Save the Cohen, Part Two
No New Deal-era federal building in Washington was as neglected over 85 years as the structure one expert calls "the Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." Here's how it happened.
A visitor examines Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation” mural, 1942. Photo by Gray Brechin of the nonprofit Living New Deal.
The federal government produced an excellent plan earlier this year to renovate the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, whose Ben Shahn frescoes I wrote about Tuesday. In today’s follow-up I describe how Senator Joni “We Are All Going to Die” Ernst, Republican of Iowa, and the incoming Donald Trump administration headed off that ambitious project, and now plan to sell the Cohen building, which also contains excellent murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel (see above), and others. Gray Brechen, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, calls the Cohen “the Sistine Chapel of New Deal art.” As I mentioned previously, you—or rather, your grandparents or great-grandparents—paid for that chapel to be built, and for its art to be created. It all belongs to you and me, and we shouldn’t let them turn it into rubble.
The piece also relates why the Cohen building, alone among federal New Deal buildings in the capital, was allowed to deteriorate over eight decades; how Republicans, in their zeal to denounce the building’s main tenant, the Voice of America, which they’re trying to shutter, couldn’t get their message straight on whether the Cohen should be renovated or be sold; how the Democrats missed their chance to block legislation to sell the Cohen; and how the Trump administration is now racing to sell by January the Cohen and three other buildings in that same Southwest neighborhood—into an historically dismal market (vacancy rate in SW: 15.4 percent; anything above 10 is bad).
Save the Cohen! Save the murals! You can read my latest New Republic piece here.
And if you missed part one, that’s here.
Please share both widely, on social media for those who do that sort of thing, by email for those who don’t. The preservation movement is going to have to move fast to save these treasures. There are tools it can use, described in the piece, but there’s no room for dawdling.