National Parks Traveler
The National Park Service was given the responsibility for constructing and administering the new facility. It was not a good day for the NPS.
After many travails, the project was completed, except for the parking garage, in time for the opening ceremonies on Independence Day 1976. Tourists who visited the National Visitor Center found two 175-seat movie theaters that offered a "Washington, City Out of Wilderness” film, multilingual information desks, a bookstore, and other attractions, including most particularly an extravagant slide show presentation that used 100 Kodak Carousel slide projectors and 100 screens. Though officially dubbed the PAVE (for Primary Audio-Visual Experience), this array was widely -- and derisively – called “the Pit.”
Alas, few tourists went to Union Station. The National Visitor Center was poorly publicized, lacked convenient parking, and offered little that was genuinely interesting to the typical DC tourist. Small wonder that it never caught on. After embarrassingly low attendance, loud complaints, some 20 congressional hearings, and a 1977 GAO report that Union Station was in danger of structural collapse, the National Park Service decided to pull the plug. The PAVE was terminated on October 28, 1978, and the National Visitor Center was out of business. Union Station was sealed shut in 1981, and before the year was out (December 29, 1981), Congress transferred Union Station to the Department of Transportation. The National Park Service was finally rid of the damn thing.