World War I Memorial?

Washington’s Battle for a World War I Memorial

The first national WWI memorial was supposed to open for the November centennial—until getting caught up in a war of its own.

By BLAKE PATERSON

When Joe Weishaar conceived of America’s first national World War I memorial, he imagined something dramatic. It was January 2016, and Weishaar, then just a 25-year-old intern at an architecture firm in Chicago, had beat out more than 350 applicants around the world to design the memorial. His proposal, “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would transform Pershing Park—a dilapidated 1.8-acre space a block southeast of the White House—by replacing the park’s dried-up sunken pool with a lawn, removing its once-cascading fountain and inserting bronze bas-relief walls depicting soldiers and battlefields. As recently as last fall, at a ceremonial groundbreaking on the site, the commission overseeing the memorial hoped to complete it in time for the centennial of the war’s ending, in November of this year.

Now, not only has that date been pushed back—organizers are crossing their fingers for a final dedication in November 2021—but Weishaar’s design has been radically scaled back. In fact, it’s not even clear yet what the memorial will ultimately consist of.

In the past two years, Pershing Park has emerged as a battlefield of its own, with the park’s original architect and a small group of cultural preservationists caught up in a drawn-out regulatory tug-of-war against the memorial’s sponsors, the congressionally created World War I Centennial Commission. Their fight is over how to preserve the park’s original landscape while still adequately commemorating World War I—the only major 20th-century war that lacks a national memorial in the nation’s capital.

At the center of the tension is the National Park Service’s decision in July 2016 to designate Pershing Park, which originally opened in 1981, as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. This designation might surprise Washingtonians who know the park as it exists now. Besides a stoic, 12-foot bronze statue of the World War I Army General John J. Pershing at the east end, the space is an eyesore—a trapezoidal slice of overgrown greenery and cracked concrete, littered with empty Gatorade bottles, cigarillo wrappers and Cheetos bags, and populated by few visitors.

Now and proposed

But Pershing Park is an “exceptional example of a landscape design of the modern period,” according to NPS, which oversees the park, and its original architect M. Paul Friedberg, who has designed public spaces around the country, is “one of modern American landscape architecture’s most accomplished urban designers.” NPS’ 2016 designation means Pershing is likely to be designated a historic place in the near future, and already it has put limits on significantly changing the park’s original design. That, accordingly, has upended Weishaar’s winning design. Since 2016, he has had to make dozens of edits, and the current proposal—presented at the May 17 meeting of the Commission of Fine Arts, one of a handful of regulatory bodies overseeing the design process—makes only two major interventions in the park: erecting a 56-foot-long sculptural wall in the sunken pool and replacing a now-defunct concession kiosk with a ceremonial flag stand.

Now and proposed

The fight, however, is ongoing. Friedberg, 87, calls even the most recent memorial design a “disaster” that would “destroy” the park’s defining features. Other critics likewise argue that the design still interferes with the historic qualities of the park. Weishaar, meanwhile, worries that his plans have been watered down, and his latest proposal has yet to receive final approval from the Commission of Fine Arts and other regulators.

Says Peter May, an NPS official guiding the memorial through the regulatory process, “I don’t believe we’re at the point where everybody is in agreement that the project has struck the right balance.”

Which means that, nearly 100 years after the end of a war in which nearly 5 million Americans served and more than 116,000 died, there still isn’t a memorial in Washington honoring their sacrifice.

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Building a memorial in Washington is often a long and winding process, filled with dozens of regulatory hurdles and fundraising challenges. First, Congress has to pass legislation authorizing the memorial. Then, an appropriate site has to be selected. Next, a design is developed or, in some cases, selected through a competition. After that, the selected design is revised and edited through dozens of meetings held by a handful of regulatory agencies. Meanwhile, the sponsors secure funds to build and sustain the memorial. Finally, it is constructed and dedicated. The World War II Memorial, for instance, took 11 years from congressional authorization to completion in 2004. The memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower is pushing on two decades.

