Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 28, 2002
By Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post Staff Writer, Page B01

Encased in a plain white fence and obscured by stacks of utility pipes, the U.S. Capitol's gleaming East Front is vanishing behind one of the most unusual and important construction projects in the world-famous structure's 202-year history.

Work has begun on the $368 million Capitol Visitor Center -- a five-acre underground complex soon to become the most visible example of how the Sept. 11 attacks are physically changing Washington.

Funded as part of a $40 billion emergency package that sped through Congress to the president's desk last winter, the subterranean facility has been accelerated with lawmakers' security foremost in mind.

For visitors to a place long known as "the people's house," the center will spell the end of an era. Just as tourists can no longer drive up to the White House portico or linger on its grounds and in its public rooms unescorted, a system of timed-entry tickets and guided tours will take hold at the Capitol. The result will restrict views of its mosaic-tiled corridors and Brumidi-painted Rotunda dome to 2,200 people an hour on 30-minute tours, instead of the unrestricted access of the past.

Next Monday, one week after Memorial Day, the Capitol will usher in the first changes. Guards will open a temporary screening facility for visitors on the building's south side and a separate facility for official visitors and Senate gallery visitors to the north.

Capitol Hill residents can expect traffic, dust and tighter security throughout construction, which is scheduled to end in time for the 2005 presidential inauguration.

For members, the project will carve out two new underground escape routes from the Capitol: a pedestrian tunnel to the Library of Congress and an access road leading a few blocks northwest. Secure, underground briefing areas, meeting rooms, House and Senate intelligence committee offices and television studios will be added. Key mechanical systems and elevator shafts have been redesigned for safety, and loading and storage facilities will be moved below ground for the city-within-a-city that will make up the legislative branch.

The Capitol Visitor Center moniker is a misnomer, in a sense. When complete, the Capitol will have a new virtual museum, office building and high-technology refuge for members of Congress in times of crisis. The 580,000-square-foot addition is the biggest in the Capitol's history.

"It is a tremendous change," said Alan M. Hantman, the architect of the Capitol. "Let's face it. The Capitol has not been built as a Disney World. It's been built as the center of our government. But it has to function as a museum, a place where people meet and talk, and a conference center. This will be a tremendous change for tourists, and the driving force is concern for security."

Capitol architects first proposed a visitors center in the mid-1970s, seeking to make tourists -- as many as 4 million a year -- more comfortable and to add educational exhibits. The 1998 killing of two Capitol Police officers by an intruder gave a new security impetus to the plan, to which Congress gave $100 million. But the initiative foundered after some lawmakers insisted that donations pay for the rest and private fundraising stalled at $65 million.

The impasse ended Sept. 11. In the nervous aftermath, President Bush and congressional leaders found the money and refined plans to address potential terrorist threats.

In the next three months, Hantman's office will award a prime construction contract, seal the east Capitol grounds to anyone not connected with the construction, and dismantle, catalogue and remove decorative fountains, lampposts and stone retaining walls before starting a six-acre, six-story-deep excavation.

The digging poses engineering challenges. Using clam bucket diggers refined by earth-moving companies, crews will open a pit large enough to fit 14 White Houses, carving straight down within two yards of the Capitol's stone foundation. To prevent a cave-in of the white Capitol dome or the building's sandstone and marble walls, crews will dig a narrow trench 60 feet deep along its length. The channel will be filled with slurry, a soupy polymer-water mixture. A steel cage will be lowered, then concrete poured in. The result: a three-foot-thick slurry wall, or girdle.

Special drills will bore holes to set steel columns, eliminating the need for pile drivers, whose pounding might disrupt debate in House and Senate chambers, which will stay in regular session just yards away.

Construction will proceed under a steel and concrete "diaphragm" -- basically a lid covering the excavation site. And the loudest, heaviest activities will be scheduled to take place only when Congress is not in session.

Project leaders warn neighbors that they expect to remove 500,000 cubic yards of soil and hope to keep trucks off the roads during peak driving hours, doing much of the moving at night. There will be enough debris to fill about 50,000 trucks -- enough if lined bumper-to-bumper to extend from Washington to White Plains, N.Y. Construction traffic will rumble through corridors feeding to Interstate 395 but will use Pennsylvania Avenue SE only in an emergency.

Security will be tightened throughout. Using measures typically seen around sensitive military installations, Capitol Police will conduct criminal background checks on all construction workers and scan every vehicle at staging areas and on site, precautions also being taken at the Pentagon.

"These guys seem to have thought about everything," said Robert L.M. Nevitt, 70, president of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, the largest civic association in the neighborhood, which received a briefing from the architect of the Capitol this spring and emerged mostly satisfied. "We tend to think of the Mall as our front yard. We just want to know: When are we going to get our Capitol back?"

When completed, the monumental East Capitol Plaza will no longer be a drab back lot. Instead of concrete-filled sewer pipe sections barricading its perimeter, slender green bollards will stand sentry. The existing desert of sun-bleached asphalt crosshatched with parking lines will vanish, replaced by a colonnade of poplar trees, fresh sod and pink granite paving stones aligned along the original 1870s plaza design by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Hidden beneath the cosmetics will be functional changes.

While final decisions have yet to be made, most Capitol entrances will be closed except to members, staff and those on official business.

Visitors will enter a three-level exhibition space designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which designed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Officials say up to 18,000 people will be able to visit on an average day, the same as the pre-Sept. 11 maximum and more than four times the number allowed now. The center will also include a cafeteria, a gift shop, a first aid center, restrooms and two 280-seat theaters.

"Visitors will be treated here with respect, as they are at tourist destinations around the country," said Hantman, the 10th architect of the Capitol. Seeing the Capitol after going through the visitors center "will be a voyage of confirmation of what they have already seen, rather than having a tour guide yell one above the other to explain such fundamentals as, 'No, the president works downtown.' "

Congressional leaders call the project a necessity, adding 21st-century security technology to a 19th-century building. Congress included $38 million in emergency upgrades this winter and will spend $70 million beyond the center's original $265 million price tag to fill out 170,000 square feet of office space.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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