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Hallowed Ground in Jeopardy
Editorial by
The New York Times
July 4, 1997
The Mall in Washington has somehow survived the caprices of shifting tastes, changing Administrations and scores of muddle-headed efforts to improve it. Its spacious vistas and monumental eloquence realize the audacious promise of the Federal city's original plan, as sketched in 1791 by Maj. Pierre L'Enfant. So do we really need or want a World War II memonal insert-ed between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial?
These are deeply felt matters; capable of melting collars and tempers. With all respect for the diligence of the new memorial's promoters, the answer is no, not at this site, which so powerfully connects the two events that shaped this Republic, the Revolution and the Civil War. To intrude in this landscape a competing memorial to a colossal contemporary conflict would in our judgment overcrowd and confuse the most memorable visual statement in the nation's capital.
In 1993, Congress approved and President Clinton signed and applauded a law instructing the American Battle Monuments Commission to create a World War II memorial in or around Washington. The idea surely has merit. By any measure, World War II was the matrix of this American century. It ended isolationist illusions, it arrayed democracies against genocidal tyranny, it introduced the nuclear age, it led to the United Nations, the cold war, the
rebirth of Germany and Japan, and not least, to the GI. Bill and the freedom struggles at home.
The commission's Memorial Advisory Board weighed various sites, settling on a 7.4 acre tract at the east end of the Reflecting Pool. Some 400 designs were submitted to an engineering evaluation board and a design jury. The unanimous choice was a memorial plaza conceived by Friedrich St. Florian, former dean of the Rhode Island School of Design. His projected memorial consists of two semicircular colonnades of 25 freestanding columns, so landscaped that they would not be visible at a distance. The existing Rainbow Pool would be the memorialšs center-piece, and walls behind the columns would provide space for inscriptions.
Various panels have yet to approve the design, which this month goes to Washington's Fine Arts Commission. Whatever one's response to Mr. St. Florian's design - some find it elegant, others discern an unhappy echo of Third Reich bombast, in the mode of Albert Speer - it is not small. Going forward with this $100 million project risks thrusting the turbulence of this century into two remarkable memorials that compel meditation on the founding, testing and regeneration of the American Union. On that ground alone, the World War II project should be weighed, delayed and in our view given a different setting.
Copyright © 2008 National Coalition to Save Our Mall Inc. All Rights Reserved |
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