It took a few tries to make it happen, but Sen. Mark Warner visited one of the wonders of the Western world late last week: the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress—aka, its Packard Campus in Culpeper County.
Virginia’s senior U.S. senator toured the 415,000-square-foot complex, guardian of countless American cultural treasures, for nearly an hour.
Just minutes into his whirlwind tour, Warner responded with a big “wow!” when told that philanthropist David Woodley Packard’s donation of the custom-built facility stands as history’s second-biggest private gift to the federal government, after the Smithsonian Institution. (It is also the largest-ever private gift to the U.S. legislative branch.)
After 12 years in the Senate and earlier stints as governor and businessman, Warner had seen a thing or two.
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But Thursday brought his first good look inside the conservation center embedded in Culpeper’s Mount Pony at the site of the Federal Reserve’s Cold War bunker. Afterward, in an interview, the senator marveled at the place and its people.
“I really wasn’t sure what to expect,” Warner said. “But I can see that if I was a hardcore film guy, this would be like nirvana, to have the ultimate job in this beautiful setting. Wow.”
The 45-acre campus, 75 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., boasts 90 miles of shelving to store, restore and process America’s film, sound and TV treasures in several linked buildings mostly built underground, topped with a huge green roof. Its holdings are painstakingly cared for by a world-class group of specialists drawn from Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, you name it.
“It makes you feel proud that it’s here,” the senator told the Star-Exponent. “I think it’s a hidden gem. I wonder how many people outside the immediate area know it’s here. ... I’m kind of surprised it took me so long (to get here).”
Gregory Lukow, the center’s chief, welcomed Warner outside the same entrance where, before COVID struck, the public entered to enjoy free movies on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays in the Art Deco-style Packard Campus Theater. In a previous, ill-fated visit to Culpeper, the senator had seen only the theater, just inside the entrance.
Lukow noted that the last time he’d seen Warner, on Aug. 23, 2011, they met outdoors beneath the largest tree on the campus, after the staff was evacuated when a magnitude-5.8 earthquake hit Mineral, Va., radiating tremors that were felt in Culpeper, Richmond, Washington and beyond.
On another visit to Culpeper County for an agricultural event, Warner recalled, ominous storm clouds carried the threat of a tornado, and he was hustled away to safer ground.
“It became a standing joke that ‘We really don’t want you back in town, unless you bring some big check for some big project,’ ” recalled the senator, who is starting his 13th year in office.
But on Thursday at the Packard Campus, the third time was the charm, as his press secretary noted.
Gathering in the lobby with Associate Librarian of Congress Robin Dale and David Pierce, the center’s assistant chief and chief operations officer, Lukow sketched the site’s history for Warner.
It is the product of a one-of-a-kind partnership between philanthropist David Woodley Packard, son of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Congress, the Library of Congress and the Architect of the Capitol.
Bunker repurposed
In close coordination with its partners, the Packard Humanities Institute bought the Mount Pony property in the 1990s. The nonprofit then converted the Federal Reserve’s concrete-walled cash-hoard facility into temperature-controlled storage for many of the nation’s movie and sound treasures. In 2007, after 10 years of intensive effort, the institute donated the complex to the Library of Congress.
Mark Warner’s predecessor, Sen. John Warner, participated in the D.C. signing ceremony where Packard handed off his baby to Uncle Sam.
On Thursday, beyond the complex’s lobby, Warner’s first stop was the three-tiered Conservation Building. It houses the staff of the library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, plus three leading-edge laboratories for analog and digital preservation of film, sound recordings and video.
The Virginia Democrat stood by the building’s western wall of floor-to-ceiling glass and drank in its gorgeous view of the Blue Ridge, the town of Culpeper, Germanna Community College’s Daniel Technology Center and the massive data centers of SWIFT and the Verizon Cloud along U.S. 29.
Lukow called that complex of facilities “our mini Silicon Valley,” all reliant on the same sort of fiber-optic infrastructure used by the Packard Campus.
That capability was an unintended gift of the Cold War, when U.S. leaders built the Federal Reserve bunker, other outlying facilities and a secure communications network to carry on the government in case nuclear war decimated Washington, D.C.
Admiring the scenery and the sleek, oak-trimmed interior designed by Packard, Warner said the center’s staff members must feel as if they’ve died and gone to heaven. Lukow nodded, noting that his team members have moved from all across the country to work in Culpeper.
‘A magnificent site’
Dale, the nation’s associate librarian for library services, invited Warner to see other parts of the Library of Congress at its main campus on Capitol Hill.
In designing the Packard Campus and its fiber-optic links to Washington, Dale said, “One of the goals was to be able to show something here and pipe it up there to have twin showings” in a second theater on the library’s campus beside the U.S. Capitol.
The library administration strives to connect the value and capabilities of Packard with the public, researchers and other clients in Washington, she said.
“There’s a lot of investment going into preserving our cultural heritage here,” Dale said. “We want to make sure people can see it here, by coming to the site—it’s a magnificent site—but also be able to do research or have availability for folks up on Capitol Hill.”
Because of the senator’s tight schedule, Warner, his aides and library staff moved swiftly from one facility to another, hustling up and down stairs between floors.
