I should add a few words about the graceful entrance to Arlington Cemetery. The National Park Service, which owns the land, calls this the Memorial Avenue Corridor. It was designed in the early twentieth century by none other than America’s most famous architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, under project architect William Mitchell Kendall, who also worked on the Washington Square Arch (75 feet tall), the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the main New York post office building, now in use as the wonderful Moynihan Station.
When you cross Memorial Bridge from Washington into Virginia, the traffic merges into the GW Parkway via a traffic circle, which is the Memorial Circle where Trump wants to plant his arch. It sits on an island, Columbia Island, which, though closer to Virginia, is actually part of the District of Columbia. Behind the circle, in a straight line from the bridge, is Memorial Avenue, a broad boulevard about 500 feet long that leads to the cemetery entrance. Its distinguishing feature is something the NPS calls the Hemicycle, a half-circle, Beaux-Arts style retaining wall designed in the early 1930s by the McKim firm. It’s all graceful and understated; it announces itself with a humility that is appropriate to so solemn a space. In the words of a 2004 NPS document I fished out: “Arlington Memorial Bridge and its features were intended to be both a monumental entry to the federal city and a formal, processional route to Arlington National Cemetery.”
I should add a word or two on the size of Memorial Circle, which in the coverage I’ve read has gone largely undiscussed. Trump’s arch, at 250 feet (the arch itself would be 190 feet, topped by a 60-foot golden statue of an angel, alongside two shorter statues of golden eagles), would be about as tall as a 20-story office or residential building. For perspective, there is in D.C. no such thing because of its stringent height restrictions. The city’s tallest commercial building is Franklin Square at 13th and K Streets, which is 12 stories and, with its spires, rises to 210 feet. (Its tallest residential building is The Cairo near Dupont Circle, at 164 feet, which was completed in 1894—and caused public backlash that led to the height restrictions that are still in place today.)
