7. The building went up in record time.
The groundbreaking ceremony was held on September 11, 1941, and work quickly got underway, with more than 15,000 workers on site around the clock. The demand for office space was so great that the first workers moved in before the complex was fully finished, and many employees found themselves working in offices without walls and travelling around the complex on wooden planks laid across open construction pits. Construction wrapped up on January 15, 1943. It’s been estimated that under normal circumstances, construction should have taken four years—the Pentagon went up in just 16 months. This speedy construction was costly, however: The project was initially budgeted at $35 million, but wound up costing $63 million, more than $900 million in today’s money.
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