Smithsonian’s treasures, behind the scenes

The scientist led the way past cabinets packed with samurai armor, drawers of birds’ nests, racks of African blankets and shelves of stuffed alligators until, at last, he reached a metal door.

With a wry smile, he pressed his badge against its electronic lock and ushered his visitor into a cavernous warehouse. Glistening in the muted light were jars upon jars upon jars of specimens of every conceivable species -- giant Venezuelan rats, diaphanous jellyfish, pale cactus flowers -- all carefully labeled and suspended for posterity in an alcoholic mixture that suffused the room with a pungent smell.

“This,” James Pecor announced, “is Pod Three.”

The Smithsonian Museum Support Center -- an enormous concrete building of nearly the same bland hue as the nearby Census Bureau, Washington National Records Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offices -- occupies a grassy, 4 1/2 -acre lot across from a strip mall near the District of Columbia.

But to walk through the Smithsonian’s primary off-site storage facility is to enter a world out of some fevered imagination. Round one corner and you are facing drawer after drawer of slides containing seemingly every type of flea. Round another and you are peering into a carbon dioxide-cooled steel and glass case housing rocks from outer space.

Then there is Pod Three -- known as “the wet pod,” said Pecor, who helps maintain the U.S. government’s mosquito collection there. But equally vast and entrancing is Pod Four, where such oversize items as petrified tree trunks and Buddha statues and totem poles are kept on enormous yellow and blue shelving. (Picture Indiana Jones’ attic as organized by IKEA.)

The skulls of elephants that President Theodore Roosevelt brought back from safari, Sitting Bull’s hand-drawn auto-picto-biography, the cashmere shawl given to President Van Buren by the government of Oman are being cared for in Suitland, Md. -- with roughly 30 million other artifacts, documents and specimens.

And that’s counting only items from the National Museum of Natural History, which keeps about one-fourth of its collection at the Suitland site, according to the center’s director, Elizabeth Dietrich. There are also thousands of items belonging to the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the -- well, you get the idea.

“By the time we’re done giving a tour, some people are turned to jelly,” said Deborah Hull-Walski, manager of the anthropology collection.

Not that the center is open to all comers.

Still, technically, every item at the center is the property of American taxpayers -- and must be made available to anyone who gives a good reason for wanting to see it. Generally, that means scientists, researchers and the occasional student group. And now that the newly dedicated National Museum of the American Indian has opened a separate Cultural Center on the Suitland property, Native Americans are coming to view artifacts in the Support Center’s collection.

Prospective visitors must contact the museum whose collection they want to see and schedule an appointment at the center; no admission is charged.

Smithsonian officials said they do not track the number of visitors to the Support Center, which opened in 1983. But the assortment of researchers on a recent afternoon gave a sense of the variety. In the center’s anthropology library, two women from France pored over photographs of Native Americans. One floor up, in the entomology section, Rampa Rattanarithikul had come from Thailand to look at slides of mosquito larvae under a microscope. She is making an illustrated key to mosquitoes in Thailand -- an important tool to combating malaria there. “In my country,” she said, “we do not have a place with all the specimens. But they are all here.”

Just outside the Support Center, in a hangar that is part of a separate Smithsonian complex known as the Paul E. Garber Facility, Peter Adam, a UCLA graduate student, was measuring a whale bone. Once the domain of the National Air and Space Museum, which has moved most of its planes to Northern Virginia, the Garber facility houses several Support Center collections, including whale bones.

Adam said he hoped the information he gains from today’s species can be used to extrapolate the size of prehistoric ones. It might be unknown to the rest of the world, but to whale researchers, Suitland is famous, Adam added. “I came here to do my master’s work as well,” he said. “You just don’t see this kind of setup anywhere else.”

The needs of such researchers add a twist to the mission of those who manage the Suitland collections. On one hand, their job is, as Dietrich put it, to halt the forces of decay. That means minimizing an object’s exposure to anything that will degrade it -- humidity, high temperatures, sunlight, pests, pesticides, the oils on a human hand.

On the other hand, items at Suitland must be accessible. At times, the collections managers seem to take as much pride in the ingenious methods devised to solve this challenge as they do in the objects. Notice, said Charles Potter, who maintains the whale bones, how they’ve been mounted on the same type of mobile, vertical metal frames used to store small planes. See, said the paleobiology collections manager, Jann W.M. Thompson, how these fiberglass jackets we’ve created for our dinosaur fossils allow you to view them from all angles without ever touching them.

Collections managers also are more culturally sensitive. Tribal representatives are consulted about the proper housing of objects from their heritage. Care is taken never to place profane objects over the head of sacred Buddha sculptures, for instance.

Native peoples who come to the center seem to appreciate the effort, managers said. On a recent tour, one American Indian was moved to donate the hat he was wearing -- a baseball cap bearing the words “Choctaw Veteran” -- on the spot.

A few days later, the hat sat on a table in the anthropology department, awaiting classification. Hull-Walski reached for it to show it off, then stopped short with a guilty smile.

“You know, I really should put on gloves to handle this,” she said.