Storage of fish in old-style crocks, to the left, and in new 

 tanks on wheels, to the right. There is little evaporation 

 from the tanks. Late 1960s or early 1970s. 



A realistic estimate in the light of the growth study was 

 that by the year 2010, 125 million specimens should be 

 on hand. Whatever the exact numbers of specimens 

 might be, it did not take much to realize that the build- 

 ing would not hold them. 



During the 1960s, when Richard Cowan was director, 

 there was considerable concern about future crowding 

 in the Museum, in spite of the new wings. As one so- 

 lution, Cowan suggested the idea of moving part of the 

 staff and their collections to the Agricultural Research 

 Center in Beltsville, Maryland, where there would have 

 been space to construct a suitably large building to ac- 

 commodate both staff increase and collection growth. 

 The departments to be moved were those of Botany, 

 Entomology, and Invertebrate Zoology. There were 

 positive aspects to the plan, but it was not approved, 

 in part because removing so many of the scientific staff 

 from the Mall area would have meant splitting the 

 Museum. 



In the eariy 1970s, committees studied the future 

 space requirements of the Museum of Natural History 

 and of all the Smithsonian museums. Eventually the 

 notion evolved of moving some of the less-used collec- 

 tions, general facilities such as the Oceanographic Sort- 

 ing Center, and the preservation and conservation lab- 

 oratories to Silver Hill, Maryland, where the Smithsonian 

 owned land and already had some storage facilities. 

 During Porter Kier's directorship, this crystallized into 

 what has now become the Museum Support Center. As 

 Kier recalls the crucial conversation, he went with Rich- 

 ard Grant of Paleobiology, then head of the Senate of 

 Scientists, to discuss the matter of a major new facility 

 with Secretary Ripley. After extended discussion, Rip- 

 ley summarized, "You mean to saddle the Institution 

 with the incubus of ever increasing collections," to which 

 Grant responded, "Yeah, I guess that's about it." 



Frozen fish in a freezer in the basement of east wnig. 



Museum Support Center 



Whatever was the deciding factor, the process of 

 congressional authorization and appropriation was 

 started. "The Museum Support Center, as it is titled, 

 all 308,566 square feet of it, will be opened in 1983," 

 Ripley wrote in Smithsonian Year 1981. "Say what one 

 may, the 'trip' has been necessary. . . . the Smithsonian 

 must realize its destiny to build a storage and retrieval 

 center second to none."' 



The facility was dedicated on May 16, 1983. The 

 building itself cost $29,000,000, and storage and lab- 

 oratory equipment will bring the total to $50,000,000 — 

 about twice the cost of the wings, air conditioning, and 

 refurbishing of the Museum during the 1960s. The 

 newspapers got it right in dubbing this facility "the 

 nation's closet" and not harping on cost.** After all, no 

 one keeps a mink coat in a hot drawer during the sum- 

 mer, and that was fundamentally what the Museum 

 had been forced to do with the collections. 



The Museum Support Center is two stories high and 

 covers four and one-half acres, most of the area being 

 taken up by four huge storage "pods." Each of the pods, 

 described as "giant thermos bottles" by the center's di- 

 rector, Vincent Wilcox, is roughly the size of a football 

 field. They are air-conditioned to seventy degrees and 

 humidified to fifty percent by fourteen cooling units 

 weighing twenty-five tons each. About 300 people work 

 at the Support Center. Specimens are treated and stud- 

 ied in fifty-five laboratories fitted with special glass 

 plumbing pipes which, unlike the old pipes in the Nat- 

 ural History Building, will not drip into the light fix- 

 tures. 



An "Ode to the Museum Support Center" was read 

 over the radio the day of the dedication. The third 

 verse ran: 



The Collections 



205 



