but because this required an additional guard, they 

 were closed and have not been reopened. The doors 

 in the west wing never have been used. 



On the interior, the ground floor and the second, 

 fourth, and sixth floors connect to the main building. 

 The north side of each lobby contains two automatic 

 elevators; each wing has one stairwell adjacent to the 

 elevators and another near its south corner. Freight 

 elevators on the south side of each wing open into both 

 the wing and the main building. Every floor has two 

 sets of toilets. Except for the polished limestone in the 

 lobbies, never seen by the public, the wings are utili- 

 tarian. 



RemingtfJii Kellogg, then director, insisted that the 

 curatoi s personally lay out and design office space, and 

 this took a lot of time. Cooper drew the plumbing and 

 sinks on the outside walls, as they had been in the main 

 building, and was told to do it over because the plumb- 

 ing had to be on interior walls. He grumbled, but rede- 

 signed. Fortimately for everyone. Cooper had read the 

 specifications of the Ceneral Services Administration 

 and pointed out that these quarters were to be labo- 

 ratories, not ottices; an office is rather rigidly defined 

 in terms of square feet, whereas a laboratory is not. 

 Had the teriii "office" been used further in official 

 corres[)()ndence, exervthing woidd have had Id be 

 changed. Parts of the west wing ha\e much less space 

 for the individual scientist because ihev are offices. 



Work Gets Under Way 



As with the original building, construction began on 

 the east side. There was no ground-breaking ceremony; 

 the contractor began work as earlv as he could in 1961. 

 Shortly after the first bulldozer appeared to dig the 

 foundation, the heav\ equipment broke into Tiber Creek. 

 This creek had meandered across the swamp of the 

 pre-Mall era to the barge canal that flowed where Con- 

 stitution Avenue is now. Decades earlier, Tiber Creek 

 had been enclosed in a massive brick tunnel and buried 

 about twenty feet underground. Now it ran across the 

 corner of the building site, so it was dug up, moved, 

 and again sealed away from view, this time in concrete. 

 Because there was some movement in the foundation 

 of the main building, heavy collections of fossil plants 

 were immediately moved from the east north range 

 into the first story of the new wing, even before the 

 walls were up. Later the plants were moved again, to 

 the fourth floor of the wing. 



Only one or two people on the ground floor lost their 

 offices, and the vertebrate paleontology laboratory was 

 able to continue work, despite the disappearance of all 

 its windows. The breaking down of walls uncovered 

 swarms of albino cockroaches, and one staff member 

 remembers how eagerly the entomologists stalked these 

 unusual specimens. Many people were temporarily in- 

 convenienced by the noise and dust, but the work pro- 

 gressed rapidly. By wintertime, construction had reached 



the level of the third floor of the main Museum build- 

 ing. Several offices in the east range had to be sacrificed, 

 and the construction crews hung canvas over the open- 

 ings they had broken in the wall. One day it was so cold 

 that ice formed in the sinks in adjacent offices. 



The east wing had acres of cement flooring that re- 

 mained vacant for weeks. After the cases were brought 

 in, gray tile was laid around the perimeter and brown 

 tile in the aisles between the cases. Every time a case is 

 moved — admittedly a i at e event — the bare cement floor 

 is exposed, and tile that does not match either color 

 has to be laid. The contractors did learn, however, and 

 the floors of the west wing were tiled in one color, before 

 the collections moved in. Raised phone jacks and elec- 

 trical outlets put in the middle of the floor had been 

 found objectionable in the east wing, yet the same de- 

 sign was used in the west wing. 



Moving into the East Wing 



By the end of June 1962, the east wing was nearly 

 done — plastered on the inside and finished on the out- 

 side, except for some miscellaneous caulking and clean- 

 ing. On August 16, the new occupants began to move 

 in. Nicholas Hotton believes that he was the first to 

 establish an office in the new wing; he was on the north 

 side of the first floor with the other vertebrate paleon- 

 tologists. 



The move itself went extremely well, and though it 

 was haid physical work and the whole process took 

 about six months, everyone who participated recalls the 

 time with pleasure. Curators lugged cases along with 

 workmen. Not a single drawer was dropped. One of 

 the items that sticks in the memory was moving some 

 cases of Geological Survey fossils in the third-floor hall 

 and uncovering a door that had been hidden for dec- 

 ades. On it was lettered the name of E. O. Ulrich, then 

 dead for twenty years. One social event was a party 

 given by S. H. Mamay to dedicate the paleobotanical 

 library, in which he installed the painting Death Pre- 

 ferred. A lot of people marveled at all the empty space 

 in the new wing. Cooper, ever the realist, is reported 

 to have said, "It won't last long." 



According to plan, the east wing was to accommodate 

 the Division of Birds on the top floor, the Division of 

 MoUusks on a large part of the fifth floor, and "prac- 

 tically all the functions of the Department of Geology 

 and the activities associated with it" on the remaining 

 four and one-half floors.'" This basic layout was not 

 followed entirely, for the anthropologists were given 

 about one-third of the fifth floor for a storage area. As 

 a consequence. Tertiary fossils had to be distributed 

 beween the fourth floor and the basement. 



The basement was designed for indoor parking, and 

 for about fifteen months many employees lived in the 

 lap of luxury. It soon became obvious that the wing was 

 full, and the cars were pushed out to make room for 

 collections and some of the shops. The entrance to the 



106 



The Exhibits 



