The administrative building is owned by the government of the District of Columbia and has served as the home of various city offices since it opened in 1941 as a unified location for previously dispersed municipal functions.

The massive complex of seven buildings situated along Pennsylvania Avenue downtown was not completed until the New Deal in the 1930s, but, once finished, achieved its goal of unifying a number of federal government offices.

Eventually, these plans also called for the unification of other municipal functions at Judiciary Square to absorb overcrowded city offices, particularly those of the police department.

[2] The proposed concentration of so many city courts and services at Judiciary Square would require a host of new buildings to fill a campus, which municipal architect Albert L. Harris started to plan in 1926.

Washington Post reporter James D. Secrest summed it up well, writing on September 4, 1938 that "Washingtonians, who have followed the National Capital's progress for the past decade, rubbed their eyes and muttered incantations at the press announcement last week that construction of the Municipal Center finally had been assured."

A 1983 Washington Post article noted that "[f]or many people, merely the mention of the place is enough to conjure up chilling visions of bottomless file cabinets, brusque government clerks and a twilight zone of bureaucratic runarounds."

Two FBI agents, Martha Dixon Martinez and Michael J. Miller, and Metropolitan Police Sergeant Henry J. Daly, were shot and killed by a murder suspect who had entered the building.

The National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Daly Building notes that “[a]mong the defining Classical Moderne features of the building are its ziggurat configuration achieved through the progressive setback of its upper stories and its use of the abstracted classical form.” Although some had originally called for a Colonial Revival design, the architects of the Municipal Center wanted its design to complement the nearby Hadfield Courthouse and Federal Triangle.

In addition, it sits as a physical manifestation of the New Deal in the city, as PWA grants helped fund its construction and it showcases the Classical Moderne style often associated with public buildings from that program.

And, on a local level, the idea behind the building's conception, the unification of city services, represents the district's long history of gaining political autonomy from the federal government.