The tourists will soon have to find another place to stuff their faces.

The food court arrangement was operating at a huge annual loss for the city, so they've recently made an arrangement to rebuild it as the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C.

There seems to be an abundance of hanging light fixtures in this space (wagon-wheel shaped, with a large central ball, chains and 3-armed fixtures at the "spokes"), but there isn't a single light bulb to be seen! I assume they're electric because many of the "sockets" are seen to be angling downward, and seem to have a switch.

[The "wagon wheel" fixtures are gas jets, superseded or supplemented by the electric mercury-discharge lamps also seen in this view. - Dave]

Does anyone know what these two objects are in the photo?

1) Down the middle of the photo, from the top, looks like a long light fixture leading to a large vertical wooden cylinder. What is that cylinder.

[The long structure is the inspectors' gallery. What look like lighting fixtures along the bottom are ports for viewing the area immediately below. The cylindrical structure at the end is the access to the gallery. - tterrace]

2) Hanging from the ceiling are a number of objects that look like large ceiling fans with a rope around the outer rim. A number of them have chains on them, apparently for strengthening. What are these?

I bet all that natural light made this a much more pleasant place to work than the fluorescently lit modern equivalent. Are those all gas lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling or electric lights with the bulbs removed? If they are gas lamps, it must have been quite a sight when they were all lit.

Today the Old Post Office is one of the least pleasant public spaces in Washington. Perhaps it was always so.

Why does the crowd stare at us as if we interrupted their ritual?

Why is everyone else dissolving?

[They moved during the time exposure]

...and what fills the misshapen human-sized bags?

[Either mail or empty mail sacks. - tterrace]

Love the calendar, "Cape May Real Estate Company"; hard to come by in DC, I'd guess. And those amazing light fixtures seem to have thumb-sized gascocks. Imagine that: a giant room full of paper mail, and hundreds of open flames.