The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ramakrishna Gundra via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 In 2016, the National Park Service announced plans to transform the undercroft beneath the Lincoln Memorial into a new museum dedicated to the Washington, D.C. landmark. A decade later, the $69 million project is practically complete and tickets are available to reserve. Here’s what visitors have to look forward to ahead of its opening on June 25.
The new attraction is located in a part of the nation’s capital that’s been hidden in plain sight since the Lincoln Memorial was completed in 1922. Beneath the elegant marble columns of the neoclassical building is a 43,800-square-foot vault filled with 122 concrete columns providing structural support. This element of the design contributes to the sense of grandeur spectators experience when taking in the view of the memorial.
“[The columns] are all here really just to raise Lincoln up and have him sitting up on the proverbial hill that you can see from the Capitol,” Sam Meyerhoff, the project’s program manager, tells NBC4 Washington’s Mark Segraves.
Up until now, the Lincoln Memorial’s undercroft has been strictly functional and off-limits to the public. That will change this summer when visitors are invited to learn about the structure from within its secret underbelly. The new 15,000-square-foot museum will feature exhibits highlighting both the memorial’s construction and its role in the country’s history in the century since.
In 1939, Black opera singer Marian Anderson performed a concert from the steps for 75,000 people after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall. Twenty-four years later, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech” from the Lincoln Memorial, further embedding the monument’s iconography in the story of America.
“You walk up today, you look at the statue, you look at the speeches,” Mike Litterst, spokesperson for National Mall operations under the National Park Service, tells DC News Now. “But you don’t understand the symbolism unless you have a really good guidebook with you or take the time. Now, with the museum, we’re going to point those features out.”
The undercroft museum also offers plenty for architecture buffs. Though visitors won’t be able to fully explore the space, its foundations will be visible through floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. The exhibition will extend into these inaccessible sections through multimedia content projected onto screens and the columns themselves.
The goal is to “try to make as much use of the space as possible,” Meyerhoff tells NBC4 Washington. “So that glass is serving a very critical component for the exhibition in making sure it’s successful.”
Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.
