corner of 7th and F Streets Northwest, in Washington, D.C.'s downtown shopping district, in November 1925. Alexander Hecht directed the Washington part of the business for the family. Hecht's was the first store in Washington to offer national brands. It also boasted the first parking garage and first elevator. Its relatively open policies made it popular among African-Americans as well as the white populace. A tour of Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings, intended to rally support for the Allied cause in World War II and the purchase of war bonds, premiered at the store in 1943. In July 1951, a mixed race group began to picket outside the store, protesting racial segregation in the store's cafeteria. The offending policy was changed in January of the following year. Hecht's moved its flagship store to a new building in downtown Washington in 1985. The former Hecht Company main building, now across from the Capital One Arena, was extensively renovated and reopened in 2003 as Terrell Place, honoring Mary Church Terrell's role in desegregating that and other public accommodations in Washington. Hecht's operated the last local department store in downtown Washington, in a structure at the corner of 12th and G Streets NW built in 1985 and renovated in 2003. Converted to Macy's location in September 2006, the building has a direct entrance to the Metro Center station of the Washington Metro. Into the suburbs After World War II, Hecht Company began to build new stores in the suburbs around Baltimore and Washington. Outside the center of Baltimore, Hecht's opened a store in Northwood in September 1954, followed by another in Edmondson Village in October 1956, and a third in the then-new Reisterstown Road Plaza in January 1962. In 1947 they opened a large three-story department store in Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. The wisdom of this move was initially questioned; however, within a few years, more room was needed, and a fourth story was added to the building. That store was closed in 1987 and was converted and expanded into City Place Mall, which opened in 1992 and which is now known as Ellsworth Place. The second suburban store opened on November 2, 1951, at Parkington in Arlington, Virginia. It cost $6.5 million to construct the store and it was the largest suburban department store on the east coast at that time. On November 2, 1958, Maryland Gov. Theodore