The FBI Headquarters Redevelopment Can Unlock America's Most Consequential Avenue
Pennsylvania Avenue has never become the great street it was always supposed to be. The Hoover Building is why. Its vacancy is a rare urban gift. Its redevelopment could redefine Washington for a century.
In 1961, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young aide in the Kennedy administration, already thinking harder about cities than almost anyone in government, sat down and wrote a report about Pennsylvania Avenue. The avenue, he observed, was an embarrassment. The great ceremonial artery of the American republic, the street that connected the Capitol to the White House, the route of every inauguration and every funeral cortège, was in a state of civic disgrace. It looked like a "seedy, unkempt thoroughfare." Kennedy saw the report and immediately understood. He approved it on June 1, 1962, and set in motion a planning effort that would eventually produce, among other things, the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
The building was one of many major projects that, together, were supposed to fix Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the first major federal structure to go up on the avenue's north side as part of the grand renewal plan. Instead, it killed the avenue. The brutalist fortress, occupying a full city block between 9th and 10th Streets, created what one DC architect later called "a black hole", an impenetrable concrete wall with no windows at street level, no retail, no life, no reason for a human being to linger for a single moment. Wolf Von Eckardt, the Washington Post's architecture critic, called it a stage set for George Orwell's "1984" when it opened in 1975. Moynihan, by then a senator, was said to regard it as one of the great planning catastrophes of his career.
For fifty years, the building sat there occupying 2.8 million square feet of poured concrete, an entire city block, six and a half acres, straddling the most symbolically significant street in American democracy and prevented Pennsylvania Avenue from becoming what it was always meant to be. And now the FBI is leaving.
Director Kash Patel confirmed in December 2025 that the bureau would relocate to the Ronald Reagan Building three blocks west, saving billions versus the long-planned Greenbelt suburban campus. The Hoover Building will close. And the block at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 9th Street, one of the most historically and symbolically charged pieces of real estate in American history, will be available for something else.
The question is whether Washington, the federal government, and the real estate industry that will circle this block will understand what that something else needs to be. The FBI site is not just an unusually well-located urban parcel. It is the only key capable of unlocking Washington as a true world city. And doing it wrong here would be as consequential as doing it wrong was the first time.
Pennsylvania Avenue Has Never Reached Its Potential
Pennsylvania Avenue was planned as America's great street, the equivalent of the Champs-Élysées, a ceremonial axis connecting the two poles of democratic power, lined with the commercial and cultural energy of a living city. L'Enfant put it at the center of his plan for exactly this reason. And for the better part of two centuries, it has failed to become what it was imagined to be, for reasons mostly self-inflicted.
The avenue, from 6th Street to 15th Street, is dominated by federal buildings, including the FBI on the north side, and, on the south side the Justice Department, the IRS and the great neoclassical mass of the Federal Triangle. Every one of them presents a dead face to the street. There is almost no retail, almost no restaurants, no ground-floor activation of any kind. A person walking the length of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House encounters, for most of that walk, essentially nothing. A scant few cafés to duck into. No shop window to pause at. Very little human-scale architecture to engage the eye, though some truly impressive works in the Willard, the Evening Star Building and the renovated Old Post Office, now the Waldorf Astoria. The buildings are monumental and the street is dead, which is precisely the opposite of what a great urban boulevard requires.
Downtown DC has been making genuine progress north and east of Pennsylvania. CityCenterDC brought luxury retail to H Street, the Penn Quarter and Chinatown neighborhoods have restaurant density along 7th Street. But the avenue itself, the symbolic spine of the city, remains inert. The Hoover Building is the worst single offender as it deadens not only the Pennsylvania Avenue block face, but surrounding blocks on all sides. But the deeper failure is structural: Pennsylvania Avenue was never allowed to be a street. It was made into a stage set for formal processions and left to die between them.
What This Block Can Do That Twenty Others Cannot
Sometimes a single block can do what twenty less significant blocks cannot. The right block, in the right location, developed with the right ambition, can function as a hinge: the element that makes the surrounding city reorganize itself around a new logic. Hudson Yards is too big to be a hinge; it is its own island, disconnected from its surroundings. The High Line works as a hinge because it is linear and connective. The FBI site has the potential to be the most consequential single urban hinge in American history, because of where it sits and what it connects.
