A National Park Service assessment of President Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch has identified 37 historic sites across Washington that would be harmed by the structure — and preservationists say that seems to be the point.
The arch would rise taller than the city’s own height limits allow and more than twice as high as the nearby Lincoln Memorial, from which it was deliberately sited and scaled to dominate its surroundings, reported the New York Times.
Virginia’s state historic preservation officer, Roger Kirchen, wrote to the Park Service in June that the arch’s adverse effects “are intentional and inherent in the design,” since the structure is meant to loom over the landscape rather than fit into it.
The list of affected sites reads like a roll call of the capital’s most solemn spaces: the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House, the Kennedy gravesite, the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial, and the National Cathedral four miles away.
The arch would ruin sightlines, symbolic relationships between monuments, and the visual experience of visiting them, according to preservationists. The arch would sit inside a corridor between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House specifically designed to evoke post-Civil War reunification, and it would obstruct views from the Eternal Flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave.
Veterans have warned that a planned observation deck would let tourists look down over the cemetery — meaning grieving families at private funerals could become part of the view. Construction itself, projected to run 20 hours a day for multiple years, would also disrupt burials with near-constant noise next to active gravesites.
Federal law requires agencies to seek ways to avoid, minimize or mitigate harm to historic sites before approving a project like this, but the site and design were finalized before the review even began, and an alternative location proposed by D.C.’s own preservation officer appears to have been dismissed.
One preservation advocate complained there’s been no effort to avoid the harm through siting, no effort to minimize it because the administration has instructed against it, and no clear way to mitigate the loss of a cultural landscape once it’s altered.
The administration is also pushing to rewrite the underlying preservation rules nationwide, narrowing “adverse effects” to physical damage alone and dropping consideration of sightlines, setting, and noise entirely.
Under those proposed rules, nearly every harm identified in the arch review would no longer count — making the project a preview of what future developments could bypass once the new regulations take hold.
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