At the end of the Third Battle of Seoul in 1951 during the Korean War, communist Chinese and North Korean troops fought successfully in chasing out US and UN forces out of the city before marching through ruined Seoul to the building and then planting a North Korean flag on its roof, carried out by a Chinese PVA platoon.

The main building is a designated registered cultural property of the Republic of Korea.

Original plans called for the historic building to be razed and replaced with a new design, but support for preservation put a halt to demolition.

A large digital clock for the building was installed in 1975, and replaced with an analogue counterpart when Lee Myung-bak was mayor of Seoul.

[1] The building, registered as a cultural asset, has been converted into a library with a collection of more than 200,000 books.