Congress officially approved the redevelopment of Pershing Park into a National World War I Memorial in 2014. But the park wasn’t originally the preferred location. In 2008, a private group called the World War I Memorial Foundation began lobbying to restore and expand the D.C. War Memorial—a small, circular structure on the National Mall honoring D.C. residents who fought in WWI—into a national monument. When local political leaders objected—arguing it hijacked D.C.’s local memorial—supporters of a national WWI memorial attempted to secure a new, standalone site on the mall. But a provision in a federal law called the Commemorative Works Act prohibits building new structures on the mall without getting a congressional exemption, a politically charged challenge that both congressional allies and memorial supporters deemed unrealistic to pursue.

Pershing Park emerged as the next best alternative. The southeast corner the park already fit with the commemorative theme, with a statute to Pershing and walls of artwork detailing the major conflicts in World War I that involved U.S. troops. In 2014, Congress redesignated Pershing Park as a “World War I Memorial” and tasked the World War I Centennial Commission (WWICC)—a 12-member federal body established by Congress to coordinate the commemoration of the 100-year-anniversary of the war—with enhancing the existing site by constructing “appropriate sculptural and other commemorative elements, including landscaping.”

In May 2015, when the WWICC released its call for entries to the design competition, the commission was not aware that the park might be designated as historically significant, according to Edwin Fountain, vice chair of the WWICC, and so gave entrants no indication of that possibility. In fact, the competition guidelines highlighted certain components of the existing park as “uninviting” or “problematic.”

The five finalists in the competition in turn appeared to look at the park as a tabula rasa, with proposals that leveled the existing landscape and inserted dramatic architectural elements. One finalist, for example, proposed demolishing the landscape and building a massive, arched “Grotto of Remembrance.” Another proposed flattening the terrain and inserted a grid of 1,166 illuminated bronze markers, one for every hundred U.S. deaths in the war. Weishaar, for his part, says he was not aware of the park’s potentially historic value when creating his design.

“The problem with this project is that the competition brief was written without an acknowledgment of what this site is, and so, the competition entries were not creatively inventive in integrating a memorial into an existing park,” says Phoebe Lickwar, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas who was contracted to work on the memorial as a landscape architect from February 2016 to October 2017. (Lickwar believes her contract was not renewed by the WWICC after she pushed to adapt the design further to preserve the park. Fountain denied this but declined to comment on it otherwise.)

Charles Birnbaum, who leads the nonprofit The Cultural Landscape Foundation and authored federal guidelines for handling historically significant landscapes while previously working for NPS, says he warned the WWICC before the competition guidelines were released that the park would likely be deemed a historic landscape. But he says the commission ignored his warnings, as well as those of Laurie Olin, an acclaimed landscape architect who was originally tapped to be a juror in the design competition. Olin resigned from that role before the competition began, after learning that the project would likely overhaul Pershing Park. “I don’t approve of this project,” Olin wrote in an email.

Peter May, the park service official helping to guide the project, says he believes the WWICC was “aware that the property was potentially historic,” but that it was not unusual for the WWICC to publish the competition guidelines without mentioning the potential historic significance of the park.

Fountain of the WWICC acknowledges that “some individuals” made note of the park’s historical significance while they were drafting the competition guidelines. But he says he never spoke to Olin about it, and that none of the government agencies overseeing the competition stressed the potential for a historic designation. “When we started this project, no one said, ‘Oh, this is a historically significant park that you’re going to have to restore,’” Fountain says.

“If it were not for the preservation demands, the design of this memorial would likely have gone in very different directions,” Fountain adds, though he believes Weishaar’s evolved design rises to the “challenge of incorporating a new memorial in an existing park.”

Lickwar disagrees, arguing that the design was ultimately compromised by competition guidelines that did not recognize the historic value of the park. “You have to ask, does sticking a wall down in a water feature in a pool—is that really the best design that we can come up with for a memorial?” she says. “I think the answer is no.”

