President Donald Trump announced on Thursday a plan to construct a pedestrian bridge connecting the Lincoln Memorial directly to the Potomac River.
Trump announced the “breaking news” during an Oval Office event promoting “clean, beautiful coal” as an energy source.
“We’re doing something that just came up. We’ll have a little breaking news here, because nobody’s heard of it, but at the Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back, the back was supposed to be the front,” the president told a gathered group of reporters. “It 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.”
The comments came shortly after workers began filling the memorial’s Reflecting Pool, the final step in the president’s renovation of the historic landmark. Trump said the connection between the Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac would be called “the promenade.”
“They want to call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I want to do that,” Trump said. “It’s going to be beautiful. 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.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the plans “have existed almost since the end of the Civil War.”
“On the backside of the Lincoln, as President Trump described, right now there’s no pedestrian access,” said Burgum. “You’re on the Mall, people come from around the world. They don’t know that 100 yards away is the beautiful Potomac River, which was part of the original plan. And now they’d be able to walk around the Lincoln Memorial, walk on a pedestrian bridge over the first highway, walk over the next one, and right down to the water. It would complete the vision. These projects would complete the original vision.”
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The White House and the Interior Department did not answer questions on when construction of “the Promenade” would begin.
You can watch Trump’s comments in full below.