LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

From watery paving of this plaza in front of the Library of Congress rises the ceremonial stair that leads to the bronze doors at the front entrance of what is now called the Jefferson Building. Flanking the three overarching doors are granite spandrels in which muse-like female figures are depicted. Above those is a balustrade, then a line of columns, behind which are five vast windows with broken pediments surmounted by busts of famous writers. At the top sits a collar-painted dome topped with a 23-carat gold leaf torch.

The inside is vastly more splendid, with towering ceilings, colonnades, mosaics, ornamental ironwork, frescoes, inlaid floors, stained glass, brown marble from Tennessee, yellow marble from Sienna, thirty-three keystone window ornaments sculpted with “savage and barbarous peoples” from the Smithsonian’s ethnological collections, and much, much more.

In 1800, Congress’s library was housed in the Capitol, and consisted of a few hundred books and nine maps. But it grew. In 1870, a revised copyright law demanded two copies of every U.S. publication for the Library of Congress. In they poured; soon there were roadblocks of books in the corri-dors of power.

The answer had to be a separate building for the books, but it was slow in coming. An architectural competition in 1873, won by John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Peltz, determined the design. Congress appropriated construction funds in 1886. In 1888, construction was supervised by the Army Chief of Engineers, Thomas Lincoln Casey, and in time his son who replaced Peltz. The building, which brought to mind the elaborate Beaux-Arts Paris Opera, was occupied in 1897.

A commemorative Wedgwood plate issued in 1900 featured an image of the Library of Congress inside a heavy ring of flowers. On the back of it was printed “It stands today the largest, most imposing, most sumptuous and most costly Library Building in the world.” Not everybody liked it. In 1898, Russell Sturgis, describing the flight of stairs seen here in Mr. Wentzel’s photograph, complained of “that false idea of grandeur which consists mainly in hoisting a building up from a reasonable level off the ground, mainly in order to secure for it a monstrous flight of steps which must be surmounted before the main door can be reached...”

All the same, it made for a remarkable photographic composition.

The street lights probably aren’t very efficient, either, but they certainly make an opulent statement. We wouldn’t trade them for the world.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLKMAR K. WENTZEL (CC ‘74); TEXT BY JUDITH W. FRANK (WASHINGTON BY NIGHT)

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