Rte 66 entering DC............becomes Constitution ave.....near the Lincoln memorial.......the original CIA headquarters..........was just across the street from the State Dept.....on like 23 rd street........which is like a block up from Constitution ave.........

(Sledge-) Hammer time: Iconic ‘Blue Goose’ to come tumbling down

er-wielding Roman Catholic nun whaling away at the side of an office building in Arlington.

Yet Sister Jackie Murphy of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary was first in line to swing the hammer at the “Blue Goose,” Marymount University’s iconic, and soon to be no more, Ballston building.
Nuns can do anything well if they put their minds to it, and Murphy’s form with the sledgehammer suggested she might have taken batting practice earlier.

“That wasn’t bad!” she said in reviewing photos of her efforts.
There was no Las Vegas-style implosion with pyrotechnics, but university and community leaders gathered March 18 to say goodbye to their old building and aim for success in building the new.
“Marymount is making a bold statement,” said John Shooshan, whose development firm is partnering with the university on a two-building successor to the Blue Goose. One will serve as the Marymount’s Ballston academic campus, the other a residential building. Parking, which had been on a surface lot, will go underground.
Shooshan has spent nearly a quarter-century working with a succession of Marymount leaders in an effort to redevelop the 2-acre parcel, strategically positioned at the intersection of North Glebe Road and North Fairfax Drive.
“This journey has not been easy, nor will it be easy,” said Shooshan, who initially contacted then-Marymount President Sister Majella Berg about a potential partnership in 1991.
Finally, “it was the right place at the right time,” he said.
For Marymount, the redevelopment provides the opportunity to leverage pent-up development potential.
“We’re very excited,” university president Matthew Shank said, promising that the new building will serve as “a wonderful statement for the entire Arlington community.”
“We want the finest learning environment and the finest working environment,” Shank said at a reception for about 150 university boosters, held in a tent on the parking lot outside the soon-to-be-demolished, Kennedy-era structure.
When it was constructed a half-century ago, the eight-story building was described as Ballston’s first high-rise. Long before the arrival of Arlington’s “urban-village” days, it shared the neighborhood with a bowling alley and palm reader.
In its early years, the building served as a training center for the Central Intelligence Agency, and due to its distinctive color, was known to a generation of CIA employees as “Blue U.”
The origins of the name “Blue Goose” are shrouded in the mists of history. But Jeanne Broyhill, whose father and uncle were responsible for construction of the building and much else in Northern Virginia during the era, says she always remembers it by that nickname. (A nearby building, now long gone, was known as the Green Hornet, Broyhill said.)
Berg, who served as Marymount president for more than three decades, agreed to purchase the building in the early 1980s to address a space crunch on the university’s main campus a mile north. At the time, the university’s cash coffers were somewhat light, but – as both God and financial wizards often work in mysterious ways – the funds were found.
Berg then was faced with an aesthetic challenge: Arlington County Board members despised the blue color, and wanted it changed. Berg, for whom blue represented both her religious order and her university, was determined to keep it as-is – but needed a strategey to change the minds of board members.