1964 most of the west wing's granite f acing was in place. 

 During tlie latter stages of construction, a workman 

 standing on some boards in the elevator shaft fell to 

 his death when the boards broke. It was the only fatality 

 associated with the building of the wings. 



Renovation of the original building was going on at 

 the same time. On the second floor near the southwest 

 corner, Waldo Schmitt, by then officially retired, oc- 

 cupied a mezzanine of fice tfiat he had loaded with quite 

 a lot of junk. When an opening was made on the side 

 of the building, the decking began to sag, and the con- 

 struction crew had to prop up the deck with timbers. 

 Carolyn Cast, an artist for Invertebrate Zoology who 

 had the of fice below Schmitt's, made a sign for the area: 

 "The little city of Gustingdust. Population ten." The 

 building manager saw this one day and tore it up. Gast 

 then made a series of signs in (ireek, Russian, Hebrew, 

 Japanese, and a variety of other languages, expressing 

 the resident scientists' opinion of the building manager. 

 One day the building manager came through with a 

 subcontractor who translated the Hebrew, but the signs 

 stayed up anyway. 



As with the east wing, construction on the west side 

 was completed with no unanticipated problems, and by 

 mid-1964 part oi the wing was occupied. The scheme 

 for the west wing — before the ground was broken, at 

 least — was that it should "house the Division of Fishes 

 on its ground floor, the Division of Marine Inverte- 

 brates on its first and much of its second floor, the 

 Division of Reptiles and Amphibians on the rest of the 

 second floor, the entire Department of Botany on the 

 third and fourth floors, and the Division of Insects on 

 the tilth and sixth floors, a portion of which will also 

 provide some storage space foi the Division of Mam- 

 mals, which otherwise will occupy the adjacent top floor 

 of the west part of the adjacent building."'" 



Moving into West Wing 



\ hc Dixision of Fishes was first into the wing, with 

 Leonard Schultz overseeing the move. Ernest Lachner 

 employed a dozen high school students to help the 

 Smithsonian labor force, and had the other curators 

 and Fish and Wildlife biologists stationed at strategic 

 places. A cjuarter of a million jars, totaling several mil- 

 lion specimens, were moved in a month without a single 

 jar being broken. 



The visitors' book of the Division of Reptiles and 

 Amphibians, kept by Doris Cochran, records that there 

 was a visiting scientist working in the old quarters in 

 the main building on January 8, 1965. By January 26, 

 the next visitor was working in the new facility, on the 

 first floor of the west wing. 



The moving of Botany to the f ourth and fifth floors 

 (rather than the third and fourth) was more compli- 

 cated. One of the gothic windows in the Castle was 

 removed and a temporary elevator built outside to win- 

 dow level. The curators and laborers would move a 



long herbarium case up a ramp to the window, and 

 then it would go down the elevator to a truck; the cases 

 were too large to be taken down the stairway. Plans had 

 been made to bring the National Fungi Collection to 

 the Museum at the time of the move, but the then-new 

 chairman of Botany, William L. Stern, decided against 

 this, for it would have used up all the badly needed 

 expansion room. One botanist recalls that he warned 

 the director of the Museum there would be insufficient 

 floor space, even without the fungi. He pointed out 

 that on the balcony in the herbarium within the Castle, 

 cases were stored three high, but in the new wings they 

 could be stored only two high. Though he was assured 

 that his fears were unfounded, the storage space that 

 was to last for thirty years was filled in ten. 



Much of the storage in the west wing is of wet spec- 

 imens in bottles and jars. These alcoholic specimens 

 were placed in large, closed-off interior rooms, consid- 

 erably reducing the danger of fire. The curators had 

 urged that there be positive air pressure in these rooms 

 to help keep out dust, but the system was not up to 

 this. Still, the new space for all the jars was a great gain, 

 and allowed the collections to be properly organized 

 for the first time in fifty years. Had the ceilings been 

 just a few inches higher on most floors, an extra tier 

 of cases could have been fitted in, affording about 30 

 percent more storage space. 



The invertebrate zoologists filled their storage space 

 with twelve-inch-wide shelving and needed more, so 

 they were given room for additional wet storage on the 

 third floor. The Division of Paleobotany, which also 

 needed more space, was assigned to new quarters in 

 the west wing. "For the first time, the entire paleobo- 

 tanical collections of the Museum and those of the U.S. 

 (ieological Survey housed in the museum [were] located 

 in a single area.'" ' 



Only the sixth floor remained to be filled. Part of 

 this was already designated for wet storage of mammals, 

 but there were some vacant offices — later used by En- 

 tomology — and the mammalogists moved into them. 

 After the renovation of the main building, they had 

 moved from the ground floor to the west north range, 

 and this was a logical extension of their territory. 



Meanwhile, back in the main building, the ground- 

 floor fur vault, which had been displaced by the door- 

 way leading into the west wing, was moved down the 

 west range a few feet. The National Anthropological 

 Archives moved from the Castle to the ground floor 

 on the west side of the range adjacent to the wing. The 

 fisheries staff from the Department of Commerce moved 

 into offices on the east side of that range and the south 

 side of the west north range, all facing into the court- 

 yard. The library got the area facing Constitution Av- 

 enue that the Division of Mammals had vacated, and 

 improved the existing decking. The rearrangements 

 on the ground floor were to everyone's satisfaction, 

 unlike the shufflings higher up in the new wing. □ 



108 



The Exhibits 



