Fayetteville’s Gift to the Nation?
Editor’s Note: In 2015, professor Hoyt Purvis wrote an article — “Two Boys From Fayetteville” — for Flashback, the quarterly historical journal published by the Washington County Historical Society. His article described the work of Sen. J. William Fulbright and architect Edward Durell Stone, who both grew up in Fayetteville and then later as adults conjured into existence the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. This article builds on Purvis’ work with more background and detail.
In early 1958, U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright of Fayetteville began pushing for creation of a performing arts center for the nation’s capital. He wasn’t the first to suggest such a thing.
In the middle of the Great Depression, as early as 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt looked at ways to put out-of-work actors back in the workforce. In furtherance of that goal, Congress held hearings in 1935 to consider building a theatre and arts center on Capitol Hill and followed that up with a resolution in 1938 calling for construction of a theatre, but funding never materialized. In 1950, Rep. Arthur Klein (N.Y.) put forward a bill for a cultural center, but again nothing came of the effort.
In March of ’58, though, Fulbright submitted anew a bill for just such a center — initially referred to as the “National Capital Center for the Performing Arts” — and the Senate’s Public Buildings Subcommittee held hearings on April 18 to consider the proposal, a long-sought desire of Washingtonians.
For Washington, finally, things seemed to be moving.
The Evening Star reported that supporters had agreed to raise some $40 million from private sources to build a performing arts center, proposed to be built at a site on the National Mall near the Smithsonian Museum. A group of women involved in the cultural aspects of Washington also lined up to push the project forward.
By the time the subcommittee panel met, though, a separate proposal for the same location had been put forward for an aeronautics museum to become part of the Smithsonian museums. The new proposal created a small difficulty for Fulbright and Rep. Frank Thompson of New Jersey, the House sponsor for the arts center. They took a second look at potential locations. A low area along the Potomac River — a section of Washington known as Foggy Bottom, just south of where Rock Creek joins the river — caught their eye.
They brought this option back to the subcommittee as strictly an option. Thompson told the newspaper: “A majority of those present favored the river site. Others, who favor the Mall site as a first choice, also favored the river site in the event the Mall site could not be made available.”
Meeting on June 20, the Senate approved creation of a cultural arts center on 9 acres of land at the Foggy Bottom location. The House soon followed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the legislation.
Hoyt Purvis, who was later an aide to Fulbright, described the location as an excellent choice. “Fittingly, it was near the location where for many years the open-air Watergate concerts had been held, until the noise of planes drowned out the music,” he wrote.
Funding for a design was approved, and Edward Durell Stone, a native of Fayetteville and good friends with Fulbright, used the Foggy Bottom location to his advantage, designing a center with a terrace that cantilevered over the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, which would do two things simultaneously: hide the passing traffic and open up broad views of the Potomac.
If it were built.
Four Years Pass
Funding for construction of the capital’s arts center continued to be delayed. While back in Arkansas during June 1963, Fulbright couldn’t help mention the slowness during ceremonies for the Arkansas Art Center, which was being dedicated in Little Rock, one of the earliest state centers of art in the nation. The Arkansas Art Center would be a bellwether of sorts for the rest of the nation.
The columnist Emily Genauer of the Herald Tribune News Service wrote: “To the rest of the country the Little Rock enterprise is of special interest because it’s a pilot project. It must serve an enormous area that, in the field of visual arts, has, except for its own tentative efforts (a fine survey show of modern sculpture, for example, presented last spring) and except for activity generated by the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, been virtually without any heat and light at all. The question is — and it’s a tough one — what do you do in a handsome and spacious new museum building that will stimulate and reward persons of means and education who have been exposed to very little art, old or new?”
Genaurer’s mention of Fayetteville and the university was a sidling reference to the Fine Arts Center on campus, also designed by Edward Durell Stone as one of the nation’s earliest academic arts centers to bring all the fine arts under one roof.
A Working Model
Stone’s theory of design for the arts center at Fayetteville was that students in the various disciplines would learn from one another when inhabiting the same spaces. A music student’s performance might inspire a sculpture student. A dance recital might inform the work of an architecture student or a theatre major.
The university’s fine arts center’s opening in 1951 brought major artworks by Picasso, Edward Hopper and Isamu Noguchi among others and permanent pieces from sculptors Alexander Calder and Gwen Lux.
Stone’s design of the Kennedy Center sought to offer a similar breadth of options for the American public writ large, building out the ideas of the academically oriented arts center at Fayetteville to a broader, larger cultural center for the fine arts. The center would include:
- A concert hall, with seating for more than 2,400 people
- An opera house, with seating for nearly 2,400 people
- Three theatres of varying sizes
It easily fit the desires of the cultured class in Washington.
The national center, though, won over even the libertarians. Writer John Chamberlain, who assumed the National Cultural Center for the Performing Arts would be “another boondoggle bearing no relation to fiscal justice,” found to his surprise that the New York real estate tycoon Roger L. Stevens had agreed to raise $30 million in private funding still needed to turn Stone’s drawings into reality.
In August, Congress gave the green light to move forward with construction.
History Intervenes
On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. The act stunned the nation. Time came to a standstill.
Four days later, Fulbright stepped beyond time, taking the lead in proposing that the cultural center be named for the late president.
Purvis wrote that the Kennedys had taken an active interest in the cultural arts center early in his administration. Their support made naming the center after President Kennedy a logical and welcome choice.
