Virginia won’t sign an agreement with the National Park Service on how a massive “triumphal arch” proposed by President Donald Trump next to Arlington National Cemetery would harm surrounding historic resources and how to minimize the damage.
Those resources include a view between the Lincoln Memorial and the former home of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, conceived more than a century ago as a symbol of reconciliation between the North and South after the Civil War.
The Virginia Department of Historic Resources informed the park service on Monday that it would be “premature” for the state to sign a proposed memorandum of agreement, which it said does not adequately identify the historic resources the project could affect or how to minimize harm to them. The park service had requested state approval of the agreement by Monday.
“It is not possible to determine that a Memorandum of Agreement is acceptable to resolve adverse effects to historic properties when agreement has not been reached regarding what the effects of the undertaking are,” said Samantha Henderson, director of the review and compliance division of the state historic resources agency, in a letter to the park service.
“The parties have also not agreed that the proposed mitigation measures … are sufficient and appropriate,” Henderson said, noting that the park service had proposed “conceptual” ways to minimize harm to historic resources on Aug. 28.
Roger Kirchen, director of the state agency, said in an interview Tuesday that Virginia regards the park service’s effort to comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act as “incomplete.”
“It’s a complex historic landscape,” Kirchen said of the area that surrounds the proposed site of the massive 250-foot-tall arch. “Its effects for the proposed area are complex as well.”
Trump wants to build the arch — which he is now suggesting as a military repository for government drones and snipers — on what is now Memorial Circle on a small island next to the southern bank of the Potomac River at the foot of Memorial Bridge. The land lies in the District of Columbia, but it faces the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery and Arlington House, built more than 200 years ago by the grandson of President George Washington and later the home of Lee, who commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War.
“The effects to resources in Virginia are significant,” Kirchen said.
The most obvious is the national cemetery, created in 1864 while the Civil War raged and now the resting place of more than 400,000 military veterans, eligible members of their families and notable American leaders, including President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, a former U.S. attorney general and senator from New York.
Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington House and Memorial Bridge are part of a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but the site also offers a commanding view across the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall, framed by the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument.
Calder Loth, a retired architectural historian in Richmond, is part of a lawsuit to stop construction of the proposed arch at Memorial Circle.
“The arch is incompatible visually, functionally and emotionally with Arlington National Cemetery,” Loth said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
He said the proposed project “just got worse” after Trump announced that he wants to use the arch — with more than 70,000 square feet of space on five levels — as a military repository.
Public Citizen, a consumer rights group and think tank, filed a lawsuit to block the project on behalf of Loth and three Vietnam War veterans, including one who still lives in Fairfax County. They strongly object to its location next to the national cemetery, which Loth describes as “the most hallowed site in America.”
Nick Sansone, an attorney at Public Citizen who is handling the lawsuit, said both his clients and the Trump administration are awaiting action in federal court on competing motions to decide the case.
While the Trump administration has threatened to begin work on the project, the court is requiring that the government give at least 14 days notice before it begins demolition or excavation on the site and 48 hours notice before conducting preliminary work on the site, Sansone said.
Virginia plans to file a complete response to the park service’s “Triumphal Arch at Memorial Circle Assessment of Effects Report” later this week, but the state agency already has outlined some of the reasons why the proposed amendment “is not executable in its current form.”
Henderson, director of the review and compliance division, told the park service that the proposed agreement “does not clearly identify the (area of potential effects), does not list the historic properties affected and does not fully enumerate the adverse effects to be mitigated.”
She noted that the proposed agreement does not address the effects on some historic properties — including the Pentagon and Arlington Ridge Park, which includes the Marine Corps Memorial (also called the Iwo Jima Memorial) and Netherlands Carillon, a bell tower given by the Netherlands to the United States in gratitude for the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.
Kirchen, in an interview, said the state’s concerns extend beyond the cemetery and Arlington House.
“Arlington Cemetery may be the most prominent, but it’s not the only historic resource within view of the arch that would be adversely affected,” he said.
The state also said the park service’s proposals to mitigate the effects on historic places fail to convey the significance of those places in American history.
For example, Henderson said the state “recommends that the interpretation of these spaces should focus on the history that drove the need to build these commemorative spaces, the history of sacrifice and honor represented by Arlington National Cemetery and Arlington House, and how that past informs our use of these spaces now.”