Over the years, I have regularly attended dance and yoga classes at St. Mark’s Capitol Hill, which sits just east of the Adams Building. I have often heard a story about how the church vestry applied to place the building on the National Register of Historic Places to prevent the Library of Congress from tearing down the church and erecting the James Madison Memorial Building at Third and A Streets SE. I have always enjoyed this story and admired the wily and quick-witted church members for this solution to their problems. However, as with many myths, when one begins to dig into the actual history, this tale begins to fall apart.
On examination, I found St. Mark’s Church was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, two years after the foundation for the Madison Building was laid! A little more digging revealed the District of Columbia had added St. Mark’s to the D.C. Inventory of Historic Sites in 1964, and I wondered if this was the action that persuaded Congress to look elsewhere for land for the Madison Building. Curious, I began to look into the record of the history behind the construction of the building.
In 1957, Librarian of Congress L. Quincy Mumford commissioned a study