A campaign to restore and preserve the Tidal Basin on the National Mall was kicked off Wednesday/National Trust for Historic Preservation, Sam Kittner

A crumbling focal point of the National Mall and Memorial Parks is being embraced by a philanthropic campaign to chart a course to restore and protect the area.

The campaign launched this week by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Trust for the National Mall, and the National Park Service is just the latest in recent years designed to rehabilitate various areas of the National Mall, affectionately referred to as "America's front yard."

In years past the Trust for the National Mall has led a campaign to restore Constitution Gardens, last year work began to replace the roof on the Lincoln Memorial, and there has been recent work done on the Washington Monument and the historic lockkeeper's house.

Perhaps the biggest project yet -- repairing and preserving the 107-acre Tidal Basin -- is just getting under way. The work that needs to be tackled includes fixing a crumbling sea wall and halting daily tidal flooding that swamps sidewalks and adversely impacts roots of some of the roughly 3,000 cherry trees that color the mall each spring with their dazzling flowers.

Not without a small measure of irony, when the campaign was kicked off on the mall Wednesday morning against lapis lazuli-hued skies above the Tidal Basin, water crept up along part of the sidewalk before slowly receding. 

The centerpiece of the initiative will be the National Mall Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, which is intended to serve as a forum for generating, disseminating, and vetting a new vision for the future of the Tidal Basin.

"The idea behind the Ideas Lab is that we bring together people, really smart people from lots of different disciplines, to think boldly and in innovative ways about how do we do this holistically, not just piece by piece," Katherine Malone-France, the interim chief preservation officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said Wednesday afternoon during a phone call.

The ebb and flow of tides daily floods portions of the National Mall/NTHP, Sam Kittner, from February 2019

The problems at the Tidal Basin are just part of the staggering $11.9 billion maintenance backlog facing the National Park Service. There was an effort in the 115th Congress to pass legislation to raise $6.5 billion over five years to address the backlog, but the measure died when the Congress adjourned without taking final action on the measures. Similar bills have reappeared in the 116th Congress, yet no substantive action has been taken on them.

What remains to be seen, both in Congress with those pending measures and with the outcome of the Ideas Lab, is how the proposed work would be paid for. 

"At this point private philanthropy is supporting the Ideas Lab," said Malone-France. "It's not a design competition, it’s an Ideas Lab where we’ll have a small number of teams that include landscape architects, architects, engineers, and others, looking, again, holistically at all of the threats that face the Tidal Basin, with the full support of the National Park Service."

With proposed solutions anticipated in spring 2020, the ideas will be presented to the Park Service to decide which direction to take.

“And then at that point, when we understand the costs and how we want to do this, when we’ve received all kinds of public feedback, then I think all of us together will be trying to figure out how to pay for it," she said.

Certainly, in light of the current tidal flooding and predicted sea level rise, any blueprint for the basin will need to take climate change into account.

"We want to make sure this site is sustainable for the long term, so what are future impacts going to be?" France-Malone said. "So hydrology is definitely going to be part of the mix here, and understanding again what’s happening now but also what we anticipate happening in the future and how we can prepare for that and mitigate it.”

The cost of implementing the resulting plans could approach $500 million, according to the groups behind the initiative. The cost of the Ideas Lab itself is being covered through a $750,000 grant from the American Express Foundation.

“We are delighted to present the National Mall Tidal Basin Ideas Lab,” said Richard Brown, vice president, philanthropy for American Express. “This work combines private sector ingenuity and public sector stewardship to uplift one of America’s most iconic spaces.”