History live!
The Baltimore Sun, Sunday June 29, 2003, By Gary Gately
As you raise your right hand and take the presidential oath of office, the big video screen shows you on the U.S. Capitol steps on Inauguration Day. When you don a black robe and sit on a replica of the U.S. Supreme Court bench, you listen to details of a case, then issue your opinion. Or you can step into a speakeasy during Prohibition or a 1940s living room during one of Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats.
We the people have never experienced the U.S. Constitution quite like this.
The new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia - the first museum ever devoted to the U.S. Constitution - brings to life the world's most famous blueprint for democracy in a multimedia extravaganza. The $185 million center, which opens on Independence Day, takes visitors on a fascinating journey through more than two centuries of constitutional history with nearly 100 exhibits, photos, video, live shows, artifacts and sculpture.
The Constitution Center, among $300 million worth of new and coming attractions on Independence Mall, reflects a broad effort to bring the past to life with a decidedly 21st-century approach. This is the section of Philadelphia that city promoters call "America's most historic square mile." But history alone, it would seem, is no longer enough.
"I thought we needed to improve our presentation and improve our product because basically our product is old buildings," says Gov. Edward Rendell, formerly Philadelphia's mayor and still a member of the Constitution Center's Board of Trustees. "They were all old buildings presented in a static manner, with a ranger reading a preordained script," he says. "In today's world, where kids are used to dynamic entertainment, that didn't cut it anymore. My belief is you can be educational and entertaining at the same time."
Rendell points to the Constitution Center and Lights of Liberty, a high-tech outdoor show with images projected onto buildings depicting events relating to the American Revolution. The show, which began five years ago, entertains, engages, startles and even scares audiences, who wear headsets and walk five city blocks at night.
At one point, skeletons of carriages lie on their sides - piles of burning embers and charred wood. Shots ring out, punctuated by screams. "Look out behind!" a voice thunders. You turn and stare into the barrels of a line of British soldiers pointing straight at you. As quickly as they appear, the redcoats vanish in a haze of smoke.
The American Revolution makes for high drama, and the creators of Lights of Liberty capture that drama brilliantly. But what about exploring the intricacies of the Constitution?
"You say 'constitutional theory and history' to people, and their eyes glaze over," says Joseph M. Torsella, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Constitution Center. "The question is, can you make this stuff compelling? Our goal is not just to prove the point. We really see the connection between the future health of the republic and people getting excited about citizenship."
Judging by knowledge of the Constitution, particularly among the youngest Americans, the republic would appear to be in trouble. Consider a few findings of polls conducted by the Constitution Center:
More teens can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government, and more know which city has the ZIP code 90210 than the city in which the Constitution was written. Older generations didn't do much better. The center's surveys found that less than 6 percent of adults could name the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.
A new look
The Constitution Center, which expects 1 million annual visitors, aims to narrow that vast knowledge gap. The opening of the center culminates more than a decade's effort and represents the biggest and most ambitious project in the first major renovation of Independence Mall since its creation in 1956.
A block south of the Constitution Center, the $38 million Independence Visitor Center opened in late 2001 with 50,000 square feet of computerized, touch-screen displays, two theaters and huge video screens showing area attractions. In October, a glass pavilion encasing the Liberty Bell will be replaced by the new Liberty Bell Center, with the bell in front of a glass wall with Independence Hall as a backdrop.
And the $15 million Independence Park Institute will welcome some 400,000 schoolchildren each year with a variety of hands-on exhibits designed to help them make sense of history.
Along with the new buildings on its perimeter, the mall also is being redesigned to create a more campus-like setting with new gardens, public art, amphitheaters and an outdoor cafe.
Constitution Center exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum, whose credits also include the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Newseum in Northern Virginia, says creating a "physical expression" for abstract truths proved a daunting challenge. But he says he's confident designers achieved that goal.
The Constitution Center, Appelbaum says, "will be a place that will revive wonder at our American enterprise - this adventure of personal expression and political debate which is our country."
Behind the expansive limestone-and-glass facade with "We the People" and the rest of the preamble inscribed on the right side, visitors enter a soaring, 45-foot grand lobby filled with natural light that looks out onto the mall and Independence Hall.
The Constitution show
From the time the journey begins in a corridor surrounding a 350-seat theater in the round, it's clear this won't be a typical museum experience.
Pictures of Philadelphia, circa 1787, surround you, along with rich audio coming from eight directions at once. Horse-drawn wagons clip-clop through the streets. Pedestrians chatter on the corners. Voices wonder aloud about the Constitutional Convention: What's going on in there? Why are they keeping it secret?
