Today is Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday! 14 years ago today, Congress decided that one president wasn’t enough for local air travelers and renamed Washington National Airport as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The renaming happened a year after the country’s second-largest federal building, the Ronald Reagan Building, opened downtown. In 1997, the New York Times noted it was “hundreds of millions of dollars over budget […] and some Republicans considered it such a boondoggle that they tried to halt construction. The 3.1-million-square-foot structure survived only because other Republicans decided to name it after Reagan.”

(Also: You know what today isn’t? The anniversary of the day District residents shot down attempts to name 16th Street NW after Reagan.)

Photo by ElvertBarnes via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License