People are angry, and real projects.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was drained and covered in “American flag blue,” only to have an algae bloom and shed pieces of its new liner shortly after reopening. The Arts of War and Arts of Peace equestrian statues near the Lincoln Memorial are being refinished in 23.75-karat gold leaf for the first time in decades. A 250-foot triumphal arch directly modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris has been commissioned and is moving forward near the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Nine decorative fountains throughout the city are undergoing restoration, and Lafayette Square has received a major overhaul.
It all falls under a March 2025 executive order titled “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful,” which ties the work to the state’s 250th anniversary in July 2026. Other funding comes from National Park Service entrance fees collected at parks across the country. Many contracts have resulted in limited competition. Critics call much of it nonsense, and with Trump, some of it is possible. But the Paris comparison reveals something far more interesting than simple ego.
Paris was not always the beautiful capital that the world knows today. Before the 1850s it was a crowded, unsanitary medieval war, narrow streets blocked from traffic and waste, open canals, frequent cholera outbreaks, and the usual barricades of rebellion that could paralyze a city. Emperor Napoleon III gave Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann great authority to repair it.
Haussmann demolished entire neighborhoods, evicted tens of thousands of working-class residents from the outskirts, and carved wide, straight boulevards out of old cloth. He installed the same cream stone facades, wrought iron balconies, and mansard roofs that still define the look of the city. He built the modern infrastructure that made Paris livable and impressive: sewers, clean water, large public parks, gas lighting, and long monumental vistas ending in magnificent new buildings like the Opéra Garnier. The costs were huge and left the city in debt. Many Parisians lament the destruction of historic sites. Haussmann was eventually fired during this scandal.
Yet the result was a modern Paris: clean, healthy, easy to navigate, and beautiful, the template for the great European titles that followed. Wide boulevards served for sanitation and traffic, but they also made it more difficult to build barriers and easier for soldiers to move. Greatness and control were not entirely separate goals.
Washington, DC is already a city of monuments and open space. Most of the current work, renewing the fountains, refurbishing the statues, repairing the public infrastructure around the Mall, is a type of deferred maintenance that any administration owes to the capital. Wanting one city that belongs to all Americans to feel harmoniously beautiful on its 250th birthday is not inherently strange.
But the comparison of Paris also shows what often comes together with the beauty of a big city: high power, public money, crimes, disturbing observations, fast times, good choices made from above, and arguments that the result is recovery, vanity, or something in between.
Paris did not become Paris by taking care of it alone. Washington is not being renovated at that time, but the ingredients are familiar: monuments, infrastructure, branding, money, setbacks, and a government trying to make the capital look a certain way.
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