From 1961 until 1994, I was an employee in Washington, D.C. of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, later renamed the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I began as a clerk in the U.S. Children’s Bureau and retired as the Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, spending the bulk of those 33 years working on social policy on old age for the U.S. Administration on Aging.

All of the above sets the stage for today’s mailing, which is about historical preservation. With the exception of a few months spent in a WWII “tempo”located on the ground where the Air and Space Museum now stands, I worked in three buildings: the Wilbur Cohen Building; the Mary Switzer Building; and the Hubert Humphrey Building. All three were located next to one another in the Southwest part of D.C., adjacent to the Capitol, and only a few blocks north of where Al Jolson grew up.

Of the three buildings the one that had the most emotional resonance for me was the Cohen Building. This was the building: where I had been sworn into federal service in an office on the first floor; where I discovered the work of the fabulous New Deal artist, Ben Shahn; where for the third time in a few years I personally encountered John F. Kennedy, the first and second in Detroit and Madison during his campaign for the Presidency, the third as he entered the building for a meeting with Secretary Ribicoff; where on November 22, 1963 on the second floor in the corridors of the Voice of America I watched the news that the President was dead; and where my career in aging had begun.

In a few design respects it is a curious building. Originally intended to house the recently-created Social Security Administration (which it never did), the floors were constructed differently than other federal buildings so that they could bear the weight of the heavy SSA calculation machinery that the building was expected to house. Also, it has an unusually large number of bathrooms, the reason being that, originally, there were separate bathrooms for whites and non-whites.

Some months ago I was alerted by a close friend with whom I had worked in the Cohen Building that the Trump Administration intended to sell the Building.

At the end of this message, you will find a link to a .pdf file, which contains five items that provide a variety of interesting information about the crisis that, suddenly, emerged in the wake of that decision. Item 1 is a November 11, 2025 ARTNET article, Item 2 is a Streets of Washington December 2, 2025 Substack, and Item 3 is a December 10, 2025 New Republic article—all three providing somewhat different but useful perspectives on the crisis. Items 4 and 5 are March 27 and June 26, 2026 New Republic articles describing how the fate of the building has unfolded in the months since. (Note that three New Republic articles were written by Timothy Noah who has become a passionate advocate for preserving the building.)

A final note: My friend in D.C. recently took a GSA-conducted tour of the Building. She, enthusiastically, endorsed it. If you are in D.C., I would recommend the tour as a must-do part of your trip.