For nine months I’ve been making a stink about the Trump administration’s imminent sale of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses the richest store of New Deal murals in Washington, D.C., including a series of Ben Shahn frescoes, situated along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, that would be very, very hard to remove (and require a great deal of expertise to preserve). Shahn judged these murals “the best work I’ve done,” and I don’t disagree; they’re stunning to see in person.
Now there’s good news to share. On Thursday the General Services Administration, which manages real estate for the federal government, signaled for the first time that it wants to cancel the sale, based on an aspect that I didn’t know about—and which has nothing to do with the Cohen being (in the words of Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal) “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”
Earlier this month I was able to report a tiny glimmer of good news—two House Republicans had voted for an appropriations amendment introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, to compel public release of a GSA feasibility study about refurbishing the Cohen. The amendment failed, but it was the first signal that we might see some bipartisan interest in saving the building. (For my earlier pieces about all this, click here, here, here, and here; see also follow-up coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.)
This week’s news is much better, and from the unlikeliest forum—a public meeting of the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent government agency that, in a May 2025 report recommended the Cohen building’s sale and gave no indication that the Cohen was anything other than a cavernous and underutilized structure that nobody would ever miss. I have a strong suspicion that the PBRB didn’t know at the time about the Cohen’s art works (which in addition to the Shahns include important art works by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and others).
Now, Ben Peters of The Washington Business Journal reported Thursday, the PBRB is putting the brakes on the sale. At the end of last year the Trump administration was so hot and bothered to unload four properties in Washington’s Southwest quadrant, including the Cohen, that the White House started soliciting bids—illegally, I might add—to demolish the buildings (since the land is what real estate developers really crave). The demolition didn’t happen, but this spring two of the four buildings were sold at, respectively, one-tenth and one-fifth of market value (in a local market for commercial real estate that was already seriously depressed). A third building outside the Southwest quadrant, the Old Post Office, also sold below market, but that’s a more complicated story of kleptocratic self-dealing by President Donald Trump.
At Thursday’s hearing, according to Peters, board member Michael Capuano said that “Our analysis shows that absent an identified anchor tenant with Southwest, the market is not ready to absorb all of this additional square footage.” Translation: We just staged two embarrassing fire sales in Southwest, so maybe we’d better slow the hell down. According to Peters, board members also expressed concern that the federal government has not yet agreed with the local District government on a master plan to redevelop the Southwest neighborhood.
But I haven’t even told you yet the really good news.
Making an appearance at the hearing was Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the GSA’s Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal and a career civil servant. Butterworth said (this is Peters’ paraphrase): “Infrastructure complications with the 1.2 million-square-foot Cohen Building at 330 Independence Ave. SW are prompting officials to potentially consider pulling it from a disposal list and instead attempt to reinvest in the property for continued government use.”
Having been focused on the Shahn murals throughout my reporting, my first thought on reading this was that “infrastructure” is a very odd word to describe precious art. But it turns out Butterworth wasn’t talking about any of the building’s murals or friezes. He was talking about the difficulty posed by the fact that the Cohen has a sort of Siamese twin, the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building, which houses staff for the Health and Human Services department, and which the federal government does not intend to sell.
The Switzer and the Cohen were built simultaneously, in roughly the same Egyptian-Revival-Meets-Art-Deco style, on opposite sides of C Street. They were designed by the same architect, Charles Z. Klauder, probably best known for building the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. And it turns out Klauder, when he designed these twin buildings, decided to save Uncle Sam a little money by having them share certain underground guts—heating and electrical equipment, I’m told, and some other utility-related gewgaws.
Apparently the two buildings are conjoined sufficiently that separating the Cohen from the Switzer in order to sell it would cost the federal government a lot of money that nobody gave a moment’s thought to until five minutes ago. Well, maybe the GSA thought about it, quietly. But Senator Joni Ernst, who wrote an amendment into a water resources bill last year requiring the Cohen’s sale, almost certainly did not. (She didn’t know about the art, even though the Cohen is situated a mere two blocks from the Capitol.) To sell the Cohen, Butterworth informed the committee, wouldn’t save the government money; it would cost the government money, because, he said, it would be “extremely expensive to replicate or sever those utilities.” Butterworth continued:
While a lot of people would like to see this building disposed of — and given its underutilization rate, we understand why — our thought is, unless we can solve that problem, that might be a building that’s better reinvested in and get back to a utilization rate that would make sense and justify the level of investment.
The way to save the Cohen, it turns out, is to save a bunch of dirty pipes and cables and ducts that you can’t even see because they run underneath C Street. With this revelation, Butterworth just made it a whole lot easier for Congress to stop the sale. Let’s raise a glass to the remarkable foresight of Charles Klauder.
“We remain concerned,” Mary Okin, assistant director of The Living New Deal, told me, “since the building is still on the accelerated disposal list, but we welcome any public announcement suggesting the building is not going to go up for sale.”
I do too, and I think probably we’re going to get one.
