Cross the Potomac from Washington and the geography of power changes shape. In the District it is marble and committee rooms; in Arlington and Alexandria it is the Pentagon's 17.5 miles of corridors, the glass towers of National Landing, a federal courthouse that lawyers call the Rocket Docket, the Patent Office, and the thousand contractors, law firms and consultancies that live off all four. For a courier in Arlington and Alexandria, each of those has its own way of receiving a package. This guide covers them one at a time, with the public facts behind each and the practical detail — what to tell dispatch — that gets a delivery through the first time.
Two jurisdictions, one run
Arlington County had an estimated 243,931 residents in July 2025 and 6,334 employer establishments in the Census Bureau's 2023 count; the City of Alexandria had 160,662 residents. They are separate jurisdictions with separate courts, but for a courier they are one territory with the District: the 14th Street Bridge drops a driver into Crystal City and the Pentagon's approaches, Key Bridge into Rosslyn, and the Wilson Bridge connects Old Town to Maryland without touching the District at all. Most Northern Virginia runs we do are triangles — a law office in Rosslyn, a client in Old Town, a courthouse or an agency in between — and the point of one driver on one run is that the triangle closes in a morning. The Arlington, Alexandria, McLean, Tysons Corner and Fairfax pages cover each area; the Virginia courier page covers the rest.
The Pentagon and the ring of contractors around it
The Pentagon's own tour brochure gives the scale: more than 25,000 office occupants, 6,636,360 square feet of floor space, 17.5 miles of corridors, 583 acres of land, completed on January 15, 1943. It is the largest office building in the region and one of the hardest to deliver to, because it is designed that way. Deliveries do not go to the doors. The National Capital Planning Commission describes the Remote Delivery Facility, on the north side outside the main footprint, as the service and operations hub of the Pentagon for deliveries, and the building's mail and packages are screened for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threats — the Pentagon Force Protection Agency said in 2019 that it screened an average of about 2,000 letters and packages a day, and was moving that work to the Mark Center in Alexandria.
So a "deliver this to the Pentagon" request is really a request to deliver to a person, and the person's office tells us how: a meeting at an entrance, a drop at the Remote Delivery Facility if the office has arranged it, or — far more often — a delivery to the contractor or agency office outside the building where the recipient actually sits. Those offices fill Crystal City, Pentagon City, Rosslyn, Ballston and the Mark Center, and they are where most of our "Pentagon" runs end: proposals, signed task orders, sealed bid packages, hardware, badges, the paper a contract requires in original. Our government courier page and the federal contractor post explain how we handle controlled material and what a contracting officer expects from a courier; the federal contractors industry page covers routes and accounts.
National Landing: HQ2 and what grew around it
Crystal City was a mid-century office district built for the Pentagon's overflow. Arlington's economic development office now calls the area National Landing, and the anchor is Amazon's second headquarters: more than 8,000 employees today in the Metropolitan Park towers, which the county says will house up to 14,000, with Amazon committed to at least 25,000 jobs and four million square feet of office space by 2031 and a further 3.3 million square feet planned at Pen Place. Around it have come the firms that follow a headquarters — law, design, staffing, food, events — and a steady flow of same-day document courier work: signed leases, visas and passports for relocating staff, event materials, executive packages, samples between offices.
Deliveries into the HQ2 buildings go through building reception and the recipient's name; the same is true of the newer towers along Crystal Drive. For firms sending every day, a scheduled daily office sweep replaces a dozen separate bookings; for occasional runs, the same-day delivery page explains the options.
Old Town and the Rocket Docket
Alexandria's Old Town is where Northern Virginia's law firms, lobbyists and associations keep their offices, in part because of the courthouse at the end of the street. The Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse at 401 Courthouse Square houses the Alexandria Division of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The clerk's office is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday; the courthouse itself opens at 8:00 on weekdays and at 7:45 on Fridays. The court's nickname — the Rocket Docket — is older than most of the lawyers who use it; a 2023 bar commentary traces it to a 1961 letter from the court's chief judge and notes that the Eastern District was routinely the first or second fastest civil trial court in the country between 2017 and 2022, with the Alexandria Division the fastest part of it.