Consider its geometry. The Hoover Building block sits at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue, 9th Street, and E Street. Pennsylvania Avenue runs northwest to southeast, connecting the Capitol and the White House. 9th Street runs north-south, connecting Pennsylvania Avenue to downtown to the north and, to the south, to the Southwest corridor now being unlocked by the federal disposal process our companion piece describes. E Street connects to Freedom Plaza, and back east across downtown. The block is not just well-located. It is the crossroads of the crossroads. And right now, its disruption to the life of downtown radiates like a metaphorical blast radius across the surrounding blocks to the north. Each adjacent block face across the street suffers because of its looming presence. Walking the gently sloping E Street behind the FBI Headquarters is one of the dreariest blocks in the city, one I literally gird myself to walk whenever I have to. And the blocks beyond that suffer collaterally.
A development on this site that gets it right could simultaneously activate Pennsylvania Avenue at its most inert point; connect downtown Washington to the National Mall with genuine street-level energy for the first time; bring restaurants and retail to within walking distance of the Capitol and every major federal monument; create a new civic node that serves both the tourist economy and the local one; and establish a physical and symbolic anchor for the entire south Mall redevelopment. Its redevelopment will also transform the value of surrounding blocks to the north, creating a game-changing potential gateway from this ceremonial avenue into the heart of the city's downtown. CityCenterDC at this location would change the game for dozens of blocks as well as the tourist experience of the entire city. It could singularly end the palpable divide between federal quarter and urban quarter. No other single site in the city could do all of these things at once. The question of what gets built on the FBI block is not a real estate question. It is a question about what kind of city Washington intends to be.
The History of Understanding It Right but Failing to Act
This is not the first time serious people have understood what the FBI site could be. Moynihan's 1962 report envisioned a Pennsylvania Avenue lined with shops, restaurants, hotels and cultural buildings as an avenue where Americans could stroll and linger, not just process past. Kennedy approved that vision. What got built instead was the Federal Triangle and the Hoover Building, monuments to institutional self-regard rather than to civic life.
When the FBI's relocation was first seriously discussed in the 2010s, the GSA issued a Request for Information that attracted 38 informal proposals from developers, more than enough to demonstrate that the market understood the site's potential. The proposals envisioned mixed-use development with inviting ground-floor retail and restaurants. The city estimated that redevelopment could generate up to $95 million annually in new tax revenue. All of this was understood. None of it happened, because the relocation deal kept collapsing. Then the Greenbelt site was selected, then challenged on conflict-of-interest grounds, then funded, then defunded, then abandoned entirely when the Trump administration scrapped it in favor of the Reagan Building solution.
Now, for the first time, the FBI is actually leaving. The window to think clearly about what replaces it is open, probably for a short time before the transaction process narrows the conversation from what the city needs to become to what the market can absorb.
The Ambition the Moment Requires
What would it mean to get this right? Not merely right in the sense of better than the Hoover Building. That bar is so low it barely qualifies as an aspiration. But right in the sense of worthy of the moment and the location?
It would mean, first, understanding that this cannot be a conventional mixed-use development. CityCenterDC is excellent at what it is: a sophisticated urban complex that brought energy to a previously dead part of downtown. Something like it on the FBI block would be an improvement, unambiguously. But it would not be transformative in the way the moment demands. A second CityCenter, however well-executed, would partially fix Pennsylvania Avenue and better connect the Mall to downtown, but even it does not carry the gravitas necessary to establish Washington as a city that has finally learned to think at the scale of its own symbolic weight.
What the moment requires is architecture and programming ambitious enough to accomplish multiple things simultaneously. The street-level activation needs to be genuine and dense, not just restaurant pads with glass fronts but a real urban ground floor that pulls people in from Pennsylvania Avenue, from E Street, from 9th Street, in every direction, at every hour. The cultural programming needs to be something that doesn't already exist in Washington: not another museum in the Smithsonian mold, but something that positions the city in the global conversation about creativity, innovation or civic life in a genuinely new way. The residential component needs to be dense enough and varied enough to put actual people on the street at 10pm on a Tuesday. The public space needs to be designed as the civic room of Pennsylvania Avenue: the place where the street finally has somewhere to arrive. But mostly, it all needs to be designed not based on precedents and not for the singular trends of the moment, but with an aspiration toward singularity and gravitas so as to be a generationally transcendent project within the country's history.
