A New Look for America's Great War Monument

Story by Steve Paul / June 7 , 2002

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The memorial's 1926 dedication (Liberty Memorial)

Had George W. Bush kept his May 25 appointment for the rededication of the Liberty Memorial, he would have been the third sitting president to officiate at the American site that comes closest to a national monument for the Great War. Calvin Coolidge opened the 8.5-acre park and building complex in 1926, and Missourian Harry S. Truman welcomed his old WWI Army unit to Kansas City's downtown overlook in 1947. After the memorial's $30 million restoration, and with its $30 million museum expansion in the works, Bush's potential visit during discussions about a public monument at lower Manhattan's Ground Zero focused national attention on a previous generation's patriotic response.

"There was a lot of public debate and grassroots discussion" after WWI, says Doran Cart, curator of the Liberty Memorial Museum, "and the process took a lot longer than people thought it would. The best approach was not to do something in the emotion of the moment, but in the reflection that followed."

 

Historic poster (Liberty Memorial Museum)

In the end, New York architect H. Van Buren Magonigle designed Liberty Memorial for maximum impact. On a hilltop just south of the huge 1914 Union Station (which itself reopened several years ago after a long-delayed rehabilitation) stretches a 488-by-48-foot wall incised by a frieze illustrating the evolution from war to peace. On the opposite side of the summit, a pair of 600-ton sphinxes, their faces veiled by wings, stand guard at the entrance to the memorial grounds. Paths lead to two identical temples, one a museum of WWI memorabilia, the other a hall with murals and bronze tablets that list the 441 Kansas Citians who died in the war. The focus of the memorial is a 217-foot-tall shaft. Four 40-foot-tall "Guardian Spirits" adorn the tower as it tapers toward a topside altar and climaxes in a steam machine and colored lights that conjure up an eternal flame.

Generations of schoolchildren scrambled around cascading stairways and courtyards that reconcile the site's steep slope. In recent years the surrounding park has been home to music festivals and other public events. But the memorial itself closed in 1994 when deterioration of the concrete deck and its reinforcing steel surrounding the tower and temples raised fears that a visitor might fall through into a 40-foot-deep void below.

 

John G. Waite Associates

The restoration replaced the decks and stairways and fortified the support system below the memorial. Architects inspected the tower stone by stone, and broken ones were replaced. The entire limestone exterior was cleaned, memory hall murals were restored, and the sphinxes were patched. The complex has also been made more accessible to disabled visitors. A recent historic landscape survey will guide replanting of the grounds, and lights supplementing the restored original fixtures will give the tower and its surroundings a nighttime glow.

Plans for the museum, which owns 400,000 World War I items, from letters to a Bavarian 15-centimeter howitzer and even a French troop-transport boxcar, have proved to be controversial. Once crammed into about 5,000 square feet of space, the new exhibit area, as designed by ASAI Architecture of Kansas City, would grow to more than six times that size, most of the space fitted into the void below the memorial deck. But a below-grade entrance plaza and museum areas would also eliminate the south side staircase and alter the lawn. Some preservationists (supported by the National Trust and the Historic Kansas City Foundation) have objected. "I don't know what we've accomplished except to destroy the original design," says Jane Flynn, former president of the Historic Kansas City Foundation. "The whole vista of the entrance mall is gone."

Despite these concerns, a review of the project by the preservation architecture firm John G. Waite Associates reported that "the new museum space has been designed in a discreet and sophisticated manner that has minimal impact on the existing historic fabric of Liberty Memorial."

 

Renovated areas appear in yellow. (Liberty Memorial Museum)

Within weeks of the Armistice of November 1918, a group of Kansas Citians talked up a memorial to honor the dead and celebrate the peace. Once rolling, their campaign raised more than $2 million in 10 days—that's 1919 dollars. Now taxpayers are funding more than $55 million in repairs, reconstruction, and a maintenance endowment. Private fundraising is supposed to take care of most of the museum expansion, and a campaign to raise more than $15 million to finish it is under way.

Steve Paul is a senior writer and editor at The Kansas City Star.

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