A Gateway Fit for a Democracy

Panorama

Up Above, Views of the Dome

The new visitor's center is underground, but its skylights offer views of the Capitol dome.

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"Generations of Americans will greatly benefit from all it has to offer," said the acting architect of the Capitol, Stephen T. Ayers, who helped guide construction for the past 21 months. "The visitor center is a treasure in itself."

In addition to the 1856 statue of Freedom, the model for the one on the Capitol dome, there are 23 other statues from Congress's statuary collection scattered throughout the complex.

The Freedom statue, which had been in the basement rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building since 1993, was disassembled there and reassembled in Emancipation Hall, the center's main gathering place, over the past few months.

The center's polished maroon-and-white marble floors shone yesterday under the hall's 18 chandeliers and two 30-by-70-foot skylights, through which the blue sky and the Capitol dome could be seen.

Nearby was the dimly lit exhibition hall where some famous -- and seldom-seen -- artifacts of U.S. history were on display.

The most haunting is the black-shrouded pine catafalque, or platform, on which once lay the body of Abraham Lincoln and the bodies of other famous Americans, including President Gerald R. Ford after his death in 2006. It sits behind a sliding bronze grate, said center spokeswoman Sharon Gang, because it will probably be used again.

There are other objects: President John Quincy Adams's metal-tipped ivory walking stick. The tiny ceremonial trowel George Washington used to set the Capitol cornerstone in 1793. The crude penciled radar plot that traced the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

There are images of some of American history's great figures: the titanic congressional foes, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun and Massachusetts's Daniel Webster.

And there are famous words: Franklin D. Roosevelt's typed "Day of Infamy" speech, in which he noted "always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us." George Washington's signed letter to Congress reporting the British defeat at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War: "I have the Honor to inform Congress, that a Reduction of the British Army under the Command of Lord Cornwallis, is most happily effected."

The exhibition hall also features banks of interactive touch screen displays and an 11-foot cutaway model of the Capitol dome.

As the tours were ending yesterday, Terrie S. Rouse, the center's chief of visitor services, said she was anticipating the public's first day.

"I want to be watching the first person come through the door . . . to see that look on their face," she said. "That's what I'm waiting for."