Walk

The Washington Arch was built in 1889. It was designed by Stanford White. A fitting tribute to the father of our country to be sure, and a gem of the beaux art school of architecture. But, better than this, a great place to party and excellent vantage point to see in dawn while declaring your independence from the bourgeois world:

[Gertrude Drick] discovered a neglected but accessible staircase (now sealed) that led to the top of the Washington Square arch, an don a fall evening led Sloan, Marcel Duchamp, and three actors, . . . up there. They carried Chinese lanterns, red balloons, hot-water bags for sitting on, and supplies of food and wine. [Drick] read a Greenwich Village declaration of independence, proclaimed the existence of the republic, and everyone fired cap pistols and released the red balloons. The party went on until dawn. In the morning passersby noticed clusters of red balloons in the neighborhood trees. p 336 Low Life by Luc Sante (FSG, New York, 1991).

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

-- George Orwell 1984

Senate House and its library, despite being the architectural basis for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984 is still the repository of archived material. No one is working there, busily recreating the past, changing history to suit the needs of the government.
Even if it would be a convenient.