So many museums are expanding that The New York Times recently devoted an entire section to tracking the latest glass-and-steel wings. One of the biggest is in D.C., where the Newseum — an annoying portmanteau of a name — was founded across the Potomac in Arlington 10 years ago. "We opened at a time when the press was not held in terribly high regard," says Joe Urschel, the museum's director and a former writer, managing editor, and television producer for USA Today. Nonetheless, attendance was pushing half a million by the time the board decided to take the institution across the river, midway between the Capitol and the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The museum knew it would attract busloads of tourists and would need to move them through its exhibits with Disney precision. It was also well aware of the more rarefied audience it gets once every four years: The First Amendment is etched out front on a 74-foot marble slab to hector passing presidents during their inaugural parades.
Designed by a team of architects from Polshek Partnership — famous for the Rose Center for Earth and Space in Manhattan and countless handsome institutional projects — the building fits into the neoclassical, height-restricted streets of Washington just fine. More surprisingly, it takes journalism's cherished mantra of transparency so literally it has a hole in its façade — a giant window framing a stadium-size video screen at the back of the lobby. The openness (at a quarter-million square feet, it dwarfs other museum projects in the country) is possible because of several deft feats of engineering, including the use of bridge-building technology to hang the 78-foot-wide glass curtain and an ingenious staircase, which functions as one of the three structural columns holding up the front half of the building.
The Newseum's collection includes a machine gun tower from near Checkpoint Charlie that surveys 32 feet of the Berlin Wall. There's also a Bell 206B JetRanger III news chopper dangling over the ticket counter and a shrapnel-ravaged Chevy truck — dubbed "the metal magnet" by its Time magazine crew — from a tour of duty in Bosnia and Croatia. The exhibits about the coverage of the 9/11 attacks, when journalists rushed into danger alongside the other first responders, warranted the installation of a special chill-out room in which to gather oneself after the experience. Further on is a stately memorial to members of the press killed on duty that reaches as far back as Elijah Parish Lovejoy, shot dead in 1837 while trying to protect the Alton Observer's press from being destroyed by a pro-slavery mob. The meditative space comes with a punch in the nose — unlike your average memorial, room has been left on the sculptural glass curve for plenty of new names.
The flow of visitors is carefully laid out — down stairs to introductory video rooms, up six floors in some of the largest hydraulic elevators ever made, past a 40-foot-wide panoramic screen, and into one of 15 theaters throughout the complex. Aspiring journos can record their own stand-up news reports — teleprompters included — in the activity center. Yet the space is never claustrophobic; just off the vast open area at its core, the Great Hall of News, await some of the best views across the rooftops lining the Mall.