As part of that, the architecture needs to be singular. Washington's building height limit means you cannot build vertically to signal importance; you must build horizontally, which makes the design challenge harder and the stakes higher. The building or buildings that go on this block will be viewed from the Capitol steps, from every tourist photograph taken on the avenue for the next hundred years, from the White House lawn. The design cannot be merely competent. It needs to be one of the great achievements of American civic architecture, the way the Seagram Building said something about what New York was becoming in 1958, the way the Sydney Opera House said something about what Australia was capable of imagining about itself.
That sounds like an enormous ambition for a real estate transaction. It is. But this is not really a real estate transaction. It is a city-defining moment dressed in the clothes of a real estate transaction. And the federal government and the District need to treat it accordingly.
The Risk of Getting It Wrong Again
The most likely outcome, given how these processes tend to go, is something like the following: GSA issues an RFP. Several large developers respond with proposals that are individually reasonable, including mixed-use, residential-heavy, ground-floor retail, token public space and architecture that is competent and inoffensive. The federal government picks the proposal that maximizes its return or minimizes its political risk or both. A building gets built. It is better than the Hoover Building. Pennsylvania Avenue remains not quite alive. Washington remains not quite a world city. And in twenty years, someone writes a very sharp report about how the FBI site represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity that was narrowly missed.
This is not a cynical prediction. It is the historical base rate for these decisions. The Penn Station replacement in New York was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Embarcadero Freeway removal in San Francisco was a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Some of these moments produce genuinely transformative results; many produce results that are better than what they replaced but fall short of what the moment made possible. The difference, in the cases where it goes right, is almost always the same: someone decides that this particular moment is too important to run through a normal process, and insists on a framework ambitious enough to match the opportunity. Burnham understood this. Moynihan understood it. The question is who understands it now and whether they have the standing to insist.
Why This One Block Is the Crown Jewel
Of all the federal buildings now moving toward disposal, including the USDA South Building, HUD's Weaver Building, the Forrestal Complex, the Labor Department's Frances Perkins Building, the Hoover Building is the one that matters most. Not because the others are unimportant; the south Mall opportunity is enormous and genuinely consequential. But the FBI site has something none of the others have: a location that can simultaneously repair the avenue, connect downtown to the Mall, and anchor the broader neighborhood transformation, three broken things fixed by one well-conceived block.
The south Mall sites can create a new neighborhood between the Mall and the waterfront. That is magnificent. But they are primarily additive, building something that didn't exist. The FBI site is something rarer: it can repair something that was broken at the founding. Pennsylvania Avenue has been a ceremonial simulacrum rather than a living street for its entire existence. The avenue that L'Enfant imagined as the connective tissue of American democracy has been occupied, for fifty years, by a building that embodies everything antithetical to civic life: secrecy, impenetrability, institutional self-enclosure. Replacing that with something radically open, radically public, radically engaged with the street and the pedestrian and the city is not just urban improvement. It is a symbolic act of enormous consequence.
The FBI redevelopment can be the moment when Washington stops being a city built for the civics textbook and starts being a city built to compete with London and Paris, imagined for the people who come from everywhere in the world to understand what American democracy actually means on the ground. The Mall gives you the monuments. Pennsylvania Avenue, if it finally becomes what Moynihan and Kennedy and L'Enfant imagined, gives you the city that surrounds those monuments and makes them live.
The FBI is leaving. The block is open. The question of what happens next is not a planning question or a real estate question or even an architectural question. It is a question about ambition, about whether this particular American moment is capable of producing the kind of civic imagination the site has always deserved and never received.
Moynihan understood what Pennsylvania Avenue could be in 1961. He spent the rest of his career watching it fail to get there. The opportunity he identified is still there, still waiting. The building that blocked it for fifty years is finally leaving. There will not be another chance like this. The only question is whether anyone has the courage to take it.
