Preserving the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial for Future Generations
One of many National Park Service sites threatened by climate-induced coastal inundation, it's the subject of a forthcoming study by Weitzman preservationists.
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The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial opened on the National Mall in Washington, DC, in 2011. The four-acre site sits at the edge of the Tidal Basin, in a part of the District that has been heavily trafficked by tourists during the annual Cherry Blossom Festival, which occurs around the anniversary of King’s assassination in 1968. In response to years of flooding in the area, caused partly by land subsidence and sea-level rise, the National Park Service this year completed the first phase of a rebuilding of the Tidal Basin sea wall; a future phase will include the wall at the King Memorial.
As part of that effort, the NPS turned to preservationists at Weitzman to complete a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR), a survey of the physical and operational characteristics of the memorial that culminates in recommendations for its care. The team, led by Randall Mason, Jacob Torkelson, and Molly Lester, set about researching the design history of the memorial and interviewing visitors about the site’s strengths and shortcomings. In collaboration with Kofi Boone, a landscape architecture professor at NC State University, they’re developing recommendations on everything from basic maintenance to plant palettes, accessibility improvements, and new interpretive moves to help draw out the original designers’ intent. They will deliver a draft set of recommendations this year and refine them with feedback from NPS.
“Our team, being more design-oriented, doesn’t think of preservation as freezing this memorial in time,” says Torkelson, a researcher with the Preservation Research Collaborative at Penn (PRCP) who earned his MSHP from Weitzman. “We think of it as managing change and introducing new elements that solve some of the challenges the site is facing currently.” For instance, adjustments to the memorial’s paving and planter walls could help mitigate the transition to the new Tidal Basin seawall or prevent damage from social paths through the cherry groves.
As seen in a map produced by the Weitzman team for the forthcoming report, the Memorial site sits at the edge of the Tidal Basin.
The site’s challenges include the impacts of climate-induced coastal inundation but go far beyond them as well, to practical considerations about how people access and experience the memorial and foundational questions about its political meaning. For the preservationists, the goal is to keep the memorial in good working order while enhancing its presence in the symbolically rich landscape of the National Mall. “The driving question is how we want this memorial to work in 20 years,” says Lester, managing director at PRCP.
Mason, a professor of historic preservation at Weitzman who has worked with the National Park Service for more than 20 years, and his team have completed cultural landscape projects for other high-profile sites like the Lincoln Memorial. They have also helped plan for the care and maintenance of lesser-known sites that represent irreplaceable cultural heritage. With Boone, they produced an award-winning cultural landscape report for Lewis Mountain, a segregated site for Black campers in Shenandoah National Park. Like Lewis Mountain, the MLK project aligns the work of two of Weitzman’s research initiatives within the Preservation Research Collaborative: the Urban Heritage Project and the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites. While the NPS is required to periodically plan for the care and improvement of its resources, the MLK Memorial project is unique in that it’s tied to specific environmental concerns around one of the newest memorials in the nation’s capital.
“I was actually kind of surprised when [NPS] brought this project up because the memorial’s so young,” Boone says. “It reinforced the impact of the risks from flood damage.”
Boone, who authored a critique of the memorial in Landscape Architecture Magazine in 2024, has observed that there are few places to sit or be still on the site. A memorial bookstore is sited across West Basin Drive from the memorial itself, creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians. King’s words, the source of his renown, are inscribed on the memorial’s granite walls but nowhere heard aloud. Moreover, the memorial emphasizes King’s “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, but doesn’t engage much with King’s later, more radical political thought. “It’s the keep-it-moving memorial,” Boone says.
Kofi Boone (at left) and students from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at NC State's College of Design joined Weitzman's Jakob Torkelson (third from left) and Molly Lester (second from right) on a site visit in November of 2025.
One of the goals of the report is to illuminate gaps between the site’s current conditions and the intentions of its original designers, led by ROMA Design Group. The team interviewed some of the designers and members of the original design jury to understand what Boone calls “gaps in the documentation” between the original proposal and the final as-built drawings. They also brought Weitzman preservation and city planning students to DC to conduct behavioral mapping and interview memorial visitors about their impressions of the space, which added depth to their understanding of its significance.
The bookstore space in particular invites opportunities for new interpretive elements, including potential interactive audiovisual features, Boone says. Other features of the site demand attention for basic upkeep. The Weitzman team is developing recommendations for clearing drainage areas to prevent standing water, cleaning the biogrowth on lighting, and replacing individual trees as part of a broader effort to diversify the plantlife at the memorial. All the recommendations are made with a sensitivity to the MLK Memorial’s relationship to other memorials on the National Mall (Dr. King stands quite literally between Jefferson and Lincoln), to the visitors’ experience of the space, and to the original prompt for the design competition, which was to commemorate “The man, the message, and the movement.”
“The National Park Service was given a new memorial without a guidebook for how to manage or maintain it,” Torkelson says. “Our job as preservationists, designers, and landscape architects, is to come in and say, ‘This is how’.”
