Can the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” Be Saved From Trump?

A December 8 story by Bloomberg’s Suzanna Monyak reported that, according to a former official of the General Services Administration, the agency in charge of federal real estate, Trump is already bypassing legally required GSA procedures and soliciting bids to demolish the Cohen, along with three other federal buildings in Washington—the Marcel Breuer–designed Housing and Urban Development headquarters; the building housing the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, built in 1919; and the GSA’s own Regional Office Building, which, like the Cohen, is a New Deal–era building housing social-realist murals, in this instance by Howard Weston (though these are on oil and removable). Once the four buildings are demolished, the land will be sold to developers. It won’t likely fetch a high price, because these buildings are all in Washington’s southwest quadrant, where the vacancy rate is above 15 percent. (Anything north of 10 percent is bad.)

The threat to the Cohen is the most urgent because The Meaning of Social Security is probably the most significant work of New Deal public art in Washington. Last week, I finally got to see it up close. Its colors remain astonishingly vibrant eight decades on. (Everybody, I’m told, has that reaction.) Small wonder that, on completion, Shahn called this “the best work I’ve done.” I also saw Philip Guston’s lovely mural, Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family, in the Cohen’s auditorium—a triptych whose panels open up and slide away ingeniously to make way for a movie screen—plus two handsome Seymour Fogel murals, Security of the People and Wealth of the Nation, that stand sentry in what was once the Cohen’s entranceway on Independence Avenue. (Today you enter from the other side, on C Street.)

In the event of demolition, removing the Guston would be a cinch; removing the Fogels more difficult; and removing the Shahn extremely difficult and costly, and perhaps impossible. Painfully aware of this, the GSA recently discussed with Olin Conservation, Inc. a private contractor that for decades has done preservation work on the Shahn frescoes, preparation of “feasibility studies for potential removal of some of the art work,” David Olin, the company’s senior conservator, told me. One salient question is whether either of the walls on which the Shahn frescoes are painted is load-bearing. (To my untrained eye, one of them might.) The GSA press office told me it was not yet able to answer this question, and Olin told me that he also didn’t know.