March 24 (UPI) — A coalition of leading cultural and architectural preservation organizations has asked the court to stop the Trump administration from carrying through with its quarter-billion-dollar Kennedy Center reconstruction project.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, along with seven other organizations, filed a lawsuit Monday in a Washington, D.C., federal court seeking injunctive relief prohibiting the Trump administration from starting any construction work at the iconic Potomac River center without completing the required public review and consultation process.
“Demolition, new construction, major reconstruction, major renovation or major aesthetic transformation of the Kennedy Center would permanently destroy historic fabric, degrade the monumental core’s vistas and public grounds and compromise the Kennedy Center’s memorial purpose and architectural integrity, causing permanent, irreversible harm that no subsequent remedy can fully undo,” the coalition said in its 82-page lawsuit.
“Its multi-year closure and transformation without the review Congress required harms only Plaintiffs but the public at large.”
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has used his office to reshape cultural institutions and root out what he describes as left-leaning ideology from public and private institutions.
Trump has focused on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as part of his cultural agenda, overhauling its leadership early in his second term and filling its board with appointees, who elected him board chair and voted to rename the arts facility as The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
Last week, the board approved his plan for the center to close on July 4 for two years, during which it will undergo a $257 million restoration project. Congress approved the funding in July when it passed Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spending package.
“We’re going to make it unbelievable, far better than it ever was and we’ll be able to do it properly,” the New York real estate mogul told reporters at the White House early last month after making the plan public.
“And we’re going to have something that, when it opens, it’s going to be brand new, beautiful.”
The Kennedy Center opened to the public in 1971 as an art center and the United States’ living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in office on Nov. 22, 1963.
“The Kennedy Center is not a personal project of any president. It is a national cultural monument built to honor John F. Kennedy and to serve the American people,” Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, one of the plaintiff organizations in the lawsuit, said in a statement.
Trump has also altered other buildings during his second presidency, many of which have drawn condemnation from critics and Democrats, most notably his demolition of the East Wing of the White House for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom.
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