The many lives of DC’s “Apex” building

Sitting on the corner of 7th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, this imposing brownstone structure is instantly recognizable. Its two spire-topped towers are iconic. Its historic name—the Central National Bank Building—is not widely known, but this eye-catching landmark bears a popular nickname: the “Apex Building.” So it may seem that this fixture of the Pennsylvania Avenue streetscape needs no introduction.

In fact, the building wasn’t known by that name for its first several decades. When the nickname did come into common usage in the late 1930s, it referred instead to a different building nearby. And the building as originally constructed was shorter and had no towers—indeed, it had a completely different architectural style. This evolution of the building’s appearance, along with its varied uses over time, epitomizes the changing fortunes of downtown Washington over the last 160 years.

The Hotel era

Completed circa 1864, the building is by far the oldest structure on the length of the avenue from the Capitol to the Treasury Building. A photo of the 1865 Civil War victory parade for the Union army shows the building in its original five-story Renaissance Revival form.

Sitting at the eastern edge of downtown DC’s busy open-air market (which occupied the area that is now the Navy Memorial), the building had an enviable location. The first tenant of the Washington Building, as it was originally and somewhat unimaginatively called at first, was the Seaton Hotel. Operating on the “European plan” (no meals included), the hotel boasted 115 rooms and common spaces that were, in the words of a contemporary news report, “heated by steam [and] capable of being adjusted in the matter of temperature with the greatest precision.”

In 1870, the Seaton gave way to the smaller St. Marc Hotel, whose 24 newly furnished rooms cost $1-3 per day. An 1884 commercial guide to Washington remarked on the hotel’s “elegant appointments [and] fine cuisine.”

The Central National Bank era

The Central National Bank purchased the building in 1887 and commissioned architect Alfred B. Mullett to rework the exterior. Mullett, well known in Washington for his earlier State, War, and Navy Building—extant today as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—made the most of the site’s prominent location on Pennsylvania Avenue. He radically altered the building’s appearance, adding a rusticated sandstone façade and two prominent corner towers topped with dormered conical roofs. Apart from a modest 1984 rear and upper-story addition, the building’s exterior remains essentially unchanged today.

The bank would go on to occupy the building’s ground floor for twenty years, moving north across C Street in 1907 upon the merger that created the National Bank of Washington. Over the next four decades, a series of cigar stores occupied the west side of the ground floor, while the retail space facing onto Pennsylvania Avenue housed clothing stores.

During World War I, the Federal Food Administration sponsored a series of illuminated signs atop the towers urging Washingtonians to conserve food for the war effort.

After the war, the billboard space was repurposed for commercial advertising, such as this mid-1920s sign promoting Uneeda Biscuits.

The “Apex” nickname

In 1937, construction began on the Federal Trade Commission Building on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Owing to its location at the eastern tip of Federal Triangle, the FTC’s new home was commonly referred to as the Apex building.

Drawing on this popular name for the immediate area, a new tenant in the old bank building called itself Apex Liquor upon opening in 1945.

Ironically, Apex Liquor looked out directly onto the Cogswell Temperance Fountain, installed on the corner of 7th and Pennsylvania in June 1884. The fountain remained in its original location until 1987, when the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation swapped the positions of the fountain and the Grand Army of the Republic monument to make the latter more prominent.

The 1945 arrival of the liquor store coincided with the start of a decades-long decline for the building and downtown DC generally. In 1950, the three upper floors of the bank building became vacant and would remain so for more than 30 years. Like many other historic structures in the vicinity, the bank building suffered badly from a lack of maintenance. A 1981 federal report put things bluntly:

All upper floors have major structural damage. Wall, ceiling and floor finishes become progressively more deteriorated as one reaches the upper floors of the building. …

Major water and structural damage has caused the floors to buckle excessively on these upper floors. The sixth floor is not visible beneath the debris of pigeons and the disintegrating roof above.

Survival and restoration

Fortunately, the building survived the destructive forces that led to many of downtown DC’s older structures being razed. Sears, Roebuck & Co. rehabilitated and slightly expanded the building in 1984 as the headquarters of its Sears World Trade business. Sears did not stay long, however, selling the building in December 1995. The purchaser, the National Council of Negro Women, made the building its headquarters and remains there today.