Well, it's about fucking time.

When I was but a fresh-faced young intern in the summer of 1999, after my Freshman year of college, I had an internship at the Smithsonian. I worked in the National Portrait Gallery, in a walled-off section of the Museum, unseen by the public -- which was a damn shame. The National Portrait Gallery is in the D.C. Old Patent Office, built in the 1830s or 40s. Our section of the Musuem was a silent corridor, whose musty and history drenched quietude was broken with the click of the IBM Selectrics and Dell Dimensions.

But what a corridor. Essentially, my office was on a catwalk-like balcony in a vast Atrium, with mid-Victorian ironwork and plasterwork, a stained glass ceiling, and a beautifully tiled floor with vivid-150-year-old tilework.

Oh, look. Here's a picture of it - it's small, and you can't get a sense of much detail, but you can tell it was really grand:




This was the room where Abraham Lincoln's inaguration ball took place. And it was the room where I showed up for work every one of those hot, sticky days of the summer of '99, transferring transparencies onto the NPG's website, and running transparencies to the basement of the Museum of American History, and analyzing provenance of paintings through private collections in America. And after a while I took it for granted that I worked in such a grand space. After all, no one else could see it, as it was closed off from the rest of the museum. And as the summer wore on, the stained glass ceiling was removed and covered with opaque glass, and the North Wing of the corridor was closed off to begin restoration.

And in the Fall of 1999, the Museum closed for restoration.

And now, a mere SEVEN YEARS LATER, it's finally reopening. And, thankfully, it sounds like the Smithsonian knows what a good thing it had in the secret Great Hall, and hopefully it has now opened the same up to the Public in all of its 1850s Grandeur.

Only seven years later. About time.