During the Covid-ridden summer of 2020, amid widespread vandalization of public monuments triggered by George Floyd’s killing, President Donald Trump issued an executive order for the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It would feature honorific statues of eminent Americans from varied walks of life. The order was promptly rescinded by President Joe Biden, but after his electoral victory in November Trump promised to reinstate it as a key component of “a most spectacular birthday party.” Where the garden will be located has yet to be announced. A revised version of Trump’s order issued days before he left office in January 2021 included a list of more than 240 prospective honorees—statesmen, jurists, generals, civil rights crusaders, musicians, novelists, preachers, poets, painters, actors, athletes, and more. The president-elect plans to order the commissioning of the first 100 statues upon assuming office.
Our nation’s capital hardly suffers from a shortage of statuary tributes, whether indoors or out, so the garden will presumably be located elsewhere. The quality of the sculpture will probably not be high, but the park could prove a crowd-pleaser even so. What Trump’s celebratory agenda lacks is a more emphatically monumental, symbolically compact addition to the nation’s public realm: a triumphal arch in Washington, which is—or ought to be—every American’s second hometown. The brilliant 1791 plan for the city, with its array of diagonal avenues superimposed on a street grid, was the creation of the French-born, classically trained architect chosen for the task by George Washington himself, Pierre Charles L’Enfant. The L’Enfant Plan generated many urban nodes calling for the erection of monuments. Yet Washington is the only major Western capital that lacks a triumphal arch. The semiquincentennial celebration provides an excellent opportunity to build one.
There isn’t enough time to build a permanent arch for the 250th. But temporary arches have a long history in this country. And there’s also a noteworthy precedent for a temporary arch being rebuilt in permanent form after winning public acclaim: the Washington Arch in Manhattan, which celebrated the centennial of George Washington’s first inauguration.
The triumphal arch originally appeared in Rome in the second century B.C., well before the fall of the Republic. The Romans were adept eclectics. They modified the monumental gateways of their Etruscan neighbors as free-standing structures and articulated them with the classical architectural forms—columns, friezes, cornices—developed by the Greeks. The resulting Roman arch was an impressive structure that often functioned as a pedestal for sculpture. Many arches of the imperial period were thus crowned by bronze statuary groups showing the emperor driving a four-horse chariot, or quadriga. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Brooklyn honoring the men who served in the Union’s armed forces in the Civil War is crowned by an allegorical Columbia driving such a chariot. But the Arc de Triomphe in Paris—one of the greatest modern monuments—is decorated with sculpture in relief only; there is no crowning statuary group. Nor does it include any columns. The same goes for the Washington Arch, designed by the brilliant Stanford White and completed, in permanent form, in 1895—though two north-facing sculptural groups featuring Washington as commander and president were added later.
It’s worth noting that, contrary to widespread belief, there is no record of a Roman arch being built for its honoree’s triumphal procession. Though commissioned by victorious generals, the earliest arches were in fact unconnected with such occasions. To be sure, numerous victory arches were erected along the processional via triumphalis that led up to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline in Rome. But hundreds of arches were also erected in many other venues—in Rome, elsewhere in Italy, and elsewhere around the Empire—and for different reasons. They could celebrate the construction of new roads, bridges, ports, aqueducts, or city walls—sometimes being atavistically embedded in the latter, sometimes standing slightly in front of them. They marked entrances to forums (civic centers), sacred precincts, and important public venues such as the Circus Maximus in Rome. In their four-fronted configuration, they marked important urban intersections. And they could be built in honor of provincial dignitaries as well as the emperor.
