The new World War I Memorial replaces Pershing Park. Courtesy GWWO Architects. 

Pershing Park, a secluded pocket near the White House, is being converted into a national World War I memorial. At the behest of its promoters, the memorial removes the active spaces for people that made the park popular, while keeping secondary elements that close off the park from the city and keep it desolate.

The previous park was built around features meant to encourage social activity before budget cuts and poor management left it in disuse. Already isolated by berms meant to shield it from Pennsylvania Avenue on the south, it became an underused hole in the urban fabric.

The $46 million memorial conversion only slightly alters the physical spaces, but completely reverses the use of the park. Gone are its two core active uses, the pool that doubled as an ice rink and concession stand. A sculpture wall, quotations, and other educational elements take their place.

The new memorial. Image from National Captital Planning Commission (NCPC).

This set of isolated tweaks looks nothing like the first visions for the memorial, unveiled in 2015. In entries to a design competition, designers proposed razing the entire park and building anew. However, the memorial’s backers rushed to bypass the politics of its design. In doing so, they threw their designers into a grinding bureaucratic process that, at the end of the day, was not able to save what made the park an attraction.

Defenders of the existing park used historic preservation to save the physical landscape, and won, in a way. But that forced officials to only balance important physical features, with war commemoration. Any consideration of creating a useful, lively urban space was completely squeezed out.

All of the conference-room politicking and meetings couldn’t make up for the shambolic competition and the anti-urban ambitions of its organizers. Worse, we lost the opportunity to adapt the park to changing conditions, and rethink the car-centered assumptions that led to its biggest deficiencies.

Ultimately, the new design illustrates how, when it comes to urban spaces, process is not a substitute for the right goals.

Pershing Park started with a good design but declined due to poor operation

Pershing Park was built in 1981 by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation (PADC), an organization set up to revitalize Pennsylvania Avenue as a monumental but still vibrant live-work area. The Market Square complex, containing apartments, offices, retail, and the Naval Memorial, embodies the balance of urban uses the PADC sought.

The original park design by M. Paul Friedberg, whose firm also designed Yards Park, consisted of three elements: a sunken pool that could convert to an ice skating rink, a small memorial to General Pershing, and a glazed concession stand.

A diagram of the three elements of existing park design. Images from NCPC.

The pool was separated from the noise of 14th, 15th, and E Streets by imposing berms topped by walkways and benches. The park was more open to the northeast, towards the hotels and theaters north of Freedom Plaza.

Why the berms? Remember that in 1979, that part of Pennsylvania Avenue was busy. E Street south of the White House was open to traffic as a direct route to I-66. At the same time, the Willard Hotel and theater and restaurants on the north side of Freedom Plaza were big draws — so the designers logically opened the park to the busier street.

Pershing Park in front of the Willard Hotel. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Ice rink licensed under Creative Commons.

The park and its ice rink were popular into the 1990s, when competition from spaces like the National Gallery Sculpture Garden ice rink drew people away and Congress disbanded the PADC. Maintenance of the park was turned over to the National Park Service (NPS).

Pershing Park. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. Image licensed under Creative Commons.

That agency’s chronic budget problems, combined with poor oversight of the park’s notorious operator, Guest Services, Inc., led to a slow decline until 2012, when neither the fountain, concession stand, nor ice rink worked.

The WWI memorial bypasses regular process and gets mired in controversy

At the same time, a group trying to build a National World War I Memorial was blocked from appropriating DC’s World War I Memorial, south of the Reflecting Pool, for national purposes. With some encouragement from NPS and other groups, memorial promoters got Congress to unilaterally pick Pershing Park in the 2015 military budget.

This authorization from Congress to “enhance” the existing site let them skip the lengthy site selection process most memorials go through, meaning that if nothing went wrong, they could break ground in November 2017. However, this jump meant they also skipped due diligence about other planning objectives like livability or historic preservation, not to mention the politics of DC’s limited space.

As a result, planners conducted the open-ended historic preservation analysis at the same time as the memorial was soliciting ideas through a design competition. The rules given to entrants and judges are critical for getting good results. The World War I Memorial’s design guidebook discouraged active uses and food sales while downplaying the significance of the existing landscape. It’s no surprise that so many submissions were extravagant knockdown schemes.

“The Honor” proposed placing a reflective “Brodie” helmet on a plateau above the street. Image by WWI Centennial Commission.

The problems with this became apparent quickly as planners issued warnings, and groups like the Cultural Landscape Foundation rallied to defend the existing park. Then one of the competition judges, the respected landscape architect Laurie Olin, resigned in protest over the level of demolition. By 2016, finalists already had to significantly rework their designs.

Joe Weishaar, Sabin Howard, and GWWO’s winning design "The Weight of Sacrifice" would have demolished most of the park. 

Skipping site selection clearly became a mistake in July 2016, when the Historic Preservation Office determined that Friedberg’s design was indeed historically significant. The Park Service and the various design review agencies were now obligated to follow strict rules in the “Section 106” process, while the existing park’s defenders, like the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Association of Oldest Inhabitants of Washington, gained the upper hand.

By Fall 2016, the alterations were limited to the core of the park. Image from National Park Service.

The memorial organizers’ shortcut had sent their designers to a bureaucratic Donner Pass, where three years of long meetings stripped the design to the bare bones of what the congressional mandate of “enhancement” could justify in the face of preservation law.

By June 2017, the Section 106 process had led to the preservation of the fountain. Image from National Park Service.

In the end, the park will reopen by the beginning of next year, but the bronze sculptural centerpiece will not be completed until 2024.

In the final design, approved in October 2019, the memorial wall is freestanding. Image from NCPC.

The park keeps the forms, but changes the function

In the new design, the basic layout remains but the use is fundamentally altered. A long wall of sculpture and a stone plaza now occupy most of the pool. A large stone fountain, which doubled as a zamboni shed, is gone. In its place, water features on the sculpture wall pick up the slack. Likewise, the concession stand is gone, replaced with an overlook outlining the history of the war.

The preservation process left the walls and statues of the Pershing Memorial itself largely intact, with minor adjustments.

The kiosk is replaced with a “belvedere” with history exhibits. Image from NCPC.

In the remaining areas of the park, the renovation adds quotations, bronze QR codes that cue up online exhibits, new lighting, and a number of accessibility improvements.

However, the large berms that separate the park from passersby remain on three sides. Rather than a balance of activity, reflection, and commemoration — like an urban Neapolitan — the memorial is three scoops of the same flavor, buried in the same tough shell. It’s a departure from the original vision.

Historic elements got protection; an active park lost out

Framing the impacts on the park around narrow federal preservation rules left the active uses only lightly protected. While some people on the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts lamented the loss, they had little leverage. The dialogue was structured as one of preserving the historic fabric versus commemoration. It was accepted that the social function could go.

In this sense, I would consider the new memorial an adaptive re-use, but not one the park needed. Remember, the berms that seemed to close off the park from the city existed to shield traffic coming to and from I-66. But that traffic isn’t there anymore, and we shouldn’t be planning Pennsylvania Avenue — “America’s Main Street” — as a noisy, polluted traffic sewer anyway.

The memorial park will still be pulled back from the street.  Image from NCPC.

Wouldn’t a design that made those edges more inviting but preserved the core functions be better from both urbanism and preservation perspectives? We will never know, because the World War I Memorial’s organizers rushed to squeeze their dour vision onto a once-thriving park. The preservation process saved its stones, but institutional inertia left one of the few lively places on Pennsylvania Avenue to be embalmed.