Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks At the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.

We are told in the introductory panel of this unusual and interesting exhibit that the ubiquitous people movers of its title log more passenger miles each year than automobiles, airplanes, or trains. It is estimated that the world's elevators, escalators, and moving sidewalks collectively move the equivalent of the earth's population every three days—a figure that some of us might question when we consider the assembled inhabitants of China, India, and what used to be the USSR. Moreover, we learn that the moving sidewalk, a mode of transport that most of us would regard as having been introduced within living memory, actually appeared at several late-nineteenth-century world's fairs. These devices now are found principally at airports, enabling the building of those annoyingly long "finger" subterminals—referred to in the exhibit, somewhat curiously, as "horizontal skyscrapers."

Before commenting on the exhibit itself, it will be appropriate to say something of its setting. The National Building Museum is a public-private partnership located in what is widely viewed as Washington's most spectacular building, a massive brick structure designed in 1882 by General Montgomery C. Meigs, one of the nineteenth-century's most creative and productive engineer-architects, to house the office dispensing pensions to war veterans and their survivors. Like a number of the city's more splendid late-Victorian federal buildings, it came within a whisker of demolition in the singularly unenlightened 1960s. Following a tasteful restoration, it first sheltered several historical agencies and now is occupied largely by the Building Museum. Its outstanding feature is a huge central atrium—long, wide, and high, dominated by two rows of four colossal Corinthian columns (plastered and marbleized brick) supporting the central roof structure—said, quite believably, to be the largest in the world. This dramatic space is used by the museum principally for special events, the exhibit galleries proper being located in former offices along the perimeter on the ground and second floors. This arrangement results in rooms that are none too spacious for their purpose, but many of the partition walls have been removed, creating adequately long, if narrow, galleries.