Washington
Creating a memorial to the horrors of World War I
Over the past 40 years, memorials to America’s 20th century wars have sprung up across Washington, D.C., with one conspicuous omission: There was no national memorial to veterans of World War I in our nation’s capital.
“If you ask anybody on the streets where the World War I memorial is in D.C., most of them will point you to the D.C. Veterans Memorial,” said Joe Weishaar. “For a long time people assumed that it was the national memorial. But the little rotunda that’s there is only to district residents.”
In 2015, Weishaar was a 25-year-old intern at a Chicago architecture firm when he heard about an open design competition for D.C.’s first national World War I memorial. “I set up a shelf in my closet, I set my computer on the shelf, and that was my office,” he said. “I was doing this, like, in nights and weekends after work.”
He sent off his design and then forgot about it, until … “I got a very strange phone call and they’re like, ‘You’re one of five finalists. We need you in Washington, like, tomorrow,’” he said.
Weishaar had never even been to Washington. “No, I had never been. Didn’t own a suit!”
Weishaar’s design beat out more than 360 applicants from over 20 countries.
When the memorial opened to the public in 2021, only one thing was missing: an intricate, 60-foot-long bronze relief, the memorial’s centerpiece, created by classical sculptor Sabin Howard, a firebrand and self-appointed bulwark against the scourge of modern art. “Artists like de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, I’m in opposition to them,” said Howard. “It’s a scam, what’s happened in the last 100 years. I’m here to rectify that scam.”
For his tableau depicting World War I, he said, “I threw out the last hundred years of history in the art world, and I went back to what preceded that period of time.”
Shepherding Howard through the byzantine approvals process was his client, the Congressionally-created World War I Centennial Commission.
“You go to these meetings, and none of the people in the room are artists; they’re all lawyers and, you know, Washington bureaucrats,” Howard said. “The commission asked me, ‘We need to see more – a dying soldier, perhaps, and more suffering.’ I started posing the models. You had madness, you had amputations, death. So, I went pretty deep.”
When he brought that iteration into the commission office, he said chairs were literally thrown in the room.
“I was treated as, ‘You’re working for us.’ And I took that for a long time. But then we got to a moment in the relationship, I stood up and I said, ‘I will not compromise this design. And if you don’t like it, you sculpt it, and I’ll send you some webinars.’”
The World War I Centennial Commission said they are “proud of the magnificent Memorial that Joe Weishaar and Sabin Howard have created,” and that it “provides a model of how a complex and collaborative process can work.”
Howard may lack tact, but he doesn’t lack confidence. His sculpture charts a soldier’s wartime journey, from his ambivalent departure, to his wordless homecoming, to the animal savagery of combat in-between. Pointing to one soldier, he said, “If you look at this figure, I don’t think in the history of art that there’s ever been a figure with this much explosive energy.”
Howard’s “movie in bronze,” consisting of 38 figures weighing 25 tons, ends with a soldier, home from war, lowering a helmet to a young girl.
For World War I historian Jennifer Keene, the sculpture’s final tableau illustrates the heavy toll the war exacted on its veterans: “They were not prepared for what they were going to find – the quagmire, the terror of artillery shells, rats and lice and trench feet. No, they are completely unprepared.”
Keene said, “I think that idea at the end, that it’s just a gesture, right? ‘Here’s the helmet.’ There’s no words there, because maybe there aren’t words that can really describe what that soldier has been through.”
The sculpture, which will be unveiled at a ceremony later this month, took nine years of Sabin Howard’s life. “Yeah, but that’s not a lot, when you think about it,” he said.
Asked what he hopes visitors to the memorial a century from now would experience, Howard replied, “I want the visitor 100 years from now to have the same feeling that I had when I went to go see the David when I was 25. We are made in God’s image. That sculpture is made in God’s image. So is mine. It’s a simple thing, but very deep.”
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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
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Hintz scored into an empty net at 19:41 for the 4-1 final.
“Everybody played hard, did the right things, got pucks in deep, especially in the third period when we’re trying to close out a lead,” DeSmith said. “So, I thought top to bottom, first, second and third, we were really good.”
