From the National Park Service website:
Pershing Park National Mall and Memorial Parks
Within the city center of Washington, DC, amidst the busy Pennsylvania Avenue corridor, formal gardens and stately trees comprise a green oasis where visitors find rest and relaxation from the hurried pace of the nation’s capital. In many respects, the scene represents life’s peaceful pursuits set among many of the towns, villages, fields, woods and rivers of Belgium and France before their destruction during the First World War. It is here that our nation honors John J. Pershing, whose World War I leadership propelled him to the rank of General of the Armies—a rank he shares only with George Washington, whose great Monument fills the field of vision from the southwest corner of Pershing Park. A portrait statue of Pershing stands amidst the walls of the American Expeditionary Forces Memorial and faces the site of what soon will become the National World War I Memorial. Altogether, Pershing Park illustrates the esteem in which the United States holds the more than two million members of the American Expeditionary Force that General Pershing commanded along the European Western Front, those that served throughout the world and at home, and, most importantly, the more than 120,000 Americans that lost their lives in service to their country.
Pershing Park In Focus
Pershing Park covers a 1.76-acre trapezoid-shaped landscape, designed by M. Paul Friedberg, with later revisions by Oehme-Van Sweden, and bordered by Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th, 15th and E Streets, NW. The park and the adjacent Freedom Plaza to the east represent the culmination of a twenty-year effort to provide an impressive terminus for Pennsylvania Avenue as it approaches the historic White House grounds and opens toward the Washington Monument and the National Mall to the south. Dedication events marked the opening of Pershing Park on May 14, 1981.
National Mall and Memorial Parks (NAMA) assumed its responsibility in 1965 to preserve and administer the monumental core of the nation’s capital, home to many of this nation’s iconic structures, landscapes and vistas. NAMA oversees Pennsylvania Avenue National Historic Site, also designated in 1965 to preserve areas associated “with events and people of large consequence in the history of the Republic and its Capital.” General Pershing certainly fits that description. In 1972, Congress created the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation to oversee a series of improvements to enhance the appearance of this important historic district—America’s Main Street. Pershing Park soon became one of the focal elements for a renewed Pennsylvania Avenue. Designers sought to realize the great potential that the site provided, not only for its relevance to General John J. Pershing but also for its association with important historical events in the city and the nation.
The effort to erect a Pershing memorial in Washington, D.C. emerged shortly after the general’s 1948 death at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and subsequent burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, both military service veterans of World War I, supported the memorial campaign.
On April 2, 1956—the 39th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s address to a Joint Session of Congress requesting a declaration of war against Germany—Congress authorized the erection of a memorial in Washington, D.C. to General Pershing. The impetus to build the memorial also came with the approach of the 1960 Centennial of the general’s birth and the discovery in that year of the disappearance of his equestrian statue at Versailles, France. Dedicated in Pershing’s presence in 1937, the equestrian statue honoring him and the troops of the American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F) vanished following the fall of France during World War II; Nazi leaders apparently ordered the Pershing Memorial be dismantled and melted down to make artillery shells.
As national Veterans Day observances loomed in 1966, Congress passed, on November 7, another public law authorizing the construction of a memorial along Pennsylvania Avenue to honor both Pershing and the A.E.F. troops he commanded. The area selected, previously designated as Reservation No. 617, City Square 226, Commerce Building Plaza and Pershing Square, became Pershing Park. Realization of an actual memorial took another fifteen years.
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