Washington’s newest attraction proves that progress can come to the capital city. Last December, just in time for President Obama’s inauguration, Congressional leaders proudly dedicated the new Capitol Visitor Center with ceremonies in its grand hall, which covers 1.3 acres and looks bright as the day beneath huge skylights with walls clad in Virginia limestone.

This impressive space is to a waiting room what Air Force One is to the Wright Flyer. Sure, it has clerks processing tickets and the familiar loading chutes of velvet ropes to corral milling crowds waiting to see the orientation film. Yet there’s a sense of modern grandness and of American legacy.

Around the periphery stand as diverse a collection of heroic statues as ever peopled a pantheon—not the giants of history, but lesser-known Americans who were each something special: the Hawaiian warrior king Kamehameha I, draped in a gold cloak; John L. Swigert, an Apollo 13 astronaut, in his white spacesuit; Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the lone dissenter in the vote to declare war in 1941; Sara Winnemucca, the first native woman to publish a book; Philo T. Farnsworth, the “father of television.” The statues reveal a harlequin array of styles and media: bronze, stone, and colored resins. They’re all about life-sized, the better to emphasize their humanity, as if to say: these honored people are like us, and each made a difference.

After seeing the film, visitors encounter a hands-on model that kids (and adults) can touch, an 11-foot-tall copy of the Capitol dome’s exterior. It stands at the entrance to the exhibition hall, a softly lit space punctuated by video stations that can access encyclopedic information files and by wall displays of precious historical documents. Notable architecture displays include a model of the dome’s other side, the dome’s inside in intriguing detail, and a series of models of this great building as it has appeared in its several configurations amid Capitol Hill’s changing surroundings.

Among the many reminders that the Capitol has two “sides” (the Senate on the north and the House on the south), two video screens carry live feeds of the proceedings in both legislative chambers. This is also apt, since a prime purpose of the facility is to orient visitors to the Capitol, engaging them before they tour the edifice. Even this is a different experience than before. The old tours were led by interns and junior aides from your congressman’s office; now, better-informed guides in bright uniforms do the honors.

This corps of guides is one of the new features that was conceived during the evolution of the Visitor Center, a decades-long process that picked up speed in 1991, took years longer than expected, and cost three times as much. In this case, there were better causes for overruns than inefficiency and greed. At first the center was intended to be merely a place where visitors could get out of the rain, with ample restrooms and a decent cafeteria—all of it underground to preserve the look of Capitol Hill and the stately