Roger Ebert, the great film critic who worked as prodigiously as ever even after thyroid cancer robbed him of his ability to speak, died today at age 70. (Chicagoist has more on Ebert’s death and decades-long impact on film criticism.)

Ebert became a household name thanks to his syndicated television series At the Movies, which he launched with fellow Chicago film critic Gene Siskel in 1986. At the Movies ran for 24 seasons before it was canceled in 2010. Even after his illness, Ebert continued producing the show with other critics sitting where he and Siskel, who died in 1999, dished out their opinions on every week’s big releases.

After so many seasons, the At the Movies set became iconic for its resemblance to an old movie palace’s balcony. And Ebert, for some time, was under the assumption that if the show ever ended, that famous balcony would head to Washington and be installed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Ebert’s movie theater set was as familiar to American audiences as the kitchen Julia Child used on her many shows.

Unfortunately for Ebert, his fans, and museum visitors, that never came to pass. When At the Movies got the axe, so did the set. Instead of coming to the Smithsonian, the famed balcony met its end in the refuse at the ABC studio in Chicago where the show taped for so many years. The Chicago Tribune wrote at the time:

So “one of the most iconic set ideas in … television history, which had survived for more than half of the life of the medium” and once seemingly destined for the Smithsonian Institution instead was leveled by workers with sledge-hammers and tossed “in a dumpster in the alley” outside ABC-owned WLS-Ch. 7, where the show was produced.

A Smithsonian staffer tells DCist that while the museum and ABC had informal talks about donating the balcony, nothing formal was ever agreed upon.