The United States spent the equivalent of roughly half a billion dollars in today’s money to build the Kennedy Center, the nation’s official performing arts memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Yet for most of its existence, it has been nearly impossible to reach on foot, marooned between highway on-ramps on the banks of the Potomac River. The building was meant to announce American cultural ambition to the world during the Cold War, when Washington had no national opera house, theater, or concert hall to rival the great state-funded cultural institutions of Europe and Moscow.
The Bolshoi Theater had operated since 1825, and Soviet cultural delegations projected the message that communism produced beauty. By contrast, the capital of the free world offered little beyond Constitution Hall, the venue that had infamously refused to let Marian Anderson sing in 1939 because she was Black. Congress authorized the center in 1958 under President Dwight Eisenhower, providing federal land in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood but only modest funding. The project was expected to rely heavily on private donations.
Roger Stevens, a Michigan real estate developer who had helped buy the Empire State Building and produced plays on Broadway, became chairman in 1961 at Kennedy’s appointment. Fundraising was slow and painful. Private donors balked at large checks for a cultural building when the federal government itself would not fully fund it. Everything changed for the worst possible reason.
After Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Congress renamed the project the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in January 1964 and unlocked roughly $23 million in federal matching funds. The total cost reached about $70 million. What the nation would not do for art, it would do for grief.
The memorial designation created a permanent split identity. As a presidential memorial, the center receives federal money for maintenance. As a performing arts center, it must fund its own programming. A memorial wants solemn permanence; a performance venue wants noisy, risky life.
That tension was built into the legal structure before construction began. The architect, Edward Durell Stone, had co-designed the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939. By the 1960s, his more decorative, monumental style had fallen out of favor with critics. He designed a 630-foot-long, 300-foot-wide, 100-foot-tall marble box, clad in roughly 3,700 tons of white Carrara marble donated by Italy.
Ground broke in December 1964, but construction proceeded slowly through the Vietnam War era, with rising material costs and labor delays. The site, chosen in the late 1950s for its river frontage and proximity to the Lincoln Memorial, was increasingly encircled by the interstate highway system, including approaches to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, Rock Creek and Potomac Parkways, and future Interstate 66. The building opened on September 8, 1971, nearly 13 years after Eisenhower signed the original legislation. Jackie Kennedy Onassis personally asked Leonard Bernstein to compose the opening work.
His “Mass” was deliberately provocative, mixing Catholic liturgy with rock, blues, and protest themes. The reaction was violently divided; some walked out, and the Nixon White House was reportedly wary. The interior was widely praised. The Grand Foyer remains one of the longest rooms in the world, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows and 18 crystal chandeliers donated by Sweden.
The Concert Hall, Opera House, and Eisenhower Theater earned respect from musicians and audiences. Foreign nations donated artwork, panels, and ceremonial pieces, making it an international building. The exterior was a different story. Architecture critics called it a “marble coffin,” a “Kleenex box,” and a “bunker with chandeliers.
” The building turned its back on the city, with no grand entrance staircase and almost no windows. Patrons arrived by car, parked underground, and emerged in the Grand Foyer as if teleported from one climate-controlled environment to another. For decades, walking to the Kennedy Center meant navigating multi-lane highways, guard rails, and a dim, exhaust-filled underpass. The overwhelming majority of visitors drove.
The building created no neighborhood ecosystem, unlike Lincoln Center in Manhattan, which transformed the Upper West Side. Its neighbors were a highway interchange and the Watergate complex, separated by a parking lot. The dual memorial and performance identity also created financial complications. Marble aged and cracked under humidity and car exhaust.
The roof leaked, mechanical systems aged, and the deferred maintenance backlog reached hundreds of millions of dollars. Congress authorized repairs in slow installments, often less than engineers requested. Stevens ran the center until 1988 and died in 1998. During his tenure, the National Symphony Orchestra grew in stature, the opera company staged increasingly ambitious productions, and the Kennedy Center Honors, launched in 1978, became a nationally broadcast cultural ritual.
The center also developed a free daily Millennium Stage performance series. For decades, the center sat less than half a mile from the Lincoln Memorial, but on a map the distance was measured in highway lanes, noise levels, and sidewalk quality. Almost no one made the trip between them on foot. Meanwhile, Washington transformed around it, with new walkable districts like the Wharf, which opened a 6,000-seat music venue, the Anthem, that was embraced by the city in a way the Kennedy Center never quite was.
The Reach, designed by Steven Holl, opened in September 2019 as the most significant attempt to fix the problem. It added three pavilions, 11 acres of gardens and walking paths, and a pedestrian bridge over Rock Creek Parkway. For the first time in nearly half a century, there was a decent walking route from the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. The expansion was widely considered an improvement, attracting younger and more casual visitors.
But it took nearly 50 years and a world-renowned architect to give the building what most cultural institutions have from the start: a front door that welcomes the city. The highways are still there, and the building remains an island. Edward Durell Stone died in 1978, seven years after the building opened, without seeing the full weight of the critical backlash or the decades of debate about his design. His reputation never fully recovered; he spent the last chapter of his career associated with a building critics savaged.
The deeper question the building raises is whether its problems are architectural at all or a reflection of America’s unresolved ambivalence about public art. France, Vienna, and other nations placed their opera houses on their finest squares and paid for them without apology. The Kennedy Center was authorized, named after a martyred president, filled with gifts from foreign governments, and then wrapped in a concrete moat of highways. The building embodies a contradiction Americans can feel even when they cannot name it: a monument to culture built by a country never entirely sure culture deserves a monument.
It is the physical manifestation of a half commitment, generous enough to produce something real, hesitant enough to ensure it always feels slightly marooned. More than 50 years after it opened, the Kennedy Center remains one of the most important performing arts institutions in the Western Hemisphere. The programming is ambitious, the education programs reach millions, and the Honors ceremony remains a national ritual. Inside, the commitment to art is real.
Outside, the Carrara marble faces the traffic, and the nearest crosswalk is a quarter of a mile away.