[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 58 (Monday, April 14, 2008)] [Senate] [Page S2956] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CAPITOL VISITOR CENTER Mr. REID. Mr. President, I had the good fortune, earlier today, to have the first visit in a long time to the new Capitol Visitor Center. When I first came to Washington many years ago and served as a Capitol policeman, every evening in the summer part of my duty was to go out on the east front of the Capitol and watch things. I can remember having many fond memories, such as watching Carl Hayden in his wheelchair watching those concerts. Even back then, I thought, gee, this is such a beautiful place. The east front of the Capitol is so much easier for visitors coming to the Capitol to see than the west front because there are not those big steps. Before, it didn't look very nice. The blacktop covered that place. That just didn't look right--with cars parked there and oil spilled from the cars. I had the good fortune, in the third year that I was a Senator, to become chairman of the Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee. Back then, the reason I was able to do it was Senator Bumpers simply didn't want to do it. It was a great experience for me. I started working to do something to make the east front of the Capitol a little more visually nice. We did a number of things. First, we got the cars off. With the help of many other Senators, we were able to finally get legislative permission to do something about it in a big way. The culmination of our being able to do that was when two police officers were killed on the House side, on the east front of the Capitol. That gave us the impetus to fund the project the way it should be funded. We did that. Now that is just great. It is so wonderful. The Capitol Visitor Center is the eighth major expansion of the Capitol in its 214-year history. The last one was out here on the east front of the Capitol for the rooms we have there for holding meetings. This facility out here is almost 600,000 square feet of space. It is equivalent in size to the current footprint of the Capitol. It consists of beautiful sandstone, granite, and marble from 14 different States. The Capitol Visitor Center project conforms to ``Buy American'' standards. I saw a lot of beautiful things but probably the most beautiful on the tour this morning were the historic Olmstead fountains and lanterns. They have been beautifully restored and are going to be the centerpiece over there. Mr. President, if someone wants to visit the Capitol today, there is no place for them to gather. It used to be on the east front, and now it is on the west front. The people who work here joke about it, saying: You can always tell when it is summertime because you can smell the visitors. The visitors stand out in the high humidity, heat, and they sweat. There is no place for them to go. The bathrooms in this facility are almost nonexistent. There is one on each side, and they are very small. This visitors center can hold 4,000 visitors at one time, and, with 8 magnetometers, they can process 2,000 people an hour. It will make this place vastly more secure than it is. We expect as many as 3 million visitors a year under the new process we will have here. When visitors come here now, there is no place for them to eat, no place to go to the bathroom, and there are limited places to buy souvenirs. With our new facility, there will be a 550-seat cafeteria, with a beautiful kitchen that will be as good as anyplace there is in our country. There is an 18,000-foot exhibition hall that will feature many never- seen-before historic documents, such as Madison's notes from the drafting of the Constitution. There are two 250-seat orientation theaters. When people come to the Capitol, they will see an 11-minute film that is done so beautifully, and it will tell them what they are going to see in the Capitol. That is as it should be. Now people walk in and don't know what to expect. There is a film they will see called ``Out Of Many, One.'' It will be played every 11 minutes. There are two beautiful gift shops--one on the House side and one on the Senate side--and 26 restaurants. There are meeting rooms for constituent meetings. The cost is a lot, about $650 million. But in comparison, the Newseum, which was opened this past Friday, cost roughly $550 million. It took 7 years to complete, and it did not have all the security problems we have had here. I congratulate the Office of the Architect of the Capitol. They did a wonderful job. Everyone has cooperated. It is a facility of which we can all be proud. I enjoyed my visit through it. It will be an added feature of this beautiful building, and it will make it so people can come here safely and securely and all the many people who work in this Capitol and work in these office buildings will also certainly be more safe because there is a way to come in and there is adequate security. ____________________