Reflecting On The Reflecting Pool.

Posted on | May 29, 2026 | No Comments

Mike Magee

As a young boy, I grew up on a lake. During the summers, there were a range of sports activities for all ages, including “Swim Team,” which our parents insisted we join. Artificial Lanes were cut into a Cove at Beach #1. Besides the butterflies in our stomachs for the races, it delivered what it was supposed to – making us all good swimmers.

The tie to the water was a constant for all of us as we grew older. Some lived on a lake. And for those who didn’t, they made access to a pool a priority. For our own family, except during my training in Chapel Hill at the UNC School of Medicine where residents families were given access to the university pool, we always had a home pool whether in Massachusetts, outside Philadelphia, or now in Connecticut. And I’ve been the “pool guy,” providing upkeep and maintenance, for almost four decades.

I have it down to a science, but still it takes effort. And so I read with interest Sam Sifton’s (host of “The Morning”) piece today on the ongoing drama in Washington involving its’ historic pool. That pool is 167 feet wide and over 2000 feet long. It was originally built in 1922 and has been both a treasure and a bit of a maintenance nightmare ever since.

The historic pool is, of course, not a swimming pool, although at 18 inches deep at the edges and 30 inches deep in the center, the National Archives does have a 1926 photo of children safely wading in it. Specifically, it is 2030 feet long, and (until recently) has been considered a work of art that was “designed to vanish.”

When 57 year old architect Henry Bacon first encountered the site, he had good reason to be discouraged. In 1915 it was a marshy mess called Kidwell flats. And yet construction at West Potomac Park of the Lincoln Memorial had begun, and on May 30, 1922 that historic monument was dedicated. It sat on 122 concrete pillars driven up to 65 feet into the mud in a search for solid bedrock.

The actual excavation for the accompanying Reflecting Pool began on March 25, 1920 and was completed in 1923. Engineers today agree, its construction was botched. The asphalt and tile base was set on “soft, dredged riverbed with the consistency of a wet sponge.” There were no underlying support pilings or infrastructure.

By 1980, the pool, under the weight of 7 million gallons of water, had sunk 12 inches. The solution, to pour a new concrete floor, only increased the weight and worsened the problem. By 1986, cracks and leaks allowed a loss of 500,000 gallons of water a week. After a two decade battle for funding, a two year $34 million renovation in 2010 drove 2,113 40-
foot lumber pilings into the marshy clay floor, allowing a celebratory August 31, 2012 reopening.

If a nightmare for the the architects and engineers, it was a dream site for visitors, declared by the Parks Service to be “the most photographed civic stage in America.” When “times of trouble” have appeared on our horizon, we Americans gravitate to this spot, as flawed as it might be. We came in numbers, 250,000 strong, on August 28,1963 to hear Martin Luther King Jr. voice “I Have a Dream.”

Of course, one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. Turns out, one of Trump’s great ideas was to give the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a remake just in time for his “best ever” 250th Birthday Celebration coming up. Seeing it. Feeling it. He acted on the impulse to change it to “American Flag blue.” (His original choice was Bermuda turquoise.)

This no doubt caused turn of the century architect Henry Bacon to roll over in his grave. Bacon’s well-documented original intent in selecting a “plain asphalt and tile bottom” was to create a mirror effect to reflect the marble Lincoln Memorial. The National Park Service, in their redo in 2012, chose grey for the floor to make it even more reflective.

As with this iconic national treasure, our democracy itself struggles these days to uncover strength and ethical moorings in shifting muddy grounds. It’s a lot.

Sam Sifton said as much this morning when he wrote, “Those problems may come as no surprise to anyone who owns a pool. Think of the upkeep and the ongoing costs: chemicals, pumps, cleaning, draining, covering, uncovering, filling, filtering, repeat. Something’s always going wrong. I have a friend with a pool. (Beats having a pool.) I asked him about it. He was forceful: ‘It’s a lot.’”

My pool here in Connecticut is about to be opened next week. And I’ve picked up the chemicals, readied the cleaning robot, and power washed the deck in preparation. The unknown is whether the ancient liner will last one more year or split open and demand replacement. We’ll see. And so it goes with Donald Trump.

The pool and we are aging in tandem. It doesn’t get much use compared to years ago. But we’ll have a crowd once again for my wife’s “Almost 80 party” in late June. So I’m under a bit of pressure this year. But nothing like they’re going through in Washington.

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Reflecting On The Reflecting Pool.

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