A glimpse at the Old Post Office Tower.

Kevin Harber / Flickr

Campgrounds at national parks like Yosemite and Joshua Tree are closing amid the overflow of human feces, but there’s a nearby federal site that has reopened despite the ongoing government shutdown—the Old Post Office Tower.

The historic site, which shares a building with the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, opened its doors to visitors this week, after having shuttered last week at the onset of the shutdown. A receptionist at the Trump International Hotel said on Thursday that the tower had reopened this week. Robert Bannister, the ringing master of the Washington Ringing Society, which chimes The Congress Bells at the Old Post Office Tower on federal holidays, says he had no problems entering the building to ring the bells on New Year’s Eve on Monday.

Greenwire first reported that the General Services Administration, the owner of the historic building, would be funding its reopening. A GSA spokesperson told The Hill that “funds needed to operate the Old Post Office tower are not associated with the current fiscal year’s (FY 2019) appropriations bill. The overall operation of the tower was a part of the government’s lease signed in August 2013, and in response to the ‘Old Post Office Building Redevelopment Act of 2008.’” If that’s the case, it is not entirely clear why the tower closed during the beginning of the shutdown.

That 60-year lease, of course, was signed between the GSA and the Trump Organization in 2013, then headed by now-President Donald Trump. The Trump International Hotel opened at the tail-end of the 2016 presidential campaign. While Congressional Democrats raised concerns that Trump’s lack of divestment in the organization amounted to a conflict of interest, a few months after he took office (and his son had officially taken over Trump Old Post Office LLC), the GSA said the president was in the clear.

Still, the president’s continued ownership stake in the hotel has been the subject of lawsuits, including D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh’s lawsuit alleging Trump is violating the Constitution’s anti-corruption clause. Representative Bill Pascrell, of New Jersey, pointed to the reopening of the Old Post Office Tower as an example of the government benefiting the president’s business interests. “The Trump admin is using your tax dollars to keep an @NPS site at his luxury hotel open while the rest of Americans are wading through garbage and locked gates,” he tweeted.

When 2018 ended without a funding agreement in place, a number of local sites that were able to stay open using last year’s funding have had to begin 2019 with closed doors, like the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo.

The Old Post Office’s lease appears to spare it this fate. Bannister says that the Washington Ringing Society will return to on Thursday evening, because it is tradition to ring The Congress Bells for the opening of Congress—though the society already has weekly practices at the tower each Thursday. “We are just showing up like we normally do,” he says.