The monumental arch had religious roots. The city gate from which it derived marked a transition between unconsecrated countryside and the urbs whose boundary had been set according to ritual. But while arches have celebrated achievements and events, only in modern times have they marked chronological milestones, such as a monarch’s jubilee year or a major anniversary of a historic event. A quarter century ago, Rodney Mims Cook, Jr., who heads the National Monuments Foundation, proposed a triumphal arch celebrating the new millennium’s advent for Washington’s Barney Circle, a grassy plot abutting the John Philip Sousa Bridge, which carries Pennsylvania Avenue across the Anacostia River in the city’s southeast quadrant. The September 11 attacks consigned Cook’s proposal to oblivion so far as the nation’s capital was concerned. But Cook wound up building a handsome arch, the Millennium Gate, in his hometown of Atlanta. The arch, which houses a museum of Georgia history, was completed in 2008. Cook also has the distinction of being one of the Trump appointees to the federal Commission of Fine Arts whom the Biden White House summarily dismissed, along with the Commission’s chair, National Civic Art Society president Justin Shubow.
Americans inherited the temporary arch from Europe, where it served as a conspicuous component of theatrically opulent settings for royal processions, including monarchs’ formal arrivals in cities within their dominions. Not just one arch, but a series of elaborate arches were built of plaster and lathe for such occasions, recreating the ancient via triumphalis. When the Marquis de Lafayette returned to the United States for a farewell in 1824, Philadelphia accordingly greeted him with as many as 13 temporary arches—one for each of the original states—of which the grandest stood next to the State House, which the marquis was inspired to call the Hall of Independence.
Four decades before, the eminent Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale had conceived a large temporary arch, 50 feet wide and 40 feet tall, in extraordinary if thoroughly festive terms—as an elaborately wood-framed lightbox clad with translucent paintings celebrating the Treaty of Paris. The arch had three openings, a bigger central one for wheeled traffic and smaller flanking ones for pedestrians—an Etruscan gateway motif employed on the Arch of Constantine in Rome. Peale’s was crowned with allegorical statues of the four cardinal virtues, a bust of America’s ally Louis XVI, and an obelisk commemorating America’s war dead. The pièce de résistance was to be a statuary figure of Peace that would descend at nightfall on a cloud with her supernal retinue—actually lowered onto the arch on a rope from a neighboring mansion’s roof. Her torch would not only initiate the lighting of hundreds of lamps inside the arch, thus illuminating Peale’s paintings, but also ignite a multitude of rockets mounted on top of it.
The spectacle’s inauguration went disastrously awry. An errant rocket was set off before Peace descended, and the artist’s painted decorations immediately went up in flames. An artillery sergeant was killed and an unknown number of people injured amid the chaotic eruption of fireworks. Peale was inside the arch when the conflagration occurred, but though badly burned and bruised, managed to survive. So did the arch’s wooden frame. Months later the arch reappeared, with illuminated paintings but no fireworks or divine epiphany.
In the fall of 1789, Charles Bulfinch, a future architect of the U.S. Capitol then in the early stage of his career, erected a simpler temporary arch abutting Massachusetts’s fine old State House to welcome President Washington back to Boston, which he had compelled the British to evacuate on March 17, 1776. The evacuation date was commemorated with banners and trophies at one end of Bulfinch’s arch. The structure was surmounted by a lofty canopy crowned with the Great Seal of the United States. A long procession including a band of musicians accompanied the president through the arch to the State House, where Washington emerged from a second-story window onto an also-temporary column-supported balcony. A choir standing under the arch’s canopy sang a tribute to the Founding Father.
Stanford White’s temporary Washington Arch, which stood athwart Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, was built of wood and staff, a fibrous plaster, and painted ivory white. Festoons and wreaths adorned its frieze and spandrels. Above its balustrade stood an old painted wooden statue of Washington that White had found in an antique dealer’s shop, according to Paul Baker’s superb 1989 biography of the architect, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White. “Below the statue, as well as on the arch piers, flags were clustered; the keystones supported large stuffed bald eagles; and streamers of bunting were draped across the upper part of the opening. . . . At night several hundred small electric lights powered by a nearby generator outlined the arch, probably the earliest use of electric lights for outdoor decorative purposes.” The arch, Baker adds, was a “stunning success.” The permanent marble arch built a little to the south, in Washington Square Park, is not a duplicate. Its proportions are different, as is its sculptural treatment.
