At left, the now-empty sunken pool in Pershing Park as it looks today. At right, an October 2017 rendering of the proposed bronze wall that would sit behind the refilled pool as part of Joe Weishaar’s design for the World War I memorial. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO; courtesy of WWI Centennial Commission

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 Patterson
via the POLITICO magazine web site

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.

Read the entire article on the POLITICO magazine web site here:

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