The Gallup Building
- Architect
- Adolf Cluss
- Year
- 1870
- City
- Washington, DC
The building at 901 F Street NW — today the Gallup Building, headquarters of the Gallup Organization — was raised as the Old Masonic Temple, designed in the French Renaissance Revival style by Adolf Cluss and Joseph Wildrich von Kammerhueber. Construction began in June 1867, President Andrew Johnson laid the cornerstone in May 1868, and the building was dedicated on March 20, 1870, at a cost of $100,000.
the building
The unfinished fifth floor. The original design called for a mansard-roofed fifth story, but it was never built for lack of funds. The finished building held ground-floor stores and a full basement, with a grand ballroom rented out on the second floor.
Furniture store era. Julius Lansburgh bought the former Masonic Temple in 1921 and ran it as a furniture store, repainting it white in 1922; Lansburgh's closed in 1970.
the style
The French Renaissance Revival design, by Adolf Cluss with Joseph Wildrich von Kammerhueber, gave the Masonic Temple an ornate civic presence on F Street even without its planned fifth floor.
significance
The building was listed as historic in 1974, and in December 1979 the District refused a demolition permit for it under DC's historic preservation law. A $33 million renovation followed in 2000. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and the DC Inventory of Historic Sites, and now serves as Gallup's headquarters.
nearby
- Washington Loan and Trust Company
- National Union Building
- Patent Office (National Portrait Gallery & National Museum of American Art)
- Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard
- General Post Office (General Land Office)
- Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library