In the dreary wasteland of cheap rooming houses and parking lots, nudie shows and pinball parlors, it is surprising to come so suddenly and unexpectedly upon what is surely one of the great buildings in the nation’s capital. Only the White House and the Capitol itself are older; only they can rival it in form and beauty and audacious splendor; yet it is typical of the unassuming role this structure has played in the District of Columbia’s recent past that it docs not even have a proper sort of name. Long-time residents still call it the Old Patent Office Building; officially, it is now the Fine Arts and Portrait Gallery Building, to indicate that it is shared by the National Collection of Fine Arts and the National Portrait Gallery; but mention either name to an inexperienced taxi driver and chantes are lie will have In ask for directions. Only a tiny fraction of the ten million Americans who visit Washington cacli year arc even aware of its existence, but this ncoclassic pile occupies two full city blocks in the run-down, not-quitc-blightcd Southeast section, and within its superbly vaulted halls will one day hang the collection of pictures that even now is bravely called the National Portrait Gallery.

Here, 177 years ago, at a point roughly halfway between the President’s house and the building Congress was to occupy on Tenkins’ Hill, Pierre Charles L’Enfant envisioned a national pantheon. L’Enfant, a wildly improvident French painter-turned-architect-and-city-planner, who was chosen to design the new Federal City because his sense of scale appealed to George Washington, was a man of sudden whim and passion, and one feature of his grandiloquent scheme for the capital was that the site in the Southeast area now defined by Seventh, Ninth, F, and G streets should he a place of honor for the nation’s immortals. In a curious though far from fully defined way, that is approximately what is now taking place; but how it came to pass, in the contorted course of a century and three quarters, requires a long backward look at the venerable building and its story.

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