Plan to build museum by Wall hits a wall
WASHINGTON — The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced Friday that it is ending its troubled project to build a $130 million underground Vietnam Education Center on the National Mall.
The proposed center, which would have been adjacent to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and near the Lincoln Memorial, had been plagued by funding problems almost since the project was launched in 2001.
The fund’s president, Jim Knotts, said Friday that the fund had raised only $45 million and that prospects for raising the rest were dim.
The center would have been a kind of Vietnam War museum featuring exhibits and a projection of thousands of pictures of the 50,000 people who died in the war and whose names are on the memorial’s hallowed black wall.
Critics of the project, which was begun by the memorial’s creator, Jan C. Scruggs, argued that there was no need for an education center when the Wall was such a profound statement about the war.
Knotts said the unanimous decision was made by the seven voting members of its board Friday at a regularly scheduled quarterly meeting at the fund’s office in Crystal City, Va.
He said the fund plans to create an online education center in place of the building.
Knotts said Friday that he and his staff are “sad and disappointed that we were not able to make the project a success, resulting in a physical building on the National Mall.”
John Dibble, chairman of the board, said in a statement: “This project has faced many difficult challenges since Jan Scruggs conceived the idea in 2001. ... Unfortunately, we’ve reached that point regarding a physical building ... as the funding has simply not materialized.”