After a superb, 17-minute introductory show, "Freedom Rising," featuring 360-degree video and a live narrator, you step into the heart of the museum. Called the American Experience, it's topped with the illuminated words of the Constitution etched on a 16-foot-high circular glass wall that stretches 450 feet.
A "We the People" exhibit begins with a cone-shaped national "family tree" with changing images of 100 Americans on video monitors. Touch a face on a video screen, and you can read and hear one of the individual stories. Nearby, a big video screen shows naturalized citizens taking the citizenship oath. And as they renounce "all allegiance to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty," you can take the U.S. citizenship test. (It's enough to make you thankful you're already a citizen.)
Representing the balance of power, realistic scaled-down models of the U.S. Capitol, Supreme Court and the White House extend from beams. Not far from a tower of law casebooks rising more than 15 feet, you can sit with others in a jury box from a turn-of-the-last-century murder trial and listen as a court officer explains your role as a juror. Then, take your place at the Supreme Court bench, where video monitors inset into the desktop show you cases before you rule. In one case, the video focuses on a man walking up to a phone booth, while the narrator says, "The long journey to the Supreme Court begins here in an old-fashioned telephone booth located somewhere in Los Angeles."
Charles Katz, visitors learn, was a bookie arrested after allegedly using public phones to place bets. Federal agents had attached a microphone to the top of a phone booth. Did this violate his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure?
Different voices speak the words of a few justices with opposing views. You punch in your decision, then learn that the court, in fact, voted 7-1 in favor of Katz in the 1967 case Katz vs. United States.
In an exhibit on the presidency, you can be sworn in - and, if you like, buy a photo of your big moment on the Capitol steps. Here, too, you watch a newscaster covering the ultimate election - the best president of all time - then head into a voting booth and pick your favorite. Check out the constantly updated results.
You can step into a small room modeled after part of the Senate floor and listen in on the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. Or behold tools used in the Watergate break-in and the infamous punch-card voting machine, ballot box and butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County in the Bush/Gore presidential election.
New ways of teaching
The Constitution Center succeeds in no small part because of its multilayered approach, appealing to young children and grandparents, casual day-trippers and constitutional scholars, technophiles and technophobes.
"The truth is that nobody's ever been able to sell the Constitution to the American public," says Michael Zuckerman, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania. "We don't have novels about it, we don't have songs about it, we don't have movies about it. It just doesn't excite us."
All that could change thanks to Philadelphia's historic district revitalization with a futuristic twist, he says.
"This stuff with the bells and the whistles and the high tech is really a way of getting history across to people in 2003," Zuckerman says. "Somebody has got to do the translation so kids 7 years old visiting from Iowa can make sense of it, and so their parents can, too."
Those who want to delve more deeply into virtually anything Constitution-related can search vast storehouses of text, video and still images on numerous computers throughout the museum. Want to know what shaped the men who shaped the Constitution? Open talking books like John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government and listen to excerpts.
Anybody can be a member of Congress when sitting at a replica of a desk from the U.S. Senate or while hitting the buttons at the computerized "law-making machine," in which the bill bounces from the House and Senate to the Oval Office. (Former senators Bob Dole and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan offer insider perspective in videotaped interviews conducted by the museum.)
When the lawmakers speak of an appropriations bill, it's an abstraction. But government spending - and the 16th Amendment, giving Congress the power to tax - mean a whole lot more when you punch your income on a computer that computes the amount of federal tax and how it's spent.
Children will love the Bill of Rights show at the Family Theater. Statues of Lady Justice and Uncle Sam stand on either side of a stage, and George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin are just faces on oversized $1, $10 and $100 bills - until they start talking. (James Madison, relegated to a portrait, complains bitterly about not appearing on any currency.) Video, animated objects, including a colorful U.S. map, and jokes disguise civics lessons as kid-friendly comedy.
Complex reality
Other exhibits highlight the contrasts between the ideals of the Constitution and the more complicated realities.
When you step into a room in pre-Civil War Boston, you see a life-size image of fugitive slave Anthony Burns being taken away by troops. An angry crowd surrounds the troops, and the narrator recounts the capture in the words of a witness.
You can read the justices' opinions in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education, or look at the pen Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Then you see video of three black men being arrested by white police officers outside a restaurant, or white kids inside a bus and black kids walking alongside it.
"Imagine an America where you are not allowed to eat at a neighborhood restaurant," the narrator says. "Imagine you can't go to the nearest public school because you have the wrong color skin. ... Imagine that where and how you eat, sleep, work, study, play and travel are all restricted by law and custom.