NOTES: The Stars swept the two-game season series (including a 1-0 win Oct. 28 in Dallas) and are 8-1-0 in their past nine games against the Capitals. … Duchene had the secondary assist on Steel’s goal, giving him 900 points (374 goals, 526 assists) in 1,157 NHL games. … Hintz has 11 points (seven goals, four assists) in an eight-game point streak against Washington. He had a game-high 12 shots on goal. … Thompson has lost six of his past seven starts (1-5-1).
WHEELING, W.Va. — Emergency crews are responding to a major incident at the Washington Avenue Bridge, which has collapsed into Wheeling Creek.
Multiple police and firefighter units are on the scene, working swiftly to rescue those injured in the collapse.
Three injured workers have been taken to the hospital. Officials say one is a serious injury and two are non-life threatening.
Access to the area has been closed to facilitate rescue operations.
The bridge was closed in early December for a replacement that was expected to take nearly a year.
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A look back at Washington’s historic flooding
It’s been a few weeks since the historic flooding hit the streets of western Washington, and if you scroll through social media, the shock still seems fresh. While some insist it was a once-in-a-generation disaster, state history tells a different story.
TUKWILA, Wash. – After floodwaters inundated western Washington in December, social media is still filled with disbelief, with many people saying they had never seen flooding like it before.
But local history shows the region has experienced catastrophic flooding, just not within most people’s lifetimes.
A valley under water
What may look like submerged farmland in Skagit or Snohomish counties is actually an aerial view of Tukwila from more than a century ago. Before Boeing, business parks and suburban development, the Kent Valley was a wide floodplain.
In November 1906, much of the valley was underwater, according to city records. In some places, floodwaters reached up to 10 feet, inundating homesteads and entire communities.
“Roads were destroyed, river paths were readjusted,” said Chris Staudinger of Pretty Gritty Tours. “So much of what had been built in these areas got washed away.”
Staudinger has been sharing historical images and records online, drawing comparisons between the December flooding and events from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“It reminded me so much of what’s happening right now,” he said, adding that the loss then, as now, was largely a loss of property and control rather than life.
When farmers used dynamite
Records show flooding was not the only force reshaping the region’s rivers. In the late 1800s, farmers repeatedly used dynamite in attempts to redirect waterways.
“The White River in particular has always been contentious,” explained Staudinger. “For farmers in that area, multiple different times starting in the 1890s, groups of farmers would get together and blow-up parts of the river to divert its course either up to King County or down to Pierce County.”
Staudinger says at times they used too much dynamite and accidentally sent logs lobbing through the air like missiles.
In one instance, King County farmers destroyed a bluff, permanently diverting the White River into Pierce County. The river no longer flowed toward Elliott Bay, instead emptying into Commencement Bay.
Outraged by this, Pierce County farmers took their grievances to the Washington State Supreme Court. The court ruled the change could not be undone.
When flooding returned, state officials intervened to stop further explosions.
“To prevent anyone from going out and blowing up the naturally occurred log jam, the armed guards were dispatched by the state guard,” said Staudinger. “Everything was already underwater.”
Rivers reengineered — and erased
Over the next century, rivers across the region were dredged, dammed and diverted. Entire waterways changed or disappeared.
“So right where the Renton Airport is now used to be this raging waterway called the Black River,” explained Staudinger. “Connected into the Duwamish. It was a major salmon run. It was a navigable waterway.”
Today, that river has been reduced to what Staudinger described as “the little dry trickle.”
Between 1906 and 1916, the most dramatic changes occurred that played a role in its shrinking. When the Ballard Locks were completed, Lake Washington dropped by nine feet, permanently cutting off its southern flow.
A lesson from December
Despite modern levees and flood-control engineering, December’s storms showed how vulnerable the region remains.
“For me, that’s the takeaway,” remarked Staudinger. “You could do all of this to try and remain in control, but the river’s going to do whatever it wants.”
He warned that history suggests the risk is ongoing.
“You’re always one big storm from it rediscovering its old path,” said Staudinger.
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The Source: Information in this story came from the Tukwila Historical Society, MOHAI, Pretty Gritty Tours, and FOX 13 Seattle reporting and interviews.
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