The district of masons................

Completed in 1915, the House of the Temple was designed by John Russell Pope, architect of other notable Washington buildings, including the National Gallery of Art (1941) and the Jefferson Memorial (1943). "The temple launched Pope's career in Washington," says Paul Dolinsky, head of the Historic American Buildings Survey. "It became one of the most respected classical designs in the world at the time." Dolinsky says the Temple Room's gilded serpents and velvet drapings remind him of the set of the 1934 epic Cleopatra. "Cecil B. DeMille meets Freemasonry," he says. "It's really a larger-than-life Hollywood set."

Modeled on a Greek-style temple, the building contains no metal girders—just stone, as the ancients would have constructed it. The massive limestone facade is ringed with 33 Ionic columns. The number 33 proliferates in Masonic ritual, but the group's historians say they don't know what it symbolized originally. The dark green marble floors of the atrium lead to a grand staircase and a bust of Scottish Rite leader Albert Pike, a former Confederate general who spent 32 years developing Masonic rituals. Pike remains a controversial figure, with detractors alleging that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and a Satanist. In 1944 the Masons, by an act of Congress, gained permission to dig up Pike's remains from a local cemetery and bury them in the temple.