The moonset over the Lincoln Memorial (Photo by Lincoln Memorial Moonset via the DCist Featured Photos pool on Flickr)
The Lincoln Memorial will be getting a major overhaul—the largest since the it was dedicated nearly a century ago.
The National Park Service will be kicking in $6 million. However, $18.5 million for the makeover comes from philanthropist David Rubenstein, who made his money as the co-founder of the private equity firm Carlyle Group and has spent quite a bit on local monuments and causes, like the Washington Monument and panda research at the National Zoo.
Many of the fixes will be routine maintenance, The Washington Post reported. The monument is going to get a major scrub-down, the crumbling, leaky roof will be repaired and the two 60-foot murals inside will be restored. There is some lingering damage to brickwork from the 2011 earthquake that will finally be fixed.
But many of those millions will be spent on expanding the limited exhibition space from 750 square feet to 15,000. Rubenstein says, “When you go to the Lincoln Memorial today, you see this great statue of Lincoln. But there’s no real museum or education center about Lincoln. So I think it would be a good idea to have such a thing.”
There will be new exhibits, and visitors will also be able to get a better view of the massive pilings and foundation that support the 120-ton statue in honor of our 16th president. That includes historic graffiti left by construction workers who built the monument from 1914 to 1922. There are charcoal caricatures of former President William Howard Taft and memorial architect Henry Bacon, the Associated Press reports.
No word on whether they’ll get around to fixing the typo in the memorial walls.
The Park Service is in the midst of a huge fundraising campaign with the goal of bringing in $350 million. Right now the service has $12 billion in backlogged maintenance. Will Shafroth, president of the National Park Foundation, called the Lincoln Memorial “old and tired.” He told the Post, “In some ways, we’ve let this place get . . . run-down. The improvements that are going to be made are going to make it a much more welcome place to be.”
The memorial attracts 7 million visitors a year. They will be able to continue touring while work is being done, though some portions might be temporarily closed off.