Speed in the courtroom becomes speed on the street. Filing is electronic for represented parties, but what cannot be e-filed still has to arrive in a hurry: sealed material in a marked envelope, physical exhibits, chambers copies, the signed original a judge wants to see. We deliver to the clerk's counter inside the window, never to a security desk, and bring back the stamped copy. The legal and court filing courier page covers the DC, Maryland and Virginia courts together; the confidential courier post covers sealed filings and what each court requires on the envelope; and the law firms industry page covers the routine — courtesy copies, closings, originals — that fills a litigation calendar. Alexandria's own circuit and general district courts, and Arlington's at 1425 North Courthouse Road, take the state-court filings; see the post on court filing deadlines in DC, Maryland and Virginia.
The Patent Office on Dulany Street
A few blocks south of Old Town, the United States Patent and Trademark Office occupies a campus of seven buildings and two garages at 600 Dulany Street — about 2.58 million rentable square feet on a five-building office campus, in the General Services Administration's description, with 1,570 more personnel planned at the site through fiscal 2027. Patent filing is electronic: Patent Center fully replaced the older EFS-Web system in November 2023. Visitors are admitted only when escorted by a USPTO employee and must show a government photo ID.
That combination — an electronic front door and a campus you cannot walk into — means a courier's USPTO work is really law-firm work. The intellectual-property practices clustered around the office trade signed originals, declarations, assignments, prototypes and models, exhibits for the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and sealed material with each other, with clients downtown and with the federal courthouse up the street. Those runs are routine for us, and they are booked by firm and recipient, not by "the Patent Office."
Reagan National: the airport inside the city
Reagan National is the only major airport a Washington courier can reach in minutes rather than an hour. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority reported 26.29 million passengers through Reagan National in 2024, up 3.3 percent, as part of a record 53.54 million across its two airports. For a courier the airport is three jobs: a hand-off to a traveller at the terminal before a flight, a pickup from a traveller who lands with something that must be downtown within the hour, and the occasional delivery of a forgotten passport or a signed page to a departing executive. Give dispatch the flight number, the terminal and a phone number for the traveller; the driver waits where the airport's rules allow. For items coming from further away by air, the long-distance courier page explains the ground legs we run to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond and beyond.
What to tell dispatch for a Northern Virginia run
The building and suite, and the recipient's name and phone — Crystal City and Rosslyn towers route by reception, and a name opens doors that an address does not. For the courthouse, the filing window that applies and whether the envelope is sealed. For anything Pentagon-related, who inside is expecting it and how their office receives couriers. For the airport, the flight. For a mixed run, every stop at once, so one driver can close the triangle. Book on the booking form; firms that send daily can set up a route under business accounts. The complete guide to Washington DC courier service explains how the rest of the region fits together.
Sources used in this article. Population and businesses: U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts for Arlington County, Virginia, and for Alexandria city, Virginia (population estimates July 1, 2025; employer establishments 2023). The Pentagon: U.S. Department of Defense, Pentagon Tours self-guided tour brochure (2020) and "Facts and Figures" page; National Capital Planning Commission, Pentagon Remote Delivery Facility project synopsis (July 2021); City of Alexandria news release on Pentagon Force Protection Agency mail screening (October 30, 2019). National Landing: Arlington Economic Development, "Amazon HQ2: Then and Now"; Amazon, "Amazon is moving forward with construction and hiring at HQ2" (November 2021). Courthouse: U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria courthouse page; Carlton Fields, "Appearing in the Red Glare of the Rocket Docket" (2023). USPTO: United States Patent and Trademark Office, headquarters page and Patent Center announcement (September 2023); General Services Administration, FY2023 Alexandria lease prospectus. Airport: Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, 2024 passenger totals release. Figures are quoted as published by those sources; building and court procedures change — confirm before a time-critical run.