Pentagon road network
highway system
The Pentagon road network is a system of highways, mostly freeways, built by the United States federal government in the early 1940s to serve the Pentagon in northern Virginia. The roads, transferred to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1964, are now largely state highways. The main part of the network is the Mixing Bowl at Interstate 395 (Shirley Highway) and Route 27 (Washington Boulevard), named because it had major weaving issues with traffic "mixing" between the two roads before it was rebuilt in the early 1970s.
The "Mixing Bowl" nickname is now more commonly used to refer to the Springfield Interchange, where I-395, I-495, and I-95 converge in nearby Springfield.
The Mixing Bowl
The Mixing Bowl originally opened in 1942 as the junction of the Shirley Highway with the connection to the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the connection to Lee Boulevard (now Arlington Boulevard). The western half, towards Lee Boulevard, was a full three-level Y interchange. The eastern half, towards the Memorial Bridge, was missing a ramp to enter the Shirley Highway northeastbound. Just south of the west half was another interchange, a single Y connecting to Arlington Ridge Road.
From 1970 to 1973, as part of a total reconstruction of the Shirley Highway, the interchange was totally rebuilt to eliminate all weaving of traffic, mainly by the use of collector/distributor roads. The former cloverleaf with Hayes Street became a system of ramps to the various roads.
“Pentagon road network” enters the record as highway system. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pentagon, road and network can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7164979. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1942, 1970 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pentagon road network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.