271] Seven designs were submitted in June 1989, each incorporating a base-middle-crown structure and enclosed in traditional materials (limestone facade, vertical glass windows, terra-cotta roof tiles).

[290][291] By this time, security concerns had led to several additional design changes (including a reduction in the number of parking spaces to just 1,900), and the cost of the structure had risen to $738 million.

[293] The second, by African American D.C. native Martin Puryear, is a Minimalist tower of brown welded metal titled "Bearing Witness" which stands in Woodrow Wilson Plaza.

[297] It had the "world's most extensive and impressive applications of bronze", "embellished with a wealth of detail, delicately modeled, carefully tooled, finely chased and exactingly finished.