Hoover Dam’s story told ‘through the people who lived it’ at new visitor center

Boulder City Mayor Joe Hardy looks through a telescope during the opening of the Hoover Dam Visitor Center in Boulder City, Tuesday, June 17, 2025. Photo by: Wade Vandervort

The first visitors to enter the renovated Hoover Dam Visitor Center on Tuesday morning made their way slowly through the building’s new exhibit, exploring each facet of life that made the dam’s construction possible.

For the people behind the project, that meant illustrating both the dangers people put themselves through during the Great Depression and the typically ignored spouses who made life in Boulder City possible.

Terri Saumier, a facility services manager under the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, said the $15 million project had a focus on telling the dam’s “story through the people who lived it” from Day 1. For locals, Saumier called the new space one of the most beautiful in the region.

“It is designed to be educational and fun for everyone, providing an authentic account of the day in the life of the people who built Hoover Dam,” said Genevieve Johnson, Reclamation’s acting regional director for the Lower Colorado Basin. “Together, they created one of the most iconic landmarks in the world.”

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., and Boulder City Mayor Joe Hardy joined reclamation officials for the visitor center’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, which also coincided with the bureau’s 123rd anniversary. Representatives for U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., as well Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo attended.

Hardy jokingly took credit for constructing the 726-feet tall dam while speaking to the group gathered for the renovated visitor center, but he clarified that it was the dam that first built the city, not the other way around.

A plaque in the new exhibit highlights the city’s original “unofficial mayor,” Ida Browder, who started the area’s first business, a cafe, and established an informal bank while holding on to workers’ money for safekeeping. Hardy called Boulder City a “job mecca” at the time.

“All of those people who were working came from all over the place, all over the United States,” the mayor said. “Here we are on the floor of the canyon, literally on top of the dam, and we get to see history being taught now.”

Tourists marveling at the dam is part of the structure’s history as well, Titus noted. She said the site’s original observation platform was made to keep visitors from interfering with the dam’s operations. Today, 7 million people visit the location each year.

But Titus spent part of her time at the podium emphasizing that federal lands belong to the public. With that, money collected from selling federal land in Nevada should stay in the state to benefit projects like the visitor center’s renovation, she said.

That point has been emphasized by other Nevada elected officials, but their concerns haven’t stopped discussions in Congress which would see the opposite happen.

An amendment to the House reconciliation bill from U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., that would have enabled the sell-off of federal land to benefit the U.S. Treasury was shot down late last month. But a similar yet more expansive provision has made its way into the Senate version of the bill.

“Republicans are once again trying to use our public lands to … pay for tax cuts for big corporations,” Titus said in a social media post last week. “In doing so, the budget bill would screw Nevadans out of critical funding that we need for conservation, outdoor recreation and wildfire protection.”

It also doesn’t include “plans for our depleting water resources,” she said in the post. On Tuesday, she highlighted investments made under President Joe Biden’s administration, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law putting over $8 billion toward Western water projects.

U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., stayed away from the moment’s politics, instead thanking the dam’s staff and complimenting the visitor center’s complete overhaul.

“You can imagine what it was like for the men and women on the ground back then,” said David Palumbo, the acting commissioner of reclamation. “For those of us in water operations … the construction of a dam of this size in the 1930s by thousands of workers here in Black Canyon plays prominently in our minds.”