Up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square, grand, sumptuously decorated temporary arches were subsequently erected in Madison Square to celebrate Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay and the triumph of American arms in World War I. In Washington, a temporary World War I Victory Arch—imposing in scale but devoid of sculpture—straddled Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Treasury Department, just west of the intersection with 15th Street and New York Avenue.
To get a temporary arch built by July 4, 2026, the White House must act swiftly once Trump assumes office. An executive order would be needed to create a task force charged with selecting a site and a design and construction team. “To meet the deadline it would be important to hire an architect who brings a contractor and a sculptor to work [on the project],” Duncan Stroik, a Notre Dame architecture professor known for his church designs, said in an email. “Better for the architect to pick those people out than a forced marriage.” The task force should be structured so as to ensure input from accomplished architects and artists. And the arch should be classical, in keeping with the capital’s architectural heritage and the executive order Trump issued after the 2020 election, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” for a reorientation in the design of federal courthouses and agency headquarters. This order, too, was cancelled by the Biden White House but will almost certainly be reinstated. It prescribed classical architecture as “the preferred and default” idiom for federal buildings in Washington, while including a number of historic styles as options elsewhere but raising the bar for modernist design. Trump’s order made a strong case for the big-tent classical norm that largely defined federal architecture down to World War II, in styles ranging from Greek Revival to Beaux-Arts high classicism to Colonial Revival and Art Deco. Modernist federal architecture has not treated the capital—or the nation—nearly as well.
Another question the task force would need to address is how the semiquincentennial arch would be treated in a thematic sense. Washington’s Jefferson Memorial doubles as a monument to the Declaration of Independence. An excerpt is inscribed within the domed shrine designed by John Russell Pope, and the relief sculpture on the memorial’s pediment shows Jefferson at the center of the Committee of Five that the Continental Congress charged with drafting the document. Another monument to the Declaration would be redundant. The triumphal arch should celebrate a major national birthday and the unending quest for a more perfect union. It should serve as an appropriate and unambiguously festive venue for parades and public gatherings. The nation has had enough of sackcloth and ashes, whether in the form of wokedom’s historically illiterate memes or modernism’s aesthetic anorexia. Construction is far more expensive now, in terms of materials and labor, than it was a century ago, so thought should also be given to having the arch built so as to stand for a few years instead of a few weeks or months.
As for sites, numerous possibilities include both land under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service and city-owned land. In the first category the spacious turfed rotary circle at the west end of Arlington Memorial Bridge might warrant consideration. Decades ago, the sculptor Frederick Hart, who created the Three Servicemen bronze for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, recommended that a triumphal arch commemorating World War II be erected there. Even a temporary arch at this site would possibly face scrutiny under the National Historic Preservation Act, but such review could be expedited.
As for city-owned land, Barney Circle—for which Cook’s foundation proposed a millennium arch—is the kind of location that deserves consideration. There is a widely appreciated need to erect commemorative works outside Washington’s monumental core, which is focused on the National Mall. Barney Circle is spacious, and it lies on a major avenue less than two miles from the Capitol. The once-marginal surrounding neighborhood has seen considerable gentrification but could still use improvement. The circle is located next to Congressional Cemetery, established in 1807 and now a National Historic Landmark containing graves or cenotaphs of numerous senators and representatives and other notables. The adjacent Anacostia waterfront offers a riverwalk trail. The National Monuments Foundation plan from 2000 employed a quadrifrontal arch as the centerpiece of a sound classical plan for the catalyzation of these assets.
That’s the kind of synergy the task force might seek to generate with a semiquincentennial arch. If a temporary arch serves only a monumentally celebratory purpose, that would be wonderful enough. But if it inspires long-term improvement of an urban district through creation of a handsome permanent arch—admittedly a more costly proposition—that would be the happiest outcome of all.
Top Photo: Detail of an engraving of Charles Bulfinch’s temporary arch celebrating President Washington’s 1789 visit to Boston. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)