President Donald Trump said Friday that his proposed “National Garden of American Heroes,” which will feature sculptures of nearly two dozen prominent Philadelphians, will be built in\u00a0West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He announced the location in a Truth Social post<\/a>, although it’s unclear whether the exhibit will require congressional approval for it to be built.\u00a0<\/p>\n MORE:\u00a0Preservationist pushes for Hercules Posey, George Washington’s celebrity chef, to get Pa. historical marker<\/a><\/p>\n Trump first proposed the sculpture garden in 2020, when statues of controversial historical figures were being taken down amid racial justice protests. The\u00a0One Big Beautiful Bill Act that\u00a0passed in July 2025 allotted $40 million to the project.\u00a0<\/p>\n “When\u00a0finished, West Potomac Park will be a World Class Masterpiece with elegant Landscaping, and adorned with Beautiful Statues, and be yet another one of my great projects to make Washington, D.C., the Safest and Most Beautiful Capital in the World,” Trump wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n The 2021 executive order<\/a> includes a list of 244 deceased Americans and says the garden is meant to “reflect the awesome splendor of our country\u2019s timeless exceptionalism.”\u00a0It features 23 people with connections to the Philadelphia region, including founding fathers, writers, musicians and athletes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Philadelphia-area selectees are:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 John Adams A task force selected the 244 people with assistance from state and local officials. Vince Haley, Trump’s chief of domestic policy agendas, will add another six names.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, the original list was created before Trump’s effort to scrub diversity, equity and inclusion practices and remove certain people and facts from federal spaces such as national parks. In Philadelphia, officials removed panels<\/a>\u00a0from the President’s House about the nine people enslaved by George Washington during his presidency. The exhibits have since been returned<\/a>, but a court case is ongoing.\u00a0<\/p>\n West Potomac Park is located between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and includes the famous cherry blossom site along the Tidal Basin. However, portions of the selected site are part of a reserve area, which falls under the purview of the Commemorative Works Act, the Washington Post reported<\/a>. Per that legislation, any new project would need approval from Congress. It also says that works memorializing people can’t be authorized until 25 years following their death, but the list includes several Americans who died less than 25 years ago.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The park was originally intended to open on July 4, 2026, for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. However, the new timeline is before January 2029, which is the end of Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post reported in July.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump said Friday that his proposed “National Garden of American Heroes,” which will feature sculptures of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,57090,226,227,229,12,88,2085,2016,2805],"class_list":["post-645665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-culture","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-philadelphia","tag-sculptures","tag-washington-d-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\u2022 Muhammad Ali
\u2022 Kobe Bryant
\u2022 Whittaker Chambers
\u2022 Mark Twain\u00a0
\u2022 James Fenimore Cooper
\u2022 Katharine Drexel
\u2022 Benjamin Franklin
\u2022 Billie Holiday
\u2022 Dolley Madison
\u2022 James Madison
\u2022 Lucretia Mott
\u2022 John Neumann
\u2022 Charles Willson Peale
\u2022 William Penn
\u2022 Edgar Allen Poe
\u2022 Betsy Ross
\u2022 Antonin Scalia
\u2022 Norman Schwarzkopf
\u2022 Bessie Smith
\u2022 Thomas Ustick Walter
\u2022 George Washington
\u2022 Walt Whitman<\/p>\n