Along Came a Spider|J. Edgar Hoover Building — the concrete slab where the federal case lands

It is the least loved building on Pennsylvania Avenue and it knows it. Finished in 1975 to a Brutalist design by C. F. Murphy Associates, the FBI headquarters squats over an entire block between Ninth and Tenth Streets, its upper floors cantilevered out over the sidewalk so that the pavement below sits in permanent shadow. The concrete was poured with a deliberately rough finish. Rain streaks it. Nobody has ever managed to photograph it flatteringly, which is arguably the point.

Washington's location records place Along Came a Spider here, and at Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street a few blocks east — the exact stretch of road where a detective's private case stops being private. That is the film's hinge. Alex Cross is a police psychologist, a man who works one mind at a time; the moment a senator's child is taken, he is swallowed by an apparatus that works in warrants and task forces. You do not need a scene to explain that transfer of power. You need this facade.

Walk the north side along Pennsylvania and look up into the overhang. The scale is genuinely oppressive from underneath, which is the honest experience of the building and the one a camera can use. There is no lobby to wander into: public visits run through the FBI Experience, which has to be arranged in advance through a congressional office, so for almost everyone the sidewalk is the whole visit.

Do it at dusk, walking west, with the lit Capitol dome behind you and the building's dark mass ahead. Two ideas of the same government, four blocks apart. The film shot both.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.