What has pink walls, is surrounded by cannons, has a secret room, uses a whole city block and sits on a stash of $1 billion?
If you answered "The Hillary wing of the Clinton Presidential Library," you may have Travelgate toxicosis. I recommend a Clintonectomy next November.
Meanwhile, take a drive to Columbus and tour the correct answer: The new Ohio Capitol.
Actually, it's not new. It's the same old Civil War-era, Greek Revival, government slab of tombstone-gray, with steps that waterfall down each side from a grove of sequoia pillars. The soup-can top is sawed off where any respectable capitol would have a dome, making it look like a garage-sale beer stein with a missing flip-lid.
But outside, the walkways are paved in freshly sliced marble, and inside is a tangle of sawhorses and yellow police tape that divides the suits from the hardhats and separates the dust and noise from no one.
The Capitol, 135 years old, is finally getting a facelift to make it look its age - like the day it was opened in 1861.
Intricately carved frames around windows and doorways, buried under sedimentary layers of paint for decades, now resemble real wood.
A floor plan that grew ant-farm style, from 53 rooms to 317, has been squashed back to 90.
By the time they scraped 31 coats of paint off the Senate chamber walls, they had room for two more wide-body senators. The paint chips were studied by a professional "paint researcher," who discovered and matched the original interior color from 1858.
It's, well . . . there's no polite way to say it. Pink.
Not Mary K-car blush. Not Pepto Bismol nausea. Not strawberry milkshake. Not shocking hot pants pink.
It's more of a salmony rose that looked, from certain angles, in certain light, about the same cool color as a 1958 Cadillac I used to drive.
All that big pink gives you the jitters at first - especially amplified through an 1858 carpet pattern that comes at you in every direction, louder than a cavalry charge.
But you get used to it. And for relief, you can let your jaw drop a few stories and raise your gaze to the round jar-lid on the rotunda, where a skylight is surrounded in concentric ripples of blue and gold and ivory and 25 other colors symbolizing Ohio's historic tradition of using as much paint as possible.
Hovering in the middle is a stained-glass copy of the original state seal, complete with a canal boat that sank out of sight sometime in the 1920s. It's no grabber, as state seals go - and they usually go from dull to obscure. It has the mandatory wheat to represent bountiful gifts harvested from agriculture lobbyists, nondescript mountains, a river, and 17 arrows, one for each state in the union when Ohio joined.
But with the light streaming through, surrounded by spokes of crimson red and sunshine yellow, the skylight is more colorful than the governor's language.
Before it was replaced, tourists would stroll in, glance up at a droopy piece of canvas over dingy plaster, and wonder how the place that collects billions in taxes could look so doublewide cheap. Now the whole rotunda lights up like a Senator's smile.
Nearby is an unfinished gift shop - probably still waiting for a shipment of souvenir erasers shaped like President Taft. It features a giant stained-glass state seal from the 1920s, found packed in a crate in a corner of a men's room.
That's not all they found.
An architect supervising the restoration told me the strangest discovery was the room without doors.
"It was a room with furniture, all ready to use, but the only entrance was a window," my tour guide explained.
You have to wonder: Is that where crippled bills crawled off to die? Was it a detention office for the boot-heel-lowest lawmaker in the House? Was it some secret meeting room for Bribetakers Anonymous?
Add it to the list of Great State Mysteries, along with the unfathomable way government can't do anything right the first time.
Our state Capitol, for example, started out as three competing designs. They chose the third-place design (of course) then halted construction eight months later (typical). By the time it was finished, it took 22 years and cost $1.4 million, even with way-below-minimum-wage prison labor.
The 1990s restoration duplicated the original 1861 boondoggles, too, with five years of cost overruns that ran the meter from $68 million to $112 million - enough to buy 80 Capitols in 1861.
I suppose some taxpayers will groan and gripe. Not me. That's hardly tip change in the state's $1 billion surplus. Besides, a restored capitol is a real treasure, a time machine for every wide-eyed child and adult who visits.
In 1861, they called it "a civic temple . . . gigantic in its magnitude, impregnable in its strength and enduring in its integrity."
Now, if only we could say that last part about everyone who serves there . . .
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