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The location of the memorial, at this point, is unlikely to change, and the broad concept of the design—its pieces, character and scale—received preliminary approval last year from the National Capital Planning Commission, National Park Service and the Commission of Fine Arts. Now, the debate is granularly focused on how to follow through on Weishaar’s vision while respecting the historic qualities of Friedberg’s design. The slog of revisions that occurs in each regulatory meeting—there have been more than a half-dozen so far—can be frustrating, especially to Weishaar, who has gradually seen his design dwindle in the 2½ years since winning the competition.

When the competition jury unanimously selected Weishaar’s design, they described it as “elegant and absolute” and a “deceptively simple concept” that promised to “remind and inspire visitors for generations to come about American involvement and sacrifice in World War I.” Although simpler than other finalists, the original design proposed a wholesale redesign of the park. The current proposal retains some elements of the original concept, but to Weishaar it feels radically different.

“We’ve been told at every step of the way that we’re on the right track, we just need to modify our design a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and slowly the design has been reduced to nothing (and definitely nothing like I originally designed),” Weishaar wrote in an email.

The WWICC presented the latest iteration of the design to the Commission of Fine Arts at a meeting in Washington on May 17. The hearing included a presentation by Sabin Howard, a Bronx-based sculptor who designed the memorial’s planned 56-foot-long bronze bas-relief wall, which is intended to depict the narrative of a “soldier’s journey”: enlistment, entering the “brother of arms,” going to battle and finally returning back home, shell-shocked and damaged, but nurturing to the next generation.

The sculpture has drawn praise from Jay Winter, a Yale University historian who specializes in World War I and memory. The “horizontal” structure of the wall is appropriate, Winter said in an interview, because “that’s what American soldiers did in the first World War—they literally filled in the holes in the wall of Allied resistance.”

Members of the Commission of Fine Arts similarly praised the artwork at the May 17 meeting, but some questioned how the placement of the wall obstructs the vistas in the existing park, a concern that has arisen in multiple CFA meetings. “What we’re charged with doing is finding a way that two artists’ visions can work together,” Elizabeth Meyer, the CFA vice chairman said at the meeting. “The full range of options are not being explored. There’s a stubbornness that’s frustrating.”

Friedberg is less forgiving, saying even the scaled-back design “destroys” the park and what it was once meant to be. “As a design, it’s a disaster. As a sculpture, I really think it’s a very self-serving and obvious narrative. There’s no subtlety. There’s no abstraction,” he says. “Washington is slowly becoming, sort of, an acropolis—a place where we just will be honoring dead battles, dead wars, and that’s not what we want this to represent.” Friedberg says he is not opposed to the park being changed and, in a letter sent in May to the CFA, offered to advise the project’s design team “pro bono” to “achieve a memorable memorial that is a model for others to build on.” “The park could be enhanced. It doesn't have to be destroyed,” he added in an interview.

Fountain, of the WWICC, argues that the updated design respects the historic value of the park by preserving “95 percent” of its original landscape. And he believes the commission has already gone far enough to appease concerns about preservation, pointing out that the memorial project in fact includes the restoration of Pershing Park, too. Despite its current state of neglect, when it opened to the public in 1981, the park was an oasis at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue—a “sweet little enclave in the city,” as the Washington Post called it, surrounded by terraced seating and lush greenery.

“There has never been an effort to get Pershing Park restored until we came along, and right now, we are the only chance,” Fountain says. The overall effort is estimated to cost $46 million, $10 million of which the commission has raised so far, largely through private funds. Fountain says the WWICC has identified about $12 million worth of “restoration costs” that could possibly be financed through the park service or other public funding sources.

In the meantime, Thomas Luebke, the Commission of Fine Arts secretary, expects the WWICC to return again before the CFA in June or July with a design that balances the new memorial with the existing park. The WWICC plans to hold some sort of commemorative event at Pershing Park for the centennial in November, according to Chris Isleib, a WWICC spokesperson. Beyond that, Fountain says, the commission hopes to have the park restored by November 2019 and the sculpture installed and ready for dedication by November 2021.

“I feel like we can sort of see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of resolving these issues,” Lubke says. “I think it can add new meaning for both—in other words, the existing park creates a fairly beautiful, contemplative setting for the memorial, and the memorial affords new life for the park.”