99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-48- The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room

Episode Date: February 27, 2012

“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…” -Andrea Seabrook, NPR Congressional Correspondent In the eight years Andrea Seabrook has been reporting on Congress, she has made … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21centry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I have this habit of walking into any door that's unlocked. And it actually does me well here in the capital because you start poking around and going

into doors and you find the coolest things. You have to appreciate the moxie of someone who can wander around a federal building, open up a random door and announce to whoever's on the other side. Hello. Hi, I'm Andrea C. Brooke with NPR. If you didn't catch that, that's NPR Congressional correspondent Andrea C. Brooke. I'm a reporter. We're poking around, looking at secret things in the Capitol.

I am so in love with Andrea C. Brooke right now. The woman on the other side of the door tells Andrea that she needs to leave and that walking into random doors in the basement of the US Capitol building is not what she's supposed to be doing. And that's 99% of visible's own Sam Greenspan. He went with Andrea to the Capitol building.

I'm so jealous of him right now. 99% of visible's own Sam Greenspan. He went with Andrea to the Capitol building. I'm so jealous of him right now. That's not what we're supposed to be doing. That doesn't deter you though. No. Are you kidding? I don't care what they think I'm supposed to be doing. I'm here to cover the United States Capitol. And frankly, I see this as part of it.

I think so. I think so. I think this as part of it. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so.

I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so.

I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. I think so. overwhelming structure. you know, riding the bills and cleaning the toilets. As if we could tell the difference. Am I right? The capital is known for its grandeur. The revtanda statuary hall, the crypt, the marble staircases.

This place is unbelievably ornamental. The walls upstairs have gorgeous freezes, you know, with birds and squirrels and gorgeous, gorgeous, linting beautiful paintwork. And that's all the stuff we're supposed to see. But when you're an Embederate Dorinob Turner and Snoop like Andrea C. Brook, you also get to know the Capitol below the surface. Literally, the basement.

Down here, there's a whole bunch of engineers, you know, like HVAC engineers in blue uniforms that say, like, you know, Joe, on a... The purpose of the building, the business of government trickles down to these lower levels. The members of the House, Republican caucus, and sometimes the Democrats meet in the basement for their sort of closed door secret strategy sessions.

And it's a really good place to place to get kind of a tip from members that you know about what's going on. But the main reason we're here is to see a little bit of the architectural grandeur that is trickled down here too. Oh it says please check in with the engineers which I think they'll do just you know One thing that's cool is I'll just show to you Andrea is leading you through the serpentine route of alleys and doorways and really in the uh what oh my gosh Here we are I know it's amazing and then there are these bathtubs It's amazing, they're these beautiful marble bathtubs with marble steps that lead up to

them in brass fittings and they're deep, beautiful bathtubs. Just to describe it a little bit, it's sort of a white ivory marble that has this luster. It reminds me of the Venus de Milo or something. It shines, it glows a little bit, and it's got very faint black veins in it, and it's just gorgeous. The curves in it are so gentle and continuous. But for all the grandeur that Tubbs possessed,

the room itself is the exact opposite. This place was supposed to cool off senators, now it cools and heats the entire capital building. There's a big HVAC equipment and computer servers and large steel cabinets containing god knows what. Even though the bathtubs along with the sink and toilet were here first, they're the ones that came out of place. The bathtubs were installed around 1860 during the expansion of the capital.

DC is known for its swampy summers, and legend has it that senators could be banished from the chamber if they were too smelly. It still wreaks, but yeah, back then, it was less figurative. And most people at the time, even politicians, they didn't have indoor plumbing at home. So Congress needed a place where the politicians

could go and wash up. Andrea reads from an informational card beside the tub. Okay, here we go. Each bathtub, and I am standing in one right now, was carved in Italy from a single block of carara marble. Three bathtubs were shipped from Genoa, Italy in July 1859 and reached Baltimore in November

of that year. July to November. The other three were shipped from Leigh Horn, Italy in September of 1859 and arrived in New York in January of 1860. The precise dates of the bathtubs arrival and installation at the capital are uncertain, but the Senate bathing room is known to have been in operation as of February 23rd, 1860. Each of the six tubs cost 90 bucks in 1860, which is around $2,500 a piece today. And that was just to buy the tubs. You got to figure it was still more to ship them from Italy, receive them at the port of Baltimore, transport them to Capitol Hill, and then you had a build of bathing facilities suitable to a senator.

They had Oakwood paneling, plaster cornices, mint and tile, egg and dart molding, of the six original tubs only two are left, and one has a piece of plywood over it that props up some padlocked steel mystery box. The other was decommissioned years ago. This place is a total collusion of ares, not just old versus new. And I know that just a little bit ago, we were considering the capital building as just a building.

It's impossible to look at this room and not see a metaphorical debate right here in the basement. We are having this great debate in our country, whether you're in the Tea Party or the Occupy movement both share the same concern about who the government is for. And I think the politicians have tried really hard to make it look as if the government is for the people and not for the gorgeously-appointed bathers of the world. For example, a new king rich took over the House speakership in 1995 after a giant sweep of the 94 elections.

He found that there were buckets of ice still being delivered to every single member of Congress's office, even though they all had refrigerators with ice makers. It was back from the time when you had to buy ice separately, and so they sort of shut down all that stuff. At the same time, they got rid of the house history, and they defunded all of these things they thought of as luxuries and they got rid of a lot of the funding for saving things like this. As Andrea puts it, the spending versus austerity question is really just the modern form of the quintessential American question of government.

Which is how much government should exist? What is it there to do? And at one point, about 140 some odd years ago, there was this idea of the government being an important institution, one that would have gorgeously appointed baths. And now we're sitting in a boiler room and the beautiful minton tile

has been painted over with industrial gray paint and the walls are kind of dirty and it's loud and and there's no way to pay homage to it anymore. It's tucked in a corner and dirty and there's a roach trap on the floor. We can have gorgeous, you have a marble kind of sparkles a little bit if it's a little bit clean look closer. You see this luster? I don't think there's any modern political persuasion that would advocate for the installation of luxurious $3,000 marble bathtubs for senators as lovely as they may be. The bathtubs, not the senators.

But if the Ornate marble bathtubs are already there, they were installed 150 years ago. What do you do with them? What represents the people now? I mean, it's interesting that it's still preserved, but it's likely not going to be restored. No. Not unless we had some resurgence and respect for our government, and you imagine the people wanting to pay, even if it was only, I don't know,

just give it $500,000 just to be crazy. Just to restore this area, it may be a lot more than that actually, come to think of how much you'd have to move. But, I don't know. Yeah. You want to go open some doors? Yes.

99% invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan, who I'm so jealous of and he's totally fired. I'm so jealous of and he's totally fired. I'm in my house. He's traipsing around the capital building with Andrea Sibruck. You're dead to me. In Mirrogan Mars, with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, 91.7, local public radio in San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco.

We are distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public at prx.org. You can find the show on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, or you can just catch up with us on the website, 99%invisible.org you