President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he planned to build a promenade connecting the Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac River.
“We’re going [to call it] the promenade. They want to call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I want to do that, but it’s going to be beautiful,” Trump told reporters at the White House on June 4.
“It’s a beautiful project, and it’s going to take the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac, which it was always scheduled to do, but when they built the roads, that was the end of that,” he added.
Trump said the original vision for the Lincoln Memorial did not materialize after two roadways were built behind it.
He noted that his administration has “a way of beautifully going over those two roads” to allow pedestrians to walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River.
“At the Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back. The back was supposed to be the front,” the president said.
“That never got built because they built two roadways behind it after it was built, and it shut off the gateway to the water. That was really going to be the main entry, and we’re going to be doing that.”
The Lincoln Memorial honors Abraham Lincoln, the 16th U.S. president who led the United States through the Civil War. It sits at the western end of the National Mall overlooking the Reflecting Pool, which the Trump administration has also refurbished.
The project is expected to be completed ahead of July 4, when the United States commemorates the 250th anniversary of its independence, according to the president.
“So, it’s being done now,” he told reporters on April 23. “You’re going to end up with a beautiful, beautiful reflecting pool, the way it’s supposed to be. Much better than it ever was, actually.”
The $5.1 million project is part of a broader effort to refurbish monuments and public spaces in Washington as preparations ramp up for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration. The statues, gifted to the United States by Italy roughly 75 years ago, were last regilded in 1971.