"If you were an African-American living in the American South in the 1950s, you didn't have to use your imagination. This was your life."
The video cuts to a man screwing a metal sign into a panel in a Dallas transit bus. The sign says: "It is required by law under penalty of fine of $5 to $25 that white and Negro passengers must occupy the respective space or seats as indicated by signs in this vehicle."
Details make the story
Such precise details, woven together with riveting video, well-researched narration and text, create a tapestry of the Constitution and make clear that its history is America's history.
Stroll past a storefront, and Vietnam protesters chant and carry placards on multiple TV screens. Then you learn that America's longest, albeit undeclared, war, led not only to the War Powers Act but also a seminal Supreme Court decision on "symbolic speech" in a case of a man who burned his draft card.
The cost of the "common defense" promised in the Constitution's preamble resonates with clarity as you stand in front of a photo of Arlington National Cemetery surrounding a 5-foot-high video monitor. A soldier carrying a rifle walks through history, morphing into different uniforms - the American Revolution, the Civil War, Vietnam, the war against Iraq. You look at him, then the statistics showing the number of Americans who died in different wars, and a somber voice reads letters from soldiers.
Here, the eternal soldier is forever marching; the founding fathers, forever frozen in a moment that changed the history of the world. You amble amid bronze likenesses of George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the three dozen other signers of the Constitution in a room resembling the one in Independence Hall where they debated, wrote and signed the document.
Then you can sign your name on parchment paper in leather-bound volumes in support of today's Constitution. Or you can dissent and write why.
You emerge in a big cafe, where you can e-mail Congress, register to vote and watch Constitution-related news. You can look through the giant glass facade at Independence Hall, and let your mind meander through the centuries.
Getting there: Amtrak (800-872-7245; www.amtrak.com) has trips daily between Penn Station, Baltimore, and 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. It's a short cab ride to the historic district. Philadelphia is about a 90-minute drive from Baltimore, and there's underground parking beneath the National Constitution Center and next to the Independence Visitor Center.
Attractions
National Constitution Center, 525 Arch St., Independence Mall, Philadelphia, PA 19106 866-917-1787, www.constitutioncenter.org. Open daily 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $6 seniors, $5 children ages 5-12; children under 4 admitted free.
Independence Visitor Center, Sixth and Market Streets, 800-537-7676, www.independencevisitorcenter.com, Open daily 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. through July 6; 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. July 7-Aug. 31. Free.
Independence Hall, Chestnut Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets, 800-967-2283, www.nps.gov/inde/indep-hall.html. Open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: Free (timed-admission tickets available at Independence Visitor Center).
Liberty Bell Pavilion, Independence Mall, 800-537-7676, www.nps.gov/inde/liberty-bell.html, Open daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free admission (no tickets needed).
Lights of Liberty, Sixth and Chestnut Streets, 877-462-1776
Shows begin at dusk Tuesday through Saturday in July and August (except July 3-4); Thursday-Saturday Sept. 4-Oct. 25. Admission: $12 to $17.76.
Lodging
Penn's View Hotel, 14 N. Front St., Philadelphia, PA 19106, 800-331-7634, www.pennsviewhotel.com. Boutique hotel a few blocks from the historic district that combines historic rooms and modern comforts. Rates start at around $145.
Holiday Inn Historic District, 400 Arch St., 800-465-4329, www.holiday-inn.com. Great location for touring the historic district. Rates from around $110.
Omni Hotel at Independence Park, 401 Chestnut St., 800-843-6664, www.omnihotels.com. Luxury hotel with large rooms, a pool and health club in Society Hill, near Independence Mall. Rates start at around $160.
Sheraton Society Hill, 2nd and Walnut Streets, 800-325-3535, www.sheraton.com. This large hotel sits amid lush landscaping and cobblestone streets four blocks from Independence Hall. Rates start at about $120.
Sample Itinerary
8:30 a.m.: Stop in the Independence Visitor Center, an attraction in itself. Familiarize yourself with the historic district. Pick up timed tickets for Independence Hall. Stroll the mall.
9:30 a.m.: Head to the National Constitution Center. You'll probably want to spend several hours here. Grab a bite for lunch at the Constitution Center's cafe overlooking the mall and Independence Hall.
3 p.m.: Visit Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell Pavilion.
6: p.m.: For a taste of real Colonial fare, try the historic City Tavern, reconstructed to capture its 1773 atmosphere, with pewter plates, candlelight, wait staff in period garb and great food. The tavern is at 138 S. Second St. (215-413-1443; www.citytavern.com).
8 p.m.: Head for the Lights of Liberty Show.
