Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 39, number 2, winter, 1955-56

              ''^Headquarters" is still hostessing. If you missed Rededication Day and a memorable experience, we still bid you welcome. To prepare you for the tour— and it will be impressive to one who was familiar with the Society's former dreary, cluttered corridors and crowded offices—the Director here has furnished a guide. Come and call at your '^Head¬ quarters,'' where the doors swing wide!
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The Graceful Tracery of State Street Elms Screens the  Historical Society  Building on  a   Wintry  Day.
The Remodeling What Has Been Accomplished?
by Clifford L Lord
The 1954-1956 remodeling of the Society's building has been a major operation covering nearly two years from May 1954 to February 1956. The anaesthesia was strictly local and the knife was sometimes keenly felt, but the patient has survived and the surgery has pro¬ duced a building far more useful to the So¬ ciety and, we hope, fufly as beautiful as the original version. The visitor wifl notice ex¬ terior changes; the blocking of the first-floor windows to furnish wafl space for the new mu¬ seum gafleries, enhancing the massive dignity of the fagade of the building; the closing of two of the portals of the main (east) entrance to provide modern cloakroom facilities; the escutcheons bearing the seal of the Society flanking the main portals; the name of the Society lettered for the first time high on the front elevation; the exterior bronze name plates; the historic marker. At night on special occasions he may see the beautiful fagade high-lighted, its beauty strangely augmented by the man-made moonlight.
Inside the main entrance—State, Park, and Langdon entrances are closed for afl but emergency exit—he will find on his left a reception desk where he can get directions to the service area or office he wants within the buflding, check his coat, buy a souvenir of his visit, or even take out a membership in the So¬
ciety. Directly opposite, behind a display of Society publications, he wifl find public wafl phones and a cloakroom specially designed for the self-service use by the hundreds of school groups which annually visit the Society. Straight ahead he wifl face the flag-backed Wisconsin Liberty Befl, symbolic of much that is basic in the American heritage. Down the corridor he may miss a number of doors and windows which have been removed to furnish added wall space for exhibits and to clean up the interior design.
He wfll find the new first-floor gafleries, stripped of what stacking once existed there, in the process of transformation into a series of exhibits covering Wisconsin history by periods. He will discover an effective traffic pattern which insures his seeing these exhibits on Wis¬ consin history in their logical order. If he visits the old museum quarters on the fourth floor, he wfll find the specialty coflections in the process of assembly and display—guns, lustreware, dolls, phflately, costumes, and so on. Back on the first floor he wifl also find a public meeting room named for Dean Sellery with a built-in public address system, attached chair storage space, and a small kitchenette equipped with utensils by Mrs. B. C. Ziegler and china sup¬ plied by the Women's Auxiliary. This room, he wifl be told, is readily converted by a slid-
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