Johns Hopkins opens new D.C. academic center in an old museum site

Excerpted from The Washington Post (Oct. 6, 2023)

Gone is the monumental tablet, engraved with the text of the First Amendment, that had announced the Newseum. Etched now into a marble facade, with lettering 11 inches tall, is the name of the new owner: Johns Hopkins University.

Students, not tourists, are flowing in and out of 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW for the first time this fall. The edifice underwent a $275 million renovation after the journalism museum shuttered in 2019. Counting the purchase price for the property, the project totaled nearly $650 million for a building with a soaring interior atrium and 420,000 square feet of space. The reopening enables the Baltimore-based research university to expand its presence in Washington through a prime location near the Capitol.

On Friday, Hopkins announced plans to launch a School of Government and Policy there within the next two to three years, alongside its School of Advanced International Studies. The university’s business school and other academic units are also holding classes in what is now called the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center—so named to acknowledge support from Hopkins graduate and benefactor Mike Bloomberg. It is the latest turn in the long tradition of out-of-town universities building their brands in the nation’s capital.

“What this represents is the physical manifestation of the university’s commitment to national and international engagement,” Ronald J. Daniels, the Hopkins president, said this week during a tour of the space. “The idea was to create a place for the university in Washington proximate to power.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

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