King Memorial Raises Goal by $20 Million

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August 13, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — The group building the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial needs more money to pay for a bookstore that's being added over the objections of some and for rising construction costs as workers begin preparing the site on the National Mall, organizers said Tuesday.

The group is looking to raise $20 million more for $120 million total. The money also is needed to pay for security enhancements required by the National Park Service and restrooms in the same building as the bookstore, organizers said.

Meanwhile, Verizon Communications is relocating several communication lines beneath the proposed site on the banks of the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The site preparation is the beginning of "the first major memorial to honor a man of peace and person of color on the National Mall," Harry Johnson, president of the memorial foundation, said in a statement.

But some object to the bookstore building being added, saying the National Mall is becoming overcrowded.

"The Park Service needs restrooms, and this is how they're getting them," said Judy Scott Feldman, chairman of the nonprofit National Coalition to Save Our Mall. She said the ballooning scope of the King memorial is similar to a visitor center that will be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"We are detracting and really desecrating the power of these monuments by adding retail," Feldman said.

The Park Service says the site's footprint has actually gotten smaller since a previous design was reviewed in 2005.

Further construction must wait until two powerful commissions that oversee the capital's architecture approve the design.

The approval timing is critical because congressional permission for the memorial expires in November. If construction has not begun by then, the foundation may have to go back to Congress for an extension.

Organizers have said they hope to complete the memorial in 2010, after originally planning it for 2009.

Surrounded by cherry trees, the memorial will feature a 28-foot "Stone of Hope" granite sculpture of King, a waterside plaza and celebrated quotes by the civil rights leader engraved in stone walls.

It would be the first major tribute to the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner outside Atlanta, where King was born in 1929.

Also Tuesday, the group announced a $3 million gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and $1 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The announcements come as the project closes in on its initial $100 million fundraising goal, collecting $98.8 million so far.

Plans for the bookstore were approved in July by the National Capital Planning Commission, which opposed adding security bollards, saying they would disrupt the design.

Feldman sent a letter Monday to the Park Service objecting to the bookstore, in part because it was not included in a 2005 environmental assessment of the site.

But Park Service spokesman Bill Line said the site has been reconfigured since then, leading to a slightly smaller footprint of the structures, even with the book building. Line said officials wanted to add restrooms to address one of the public's top complaints about the National Mall.

"It's going to draw a lot of people," he said.

Johnson, of the Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, did not immediately respond to telephone and e-mail requests for comment.


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