Later view oj ihe Hall oj I'alcoholany on the first flooi 

 looking west to rotunda, 1930s. To the right is a fossil tree 

 stump. To the left of Hall 5, /// Hall 2, one can see the 

 papier-mache Stegosaurus made for the 1902 Fan- 

 American Exhibit in Buffalo, and the Triceratops skeleton 

 to the right. 



place. Most members of the scientific staff were turning 

 out large tomes. In the exhibits field, the Museum in- 

 stalled, in 1931, the seventy-foot skeleton of the huge 

 dinosaur Diplodocus longus, a fossil unearthed from the 

 quarries at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. 

 Mounted so that visitors could walk under it between 

 the shoulder and the hip, the skeleton reigned for twenty 

 years as the Museum's single most impressive exhibit. 

 The old A-frame cases, at Edward Henderson's sug- 

 gestion, were partitioned so that people viewing a dis- 

 play from one side would not look into the faces of 

 those on the other side. Henderson also introduced, in 

 the 1930s, the first lighted case in the building, to il- 

 luminate the Star of Artaban sapphire. To make its 

 alcove as dark as possible, he pushed the case so far 

 back that the top of it could be glimpsed from the 

 Dinosaur Hall below; for this Gilmore chided him. 



Although money problems remained, space prob- 

 lems were partially resolved. Early in 1930 the naval 

 collections that had filled the rotunda for ten years were 

 moved to the Arts and Industries Building; over most 

 of the year, the remainder of the War Collection fol- 

 lowed piecemeal. That same year a steel-frame gallery, 

 or mezzanine, was erected over rooms 18 to 20 on the 

 ground floor, "increasing the storage facilities of the 

 division of vertebrate paleontology by approximately 

 1,750 square feet of floor space."' It is not clear what 

 prompted this new construction, although there were 

 attempts under President Hoover to use government 

 construction as a way of promoting the economy. 



Vacating "two large and finely lighted" second-floor 

 exhibit halls that had been closed to the public since 

 1917,** the long-suffering mammalogists returned to 

 the ground floor. There they too obtained additional 



Stratigraphic section, 1 nvertehrale Paleontology. This ivas 

 f)arl of Panorama of Life on the north side of Hall 7, 

 xvhich shoived a cross-section of the United States, together 

 with cases of fossils arranged by age. In the foregrouiul is 

 jjart of the biologic series of fossils. 



space by decking: "The galleries in the two ranges pr(j|)er 

 will cover all the space between the exterior wall of the 

 building and the partition walls enclosed the rooms in 

 the two ranges; and, in addition, in rooms 51 to 53 and 

 in the eastern half of room 57. The western half of this 

 latter room is already occupied by a steel gallery and 

 steel shelves containing the alcoholic mammal collec- 

 tion.'"' A synoptic display of marine invertebrates, par- 

 tially installed on the ground-floor west north range, 

 was abandoned in favor of the decking. 



Today on the Constitution Avenue side of the build- 

 ing, in the windows of the west north range, one can 

 see a horizontal line of steel I-beams. They ruin the 

 appearance of the windows and certainly were not a 

 feature that Rathbun would have approved. The upper 

 deck consisted of loose steel plates that always rattled 

 when someone walked on them, with the storage cases 

 sitting directly on small cross-girders. 7 here were plenty 

 of gaps between the plates, just large enough for dropped 

 pencils or books to fall through into the offices below. 

 The vertical steel I-beam supports are in the halls, but 

 they have been there for so long that even the oldest 

 inhabitants of the building do not recall either the ver- 

 tebrate paleontology or the mamnial galleries' being 

 installed. Unaesthetic as they may be — though made 

 feasible by the aesthetic decision to raise the ground 

 floor three feet in 1905 — these decks were and are very 

 useful. In addition, they were symbolic, a tangible in- 

 dication that preoccupation was shifting from the ex- 

 hibitions to research and reference collections. 



Crowding in Natural History 



The Museum stall was greatly relieved to see the War 

 Collections disappear, but as usual there was a trade- 



Interregnum 



75 



