Homeland Security headquarters has hidden history

The new Department of Homeland Security is making its temporary headquarters on stolen property.

The complex of redbrick, Georgian buildings at Massachusetts and Nebraska avenues NW originally belonged to Mount Vernon Seminary, a school for young women.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, in 1941, while the students were home for Christmas, the Navy seized the entire 38-acre site for use in naval intelligence and never gave it back; eventually it paid the school a fifth of what the property was worth. The seminary was forced to move into the second floor of a new branch of Garfinckel's department store.

"Maximum military hubris," David Brinkley labeled the Navy's move in his 1988 book about wartime Washington-and unnecessary, because the Navy already owned enough property in the suburbs, much of it like the tracts the newest Cabinet agency just rejected.