Sunday August 22, 2010

New Center Near Fordâ??s Theater Aims to Expand the Lincoln Experience

By BERNIE BECKER

Published: August 20, 2010

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WASHINGTON — Close to a million people go to Ford’s Theater each year, many of them drawn to see where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on April 14, 1865.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

The center, expected to open in February 2012, will be next to the house where Lincoln died.

In 18 months or so, visitors will have the opportunity to see more.

The aim of the Ford’s Theater Center for Education and Leadership, to be set in a 10-story building across the street from the theater, will be to explore Lincoln’s legacy and the aftermath of his assassination. Paul R. Tetreault, the director of the Ford’s Theater Society, said the center — next to the Petersen House, where Lincoln died — would complement the theater’s museum.

“Here is about learning who Lincoln was and why he mattered,” Mr. Tetreault said in an interview at the theater. “Across the street is about what has become his legacy.”

Construction on the center began in July as part of a million project that spruced up the theater and overhauled its basement museum. If all goes well, the roughly million center, a partnership between the theater society and the National Park Service, will open in February 2012 — 203 years after Lincoln’s birth month.

Some of the new exhibits will be a bit nontraditional.

For example, the center plans to showcase a three-story “tower of books” — a sculpture that will stack replicas of actual works atop one another — to highlight how much has been written about Lincoln. Elsewhere, the center will explore how Lincoln has been portrayed or used in popular culture, with Lincoln Logs and commemorative coins among the possible attractions.

The center’s museum space will also concentrate on the period just after Lincoln’s death, with simulations of both the president’s funeral train and the tobacco barn where the manhunt for Booth came to an end. Two floors of education studios above the museum area will be available to school groups.

Mr. Tetreault and the historian Richard Norton Smith, an adviser on the project, say the approach at the education center is by necessity somewhat different from that of the museum across the street. In short, they said, a historical figure’s legacy is more open to interpretation than his or her life.

Mr. Tetreault said he hoped the center would provide a wide range of views on Lincoln and his legacy, allowing visitors to come to their own conclusions.

Mr. Smith, noting that “lots of people have told the Lincoln story,” said, “This at least feels to me like a fresh attempt to examine what is in some ways a never-ending story from multiple perspectives over different generations.”

The education center’s purpose seemed to intrigue some of the tourists who made a recent stop at the theater, at least one of whom, Rick Graham, had a decades-old memory of a previous experience there.

Mr. Graham, of Birmingham, Ala., remembered visiting Ford’s Theater as a boy in 1962 and being enthralled by the story of the assassination and Booth’s escape from the theater. On this trip, Mr. Graham said, he wanted his wife, Charlotte, to see it as well.

After all these years, Mr. Graham said, “I’m still fascinated.”