Fragile films
Heather Linville, supervisor of the center’s Motion Picture Laboratory, met Warner in the center’s sunny, third-floor atrium to guide him through the lab.
Warner expressed great interest in learning about photochemical film preservation. Linville described how original 35mm film elements are copied onto modern, more stable film stock.
“When stored in proper vaults, the new preservation master elements can last hundreds of years,” she said.
In the film inspection room of the library’s nitrate vaults, moving-image technician Laurel Howard showed Warner part of a 1944 classic from The Walt Disney Studios. The division oversees one of the largest collections of motion pictures in the world, spanning the whole history of cinema.
With a magnifying lens, Howard let the senator examine Technicolor frames from the Disney Collection’s “The Three Caballeros,” a movie in which animation overlays make it appear Mexican actress Carmen Molina is dancing a waltz with the cartoon character.
Descending into the oldest part of the complex and opening a set of doors onto a long corridor, Lukow told the senator’s party: “We’re now stepping into the old Federal Reserve bunker. We demolished it down to the structural level. All that was left was the slab and the walls.
“Now, just stop and take a gander down the hallway,” he said. “That’s over a hundred yards, longer than a football field, with vaults on both sides, in both directions. So you get a sense of the scale of this building.”
As he strode briskly onward, Lukow told Warner that the center holds 1.7 million moving-image items and 3.6 million recorded-sound items. The sound items include records, cassettes, wax cylinders from the early Thomas Edison years, and recent born-digital files.
Gobs of data
Lukow showed Warner the center’s data center, called DC3. DC1 is in the library’s Madison Building on Capitol Hill, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress decided to store all of the legislative branch’s digital content outside the Beltway, he said. DC2 is somewhere in the Manassas area.
DC3 stores all of the digital files the Packard Campus produces—with a capacity of 12 petabytes, which is larger than the library’s main storage center in the nation’s capital, Lukow said.
That elicited another “wow” from the senator.
For comparison’s sake, if you stored two petabytes of data on CD-ROMs, each holding 700 megabytes, the stack of discs would reach two-and-a-quarter miles into the sky, according to the library.
Opening a door to DC3, Lukow showed Warner a room containing rows of giant black, robotic data tape libraries, storing 10,000 tapes in slots. Each tape holds 8.5 terabytes of information, he said.
As digital files are produced daily on the center’s third floor, each night a robot arm takes a tape of fresh data from upstairs and loads it in a driver inside DC3, storing it for later access in Washington, Culpeper or elsewhere.
“Fascinating,” Warner said.
Congress recently funded DC4, a new data center to be built in Wise County, Va., Lukow and Dale said.
In the Collections Building’s video facility, Lukow and Pierce told Warner how the Packard Campus preserves many thousands of hours of video and TV footage, from games and TV shows recorded on videotape to newer fare that is produced digitally.
“What we’re facing is another 10 years of transfer of the video collection to digital, while acquiring shows born on digital,” Pierce said.
In its role as a preservation archive, the Packard Campus always tries to get the best possible copy to store for the future, he explained.
“In a surprising number of cases, companies come back to us to fill in gaps,” Pierce said. “Maybe they’ve lost one episode of a program or somebody’s doing a documentary, and the owner hasn’t digitized it yet and says ‘Get it from the Library of Congress.’ ”
Movie palaces
Leading the group to the center’s pride and joy, its theater, Lukow told Warner how the Packard Campus has since its start shown free movies to the public three days a week, often including a children’s matinee on Saturday afternoons.
“If we show something really rare and obscure, we’ll draw people from other states because they can’t see it anywhere else. Other times, we may have 40 people,” he said. “If we show really popular films like ‘The Maltese Falcon’—which we have the original camera negative for—or ‘Gone with the Wind,’ we sell out. So it really depends on what we’re showing. But we like to mix it up like that.”
Every month pre-COVID, the theater’s state-of-the-art projection room would screen a selection of titles from the National Film Registry, the trove of 25 movies chosen yearly by the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, for their “cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage.”
Describing David Packard’s attention to the theater’s details and furnishings, Lukow noted that an electronic reproduction of a 1929 Mighty Wurlitzer organ rises from its stage so an organist can accompany silent films with live music, just as those movies were first shown to the public.
“This theater was a labor of love for Mr. Packard,” he said. “He purchased his own movie palace in 1988, the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto, California, a still-surviving classic movie house. He spent millions to restore it. He’s still showing movies there. It’s probably the most successful repertory cinema in the country, the last 37 years. And if you go there, the chances are he’ll be tearing your ticket, literally.”
Then Warner asked, to laughter: “So the real question is, do you sell popcorn?”
“No, we don’t, and you can see why,” Lukow replied, with a smile. “No food or drinks. That’s something the community of Culpeper and the local region has been happy to live with.”
“I really, really appreciate this,” Warner said of the tour. “Very much.”
“Glad the jinx is broken, sir,” Lukow said.
As his tour ended, Warner made clear he was glad he had wedged it in between a broadband event in Charlottesville and presiding over a Senate session on Thursday evening.
“Our region has so much, with access to the Library, the Smithsonian and other great parts of our history ... I think we sometimes get jaded,” he said. “... It’s nice to have people reopen your eyes as to what’s here. That’s why this was so much fun.”
Learn more about the library’s Packard Campus at loc.gov/avconservation.