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He was wrong. "We threw away millions," says Interior Official Richard Hite, who helped direct the project. "We screwed up. It's a national disgrace. I'm not saying that anyone acted in bad faith. But so many people being involved made it impossible to manage."
Amid lawsuits, contract disputes and turf battles among the parties involved—Amtrak, the railroads, the architects, the contractor, Congress, the Park Service, the Federal Railroad Administration and the Departments of Interior and Transportation—construction finally began in May 1974. "I'll never forget that day they put the jackhammers in the floor," says Nita Shaw, a secretary at the station for 31 years. "I had to walk over to the Capitol to calm down and stop crying."
President Nixon, eager to have a showcase for the Bicentennial tourists coming to Washington, had ordered the center to be finished for a July 4, 1976, opening. In the rush, planners neglected heating, wiring and plumbing. Work began before the cost estimates and architectural plans were finished. A construction contract was signed that invited cost overruns. The crumbling roof was ignored. "It sounds horrible in retrospect but in the rush we never addressed the problem of the roof," Hite says. "We were going to open that thing willy-nilly." Ironically, the great Bicentennial crowds never materialized.
To make it a complete Washington scandal, there was even a little sex. Or so claimed Elizabeth Ray, the famed blond secretary who could not type. During the congressional sex scandal revelations of 1976, Ray reportedly told federal investigators that her former boss, Kenneth Gray, had arranged for her to sleep with Alaska Senator Mike Gravel on a houseboat outing in August of 1972 in hopes of securing his support for some visitor-center legislation. Gray and Gravel have denied the allegations. Says Gray: "She never had a damn thing to do with the center."
The center featured two 175-seat movie theaters, multilingual information desks, a "First Ladies of America" exhibit, a national bookstore and a Hall of States. Its centerpiece was an 8,000-sq.-ft. sunken area called the "Primary Audio-Visual Experience." Critics soon renamed it "the Pit." At a cost of $1.5 million, the Pit housed a large screen that flashed a nine-minute musical slide show called the "Welcome to Washington Presentation."
"What is the point of looking at slides of the U.S. Capitol when you can walk out the front door and see it?" asked Daniel Moynihan. At one hearing, the Senator from New York drolly asked Hite if the number of people going down in the Pit equaled the number of people coming up. Some joked that the Pit should be turned into a swimming pool or a national aquarium to take advantage of the leaky roof. Virtually ignored by tourists, the Pit closed after two years.