Photo by NCinDC.

Many know the beautiful downtown building that use to host the Woodward & Lathrop department store, known as Woodies. The building’s tenants now include Forever 21, Madame Tussauds, and Zara and the fabulous facade has never looked better. Lesser known, but still a wonderful building is Woodward & Lothrop’s warehouse on 1st and M Streets NE.

The warehouse, built between 1937 and 1939, was designed by Abbot, Merkt and Company. I think of warehouses just built for function, but the Woodward & Lothrop warehouse was built with an eye for form a well: it was built in the Streamline Moderne style – a later type of Art Deco design, a very unusual style for a warehouse. The great architecture details of the building, so strange for a warehouse, is what lead the building to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.

With areas for service, storage, and delivery, it is one of the few mixed-use warehouse still standing in Washington. An ambitious warehouse for its time, it is also one of the city’s largest. Woodward & Lothrop owned the building until 1995, when the chain was bought out by Hecht’s.

Now converted into office space, the warehouse hosts the offices of various federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.