Michael Morain

mmorain@dmreg.com

If you ever had an ant farm as a kid, you can picture the atrium of downtown’s Capital Square, where ordinary workers do their ordinary jobs behind eight floors of wrap-around windows.

Now, if you can imagine shaking that ant farm, you can picture what Capital Square looks like this week. A work crew started installing the gear for the 1,600 credentialed media expected to take over the building for the Iowa caucuses on Monday night. Media will officially swarm the center when it opens Friday.

The worker bees in cargo pants and comfortable shoes moved in at midnight Saturday, less than an hour after the RAGBRAI route-announcement party cleared out, and brought with them their ladders and scaffolds and lights. Bundles of extension cords snake in and out of the doors. A movie-sized LED screen went up by the escalators, projecting an animated movie about a bunny until somebody switched the image to a standard screen-saver.

The Register's newsroom is on the fifth floor, and one of our photographers, Rodney White, set up a time-lapse camera to capture the whole transformation.

"This is going to be awfully exciting," said a security guard, who chit-chatted with downtown employees who were gawking at the transformation during their lunch break. Several folks leaned over the skywalk railing to snap photos.

“I love it all,” said Bonnie Thorn, who works nearby at the Polk County Administration Building. She marveled at all the wires sticking from behind the LED screen like tentacles.

Brian Bayeur, who works on Capital Square’s eighth floor, texted a few shots to his eighth-grade son, Brendan, who is studying civics at Northview Middle School in Ankeny. The older Bayeur used to be in broadcasting and recognized a lot of the gear spread across two-story platforms.

Someone else walked by and quipped, ‘So when is ‘American Gladiators’ coming?’ ”