In 1977, the original Naval Medical Center tower was designated a historical landmark and entered into the Registry of Historical Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Roosevelt’s for the idea Naval Medical Center design came from the State Capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska. The New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue had previously designed the American Modernist building with a 400 foot high tower in the center.

FDR was particular about where buildings and monuments should be placed. He wanted to have a tall tower at the Naval Medical Center, and that would not be allowed inside the District of Columbia — but outside of the District was another story. Where, oh where, could it be located? Supposedly, 80 sites were considered. The one that won was a cabbage farm across Rockville Pike from the site where the new campus for the National Institute of Health (then singular) was being built on Luke and Helen Wilson’s donated land. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) laid the cornerstone of the Tower on Armistice Day 1940 on Naval Medical Center campus in Washington, DC.