(gentle music) Shirlington was first developed in 1943 by Joseph Turner, known as the Shirlington Business Center.

Shirlington is a combination of Shirley and Arlington because Shirlington is right next to Shirley Highway, Interstate 95 and 395.

And from Route 7 to the Pentagon, that got built just two months before the Shirlington Business Center opened.

People could just go right off the highway and go visit Shirlington and get their errands done.

So Shirlington, by the 1950s, is really booming, and eventually they get a good anchor store, the Landsburgh’s Department Store, and it became one of the largest shopping complexes in the area.

People no longer had to go into downtown because they could get the same conveniences right next door.

So in the 1980s, there was a major renovation of Shirlington, and that started to attract new businesses.

WETA is one of those.

- WETA started as the dream of our founder, Mrs. Elizabeth Campbell, who was a retired school teacher in the early 1950s.

And all across the country, this notion of educational television was starting to bloom, and the FCC actually started to allocate a channel per market for educational television.

WETA ended up with Channel 26.

The first broadcast was October 2nd, 1961.

- The station is an aid to the child, an educator to the adult, a voice of the community.

- [Jim] WETA was a channel without a facility, so they turned to schools because that's what Mrs. Campbell knew the most about.

And so the first facility opened up in the basement of Yorktown High School in 1961.

And then the first content was a classroom show called Time for Science.

- The actual school student population at first didn't really know or understand what was down there.

TV wasn't that old in that day and age.

The room itself was 50 feet by 50 feet.

That was the entire operation, all in that one room.

We had to know each other very well.

(Mike chuckling) My first position would've been running camera.

Everybody chipped in where they could, I mean, even the directors would sometimes be sweeping the floor.

Most of the programs were geared for students.

They used part of the Yorktown School staff to teach some of those programs.

(gentle music) - When the station started in the early sixties, there was a legitimate need to bring a balanced, value-neutral assessment of Washington DC politics.

So we created a political news roundup that was to be recorded and aired on Fridays at the end of the week.

And that show became Washington Week, and that show still exists to this day.

So WETA, up until 1970, was a local venture only.

And then Watergate happened.

This entity that we had built called N-Pact, they decided to do coverage of the Watergate hearings, gavel to gavel, morning to evening.

- Those tapes could settle once and for all, how much the president knew, and when.

- Coverage of Watergate that we provided for PBS used Robin MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, and that put them on the map.

And to this day, those recordings are considered some of the most important recordings in television news history.

- For N-Pact and Jim Lehrer, I'm Robert MacNeil.

- [Jim] That is what led to the creation of PBS NewsHour.

(upbeat music) So here we are in the year 2025.

We still have Channel 26, but we also have four additional channels.

We have multiple websites, and we have multiple radio station frequencies as well.

And we now have an excess of 400 working here in South Arlington.

In addition to all the office space, we have all of the production facilities for television, including two new studios.

It's like a time warp going from what we used to have to what we have now.

And then in addition to the studios, we have the ability to host community events right here in the building.

Since the turn of the century, a new commitment to local programming has yielded programs into the arts, food, diversions, and It’s Academic.

(audience clapping) Sharon Percy Rockefeller has actually done more to build upon what Mrs. Campbell started and has expanded it to a national audience.

We now are the home of the NewsHour.

Ken Burns, Skip Gates.

And I don't know that Mrs. Campbell could ever have envisioned that.