Fulbright introduced legislation on Nov. 26 to that end. Two weeks later, with broad support across Congress and the nation, he broadened the proposal by introducing it as a joint resolution of the House and Senate. The resolution easily passed. It read:
“The Board shall construct for the Smithsonian Institution, with funds raised by voluntary contributions, a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on a site in the District of Columbia bounded by the Inner Loop Freeway on the east, the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge approaches on the south, Rock Creek Parkway on the west, New Hampshire Avenue and F Street on the north, which shall be selected for such purpose by the National Capital Planning Commission. The National Capital Planning Commission shall acquire by purchase, condemnation, or otherwise, lands necessary to provide for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and related facilities. Such building shall be in accordance with plans and specifications approved by the Commission of Fine Arts.” — 20 U.S. Code 76i.
A little more than a year later, ground was broken on Dec. 2, 1964, for the John F. Kennedy Center for Cultural Arts. Robert Kennedy and Jeanne Kennedy Smith, representing the Kennedy family, joined President Lyndon B. Johnson to turn the first earth.
In speaking at the groundbreaking, Johnson said: “The role of government must be a small one. No act of Congress or executive order can call a great musician or poet into existence. But we can stand on the sidelines and cheer. We can maintain and strengthen an atmosphere to permit the arts to flourish, and those who have talent to use it. And we can seek to enlarge the access of all our people to artistic creation.”
Opening Day
On Sept. 8, 1971, the Kennedy Center officially opened to the public. Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was performed in the Opera House. The next night, the Concert Hall opened with a special performance by the National Symphony Orchestra. A month later, the Eisenhower Theater produced Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
If the public was enthusiastic about the new center, the critics were less sanguine.
In a story for The New York Times, architectural writer Ada Louise Huxtable panned the new arts center, calling it big, bland and banal. Its 600-foot-long grand foyer was described as being the length of “three New York City blockfronts,” as if she had expected to find front stoops every 30 feet and trash cans at the curbs. Huxtable did find one saving grace. She wrote that the commonness of the building was a crowd pleaser, a “genuine people’s palace. … Because it so lacks the true elegance of imagination, it does not put them off at all. They are awed by the scale and admiring of the decoration, which is a safe, familiar blend of theatrical glamor and showroom Castro Convertible.”
Her story goes on that way for three or four New York City blockfronts.
In writing for The Washington Post, Wolf von Eckhardt was more succinct, referring to the structure as a “Brobdingnagian shoebox.”
Von Eckhardt later conceded that critics, including himself, had taken their non-enthusiasm for Stone’s design too far and acknowledged that the Kennedy Center had “become an inspired and inspiring catalyst for the capital’s cultural life,” according to Purvis.
Fulbright, however, predicted that time would be an ally, suggesting that as people came to know the center, its resource, its beautiful interiors and exteriors, the reviews would turn to acclaim.
For two boys from Fayetteville, as Purvis called Fulbright and Stone, the life of the Kennedy Center remains a hallmark of Arkansans’ contribution to America’s cultural understanding of itself, our open embrace of artistic performance and art from around the world, and another “beacon of hope in a world dreary lighted.” The Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas and Arkansas Arts Center at Little Rock stand as early forerunners to the nation, and both remain in the vanguard of supporting the arts.
Diminution of Honor
In 2025, the president of the United States unceremoniously added his own name to that of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
Singers, musicians and actors who had been scheduled for the 2026 season abruptly canceled their shows after the announcement that the name would be altered.
To save face and placate the peevish president, a board appointed by the president ordered renovations to the building to start in 2026. Historical preservation groups sued to prevent the building from being renovated into a banal black and gold scheme.
Richard Grenell, appointed director of the center by Trump, asked a curator whom he had hired to remove works of art that had been donated by nations around the world to honor Kennedy, and replace them with art selected by Trump’s patrons, according to The New York Times. An email from Grenell to Joseph Palermo read:
“You can definitely start sending stuff back to the countries who donated it now. Figure out everything you don’t want and just send it back A.S.A.P.”
Near the end of May 2026, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that all physical signage and branding bearing the Trump name be removed, writing that the center was approved by Congress solely as a memorial to President Kennedy. “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy,” Cooper wrote, “and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. … Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,”
Likewise, Cooper temporarily blocked the venue from closing down for the summer for a two-year “revitalization project.”
In the meantime, according to The New York Times, “Audiences, performers and visitors have fled from the center, which has lost about 90 percent of its staff and, for now, 100 percent of its paying audience.”
The name of Donald John Trump was removed from the building in 2026, but workers erected a scaffolding, apparently intended to hide from public view the absence of a petulant self-described billionaire’s missing name.
In September, rumors that the president intended to demolish the Kennedy Center if he couldn’t have his way were lended credence after the president was seen on Air Force One with a poster showing the center a headline: “Kennedy Center Demolished.” He had previously said that he wouldn’t tear down the building but he had said the same thing about the East Wing of the White House and then tore it down completely to build instead an ostentatious, out-of-scale ballroom.
Trump said:
“The Trump administration should certainly have recognition. … Because frankly if we don’t do that it’s going to close, it’ll end up being ripped down.”
Crowds of thousands of supporters of the Kennedy Center surrounded the building on Sept. 18 to protest the moves by Trump.
How many New York blockfronts of arrogance would Ada Louise Huxtable have given this affront? The world can only imagine.