With two houses of Congress vying for space in the venerable Capitol building, it is no wonder that neither chamber is given more than their fair share. In their separate wings, this is easy to accommodate. It gets more difficult in the central piece. Most of the rooms are either clearly on one side or the other. In most places right in the middle, there is either a corridor or staircase or, in some cases, just a wall. The Gallery floor is it a bit more complicated: Two small rooms are directly in the middle and have been fairly doled out. The smaller room –with windows overlooking the Mall– belongs to the House; the larger, windowless, chamber is assigned to the Senate.
Only the crypt level is ––or, well, was–– different. Just east of the column-dominated crypt was a small room that had the name EF-100. While all other rooms (well, those that do not have a specific name related to their purpose) have names that start with either H or S, the letters here stand for “East Front.”
A 1997 history of the Capitol published by the Architect of the Capitol refers to this as the ‘Reception Room.’
The room was built as part of the East Front expansion in the 1950s. In total, about 60 extra rooms were added at this time. The others were split between the House and Senate.
This new room was the perfect neutral ground for bicameral meetings to take place.
An article published in 1968 in the Journal Exceptional Children calls it “in a political sense, ‘no man’s land.’” and describes the room as having separate entrances on either end, but that most Congressmembers enter through the center, unless engaging in the “ritualistic rite of ducking an ardent persuader sitting in the lobby in benches near the main door.”
Most of the article is taken up describing the conference committee formed to hammer out the differences in the amendments to the 1966 and 1967 Elementary and Secondary Act.
Twenty years later, the room hosted an off-the-record breakfast organized by the Congressional Research Service. The guest of honor was the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Robert M. Gates (later Secretary of Defense under Bush II and Obama.) The purpose was to “assess Gorbachev’s leadership position, Soviet domestic and foreign policy over the next five years, and implications for the United States.” It followed President Reagan’s historic visit to Moscow a few months earlier.
A total of 22 Senators and Representatives indicated that they would join in, though the memo released by the CIA in 2012 was written in the run-up to the meeting. Who actually showed up is anybody’s guess.
But the meeting space was not always used for such high-level events. Five years earlier, Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Administration hosted a “birthday shindig” (per the Washington Post) there. For $6, “Orangemen and Orangewomen” could join the party.
EF-100 no longer exists, but if you want to be where it once was, just join a public tour of the Capitol. When you get off the escalator that takes you from the visitor center into the Capitol, you will be standing in what used to be this space.
And, not to worry: As part of the visitor center expansion, a large space that could be used for this purpose was built.