This ten-story theater and office building, originally known as The Earle and now currently known as the Warner Theatre, was designed in 1924 by noted theater architect C. Howard Crane and his New York partner Kenneth Franzheim. Originally, the Earle was built as a movie palace that also staged live vaudeville productions, but by 1945, the theater was exclusively showing movies. In 1947, it was renamed for Harry Warner, one of the Warner Brothers. After years of showing only movies, the theater was in disrepair by the 1970s, but by the end of the decade it was hosting live concerts once more, as it still does today.
The interior of the building is designed in the French Renaissance style with lavish surface treatment and abundant gilding. Classical forms, such as barrel vaults, engaged pilasters, and arched openings, articulate the interior spaces of the entrance lobby, foyer, auditorium, and stage. Mythical figures, musical instruments, plant forms, animals, lanterns, and urns are carved in gilt against backgrounds of green and rose.
DC Inventory: May 18, 1983
DC Inventory (redesignation, including interior designation): August 7, 1985
]]>The State, War and Navy Building was built just west of the White House, between 1871 and 1888, to designs by architect Alfred B. Mullett. Like the Greek Revival style Treasury Department Building to the east, on the other side of the White House, the Second Empire/French Renaissance style State, War, and Navy Building is a monumental, isolated rectangle with a transecting wing and two interior courts.
The building is six stories high, with purple-grey Virginia granite walls and slate mansard roofs. Its colossal size and almost unbelievable variety and richness of detail represent the quintessence of vigorous, superscaled late 19th-century architecture.
This building was constructed to create a new permanent home for the overcrowded State, War, and Navy departments. Four future presidents had offices in the building: Theodore Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, William Howard Taft as Secretary of State, Franklin D. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Lyndon B. Johnson as Vice President. 13 Secretaries of the Navy, 21 Secretaries of War, and 25 Secretaries of State had offices in the building. It is now principally occupied by the ever-expanding White House staff, and known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or Old Executive Office Building.
DC Inventory: November 8, 1964 (Joint Committee on Landmarks)
National Register: June 4, 1969
National Historic Landmark: November 11, 1971
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