share a new building, as they had shared the old for almost 60 years? If so, where should the new joint home be located— on the site southeast of the Capitol which had been approved in 1941, or at the Army Medical Center
which had grown up around the Walter Reed Hospital ?
Or, should the long association of the Library and the Museum as joint occupants of the same building be terminated by providing separate buildings, either on adjacent blocks of land on Capitol Hill or with the Library location in that area and the Institute and Museum in the Walter Reed group ? Or, perhaps, the Institute and Museum should become part of an Army Medical Research and Graduate Teaching Center proposed to be located at Forest Glen, Md., where the buildings of the National Park Seminary for Women were occupied as an annex to Walter Reed General Hospital, for convalescents.
On one point, there was virtually complete agreement: that the building originally planned in 1941 would be entirely too small for the needs of the Museum and the Library, because of the "tremendous expansion of both institutions and the establishment of the Army Institute of Pathology," as The Surgeon General put it, in recommending to the Commanding General, Army Service Forces, a change in the basic plans for the proposed building. As necessary steps in orderly planning, it was requested that The Surgeon General be authorized to endeavor to secure approval of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission for an additional block of land in the proposed site on Capitol Hill."5[1]
Permission was granted to start revised plans for the proposed building, and the architects, Eggers and Higgins of New York, came to Washington to meet with representatives of the interested Government agencies. The whole group adjourned to meet with Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant III, chairman of the Park and Planning Commission, who assured them that the Commission would "earmark" in its plan a plot of land on Capitol Hill, adequate for the purpose.
On the same day, 20 April 1945, at a meeting called by General Kirk, The Surgeon General, to discuss the status of the new building, the proposal to concentrate the educational activities of the Army Medical Department was introduced, and Colonel Ash urged that the matter should be referred to the Army Medical Research Board for its consideration before proceeding further with plans which would commit the Department to the erection of a building, or buildings, separated from its central educational activities.
- ↑ 5 Correspondence, The Surgeon General, to Commanding General, Army Service Forces, 19 February 1945. On file in historical records of AFIP.
