The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, once one of Washington's busiest cultural landmarks, has been hollowed out to a scale that even longtime staff and volunteers describe as unrecognizable.
The center has lost roughly 90 percent of its employees and 100 percent of its paying audience since President Donald Trump overhauled its leadership and programming in his second term, but amid it all, 87-year-old volunteer Sandy Weiswasser continues showing up weekly to guide the center's dwindling visitors, treating the ritual as an act of witness, reported The New York Times.
“This place used to be really thriving and busy and crowded,” Weiswasser told the newspaper. “Now it’s a black hole.”
The volunteer tour guide program, which once numbered 140 guides offering tours in 10 languages to as many as 400,000 visitors a year, has shrunk dramatically. On a recent Monday shift, only five guides showed up — and just three people took a tour.
“I don’t count success by the number of people who hear me," Weiswasser said. "Every person is valuable.”
The National Symphony Orchestra's future is now uncertain because the 80-year-old president has not approved its budget request, and its most recent season-ending concert played to visibly empty seats. The Washington National Opera severed its 15-year residency at the center in January after clashing with new leadership, meaning the Opera House — its orchestra pit now littered with trash — no longer hosts opera at all.
The center's physical decline mirrors its institutional one. Flower beds on the riverside terrace have gone wilting and weedy, artwork has disappeared from corridors and lounges, and a donated bust of composer Béla Bartók sits visibly damaged, missing a chunk of stone.
Leadership turnover has reshaped the center's identity as well. David Rubenstein, the billionaire philanthropist who chaired the board and helped fund its expansion, was replaced by Trump himself as chairman — and took his financial backing with him when he departed.
Even the center's donor spaces tell a political story. One lounge, originally named for a 2011 gift from a Russian oligarch, was renamed after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It has since been rebranded again, this time sponsored by a Trump donor who was convicted of securities fraud before receiving a presidential pardon.
Staff accounts point to a harsher internal culture as well. Waves of employees were dismissed with only 20 minutes to leave the building, escorted by security, in what workers dubbed "Firing Fridays." Longtime volunteers, once celebrated at a formal annual gala, now receive a brief reception and souvenir gifts like bottle openers.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation in 1958 to establish the performing arts center, and its cause was championed by his successor John F. Kennedy, and Congress passed a bipartisan bill dedicating the institution to him after his assassination, but Trump's handpicked board slapped the current president's name onto the building – which Weiswasser said missed the point
“This is a memorial," she said. "Memorials are to dead people.”
