THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader The Bunker Mentality Congress throws a whole lot of money down a whole lot of holes. But there are holes, and then there are holes, and the Capitol Visitor Center was a money...
...And there were, in fact, better ways to go—either in doing a genuine relandscaping of the small knoll on which the Monument sits or in using less obtrusive metal and stone ballards to prevent vehicle entry while preserving the traditional appearance...
...What does it say about a culture, he reasonably asked, when it has so lost its nerve that its first impulse for a new public building or monument is to dig a hole in the ground and bury the result...
...If nothing else, the compromise security plan for the giant obelisk will be cheaper than an underground dig: about $15 million for vehicle barriers of landscaped circles, separated by two-foot-high stone walls...
...If the cost of the Capitol Visitor Center were to approach that of Boston's Big Dig—the current price of which is an estimated $16 billion—it wouldn't come as a surprise...
...Still, better to put up a few walls and landscaped circles than to dig a multimedia bunker...
...The Capitol Visitor Center is Washington's version of Boston's "Big Dig," the construction boondoggle that has plagued Massachusetts's commuters since its inception in 1987, with astronomical overruns of time and money—and more time and money, and yet more time and money...
...Partial victory was gained last week, in one battle of THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S long war to cure Washington's subterranean blues, when the National Park Service decided not to include the underground visitors' center for the Washington Monument in its budget proposal to Congress...
...Back in 1991, when Congress first approved the sprawling, underground construction, Dan Glickman, a congressman from Kansas, denounced the project...
...Last January, the critic Catesby Leigh excoriated in The Weekly Standard the subterranean depression that seems to have possessed the designers of the federal government's architecture...
...Of course, the cost is hard to forget...
...Forget the cost for a moment...
...And when the Hill newspaper recently asked GAO comptroller general David Walker about the project, he admitted that the current expenditure is $395 million, with "no end in sight...
...But Judy Scott Feldman, president of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, declared the vehicle-barrier walls "unnecessary and ruinous to the scenic slopes...
...It closes off to the public the elegant symbol of democracy in the east front stairs...
...Among all the plans to burrow out a prairie-dog town under Washington, the worst remains the Capitol Visitor Center^w^liich is an aesthetic disaster of astonishing proportions...
...When Glickman voiced his concern in 1991, the Capitol Visitor Center was expected to cost $71 million...
...And it will certainly be more attractive than the concrete highway barriers and construction fences that currently scar the central Mall in the name of security...
...Why should we bother spending so much on a visitors center, he reasoned, when "most people can't afford to visit Washington...
...When Leigh wrote earlier this year, the pricetag had ballooned to $370 million...
...And, perhaps worst of all, it will turn a trip to the home of Congrass intd a mueei-media extravaganza in which the tourist never gets to the Capitol itself—screened off by theaters, gift shops, a cafeteria, and a 16,500-square-foot gallery...
...But there are holes, and then there are holes, and the Capitol Visitor Center was a money pit from the beginning...
...It insists that the projjer way lo visit the Capitol is by passing through five acres of underground bunlcer (a larger footprint than the Capitol's...
...What Glickman missed, however, was that the planned center would be a reason for people not to visit Washington...
...Security concerns since the terrorist attacks of September 11 gave new life to what had become a moribund project, and we fear that the Park Service hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that it was a bad and ugly idea to begin with...
...We'd like to believe that the plan is truly dead, but the Park Service has been proposing to burrow underneath the Mall for thirty-seven years...
...At least it will allow visitors to walk up to one of democracy's towering monuments...
Vol. 9 • November 2003 • No. 8
