201
Prince Street

The Athenaeum stands at 201 Prince Street, on the corner of Prince and South Lee, two blocks west of the Alexandria waterfront. The building was completed in 1851 as the Bank of the Old Dominion, designed in the Greek Revival temple-front vocabulary that defined antebellum American institutional architecture: a four-column Doric portico fronting a rectangular masonry shell, the whole rendered in stuccoed brick painted white.

During the Civil War, the bank closed and the building was pressed into service as a U.S. Army commissary depot under the Union occupation of Alexandria — one of dozens of civilian buildings the Union army requisitioned during the city’s 1861–65 occupation. After the war the structure served briefly as the Free Methodist Church and later as a wholesale druggist’s warehouse.

In 1964 the building was acquired by the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association, who renamed it The Athenaeum — invoking the classical-Greek term for an institution of literary and artistic culture — and converted the interior into an art gallery. The Athenaeum has operated continuously as a gallery since, hosting rotating exhibits of contemporary art alongside public programs in the building’s Greek Revival main hall.