The Lincoln Memorial is one of the most recognized sites in the United States, and the opportunity to work on it “as good as it gets when you go into preservation and architectural history,” says Molly Lester, associate director of the Urban Heritage Project.
With Randall Mason, a professor in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, Lester and a team of Weitzman students have been working with the National Park Service (NPS) to document the Memorial’s physical history and recently completed their report.
To Mason, the real honor is the 10 years of partnership between the Urban Heritage Project, as this research initiative is called, and the NPS’s National Capital Region Office under the auspices of the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit program.
Since 2011, Mason has led teams of faculty, students, and graduates in documenting and studying cultural landscapes stewarded by the NPS, from small parks to golf courses to urban boulevards like Pennsylvania Avenue. They have examined how public space and memory interact in DC, reflecting its dual role as both a city and the nation’s capital. For Mason, it was gratifying to be trusted with such a notable site.
Lester said that the NPS values its partnership with Penn because “we’re not contractors, but partners to the NPS. We are there to ask questions and think creatively.”
For the Lincoln Memorial, the Weitzman team produced what’s known by preservationists as a Cultural Landscape Inventory: a framework for documenting the present and past of an historically significant landscape. This document, which will inform the day-to-day operations of the site by NPS staff, combines extensive historical research with thorough spatial documentation for a holistic understanding of the evolution and current condition of the landscape.
Most surprising to Lester was the longstanding presence of rapidly-constructed Defense Department buildings intended for temporary use during World War I. The green space now containing the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial once featured an expansive complex of “tempos”–four-story steel and concrete structures as far as the eye could see, complete with two footbridges over the Reflecting Pool–that remained until the 1970s.
This space, Lester stresses, “has never been untouchable. And so, our work is to understand how has it always changed, and what does that mean for how it will continue to change?”
In the report, the Memorial’s period of significance extends to the present day. According to Lester, this is atypical and could present management challenges of its own. But, she says, the team wanted to acknowledge this intangible heritage and argued “for there to be a deeper and broader understanding [of the Memorial] as a significant place.”
“There can be a perception that preservation is just about putting something in amber and making sure it won’t ever change,” Lester says. Rather, the team’s overall approach is to anticipate, embrace, and manage change as it happens. Says Mason, “our theory of history is that it’s additive and multivocal, and there's no one perspective that should blot out all the others.”
Read more at Weitzman News.
