As Teresa Durkin walks around Washington, D.C.’s iconic Tidal Basin, she is frustrated by what she sees. Durkin, executive vice president of the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, points out the crumbling stone seawall, which encircles the pond for about 2 miles. Sections of the wall have separated from the concrete walkway and lean precariously over the water’s edge. The sidewalk itself is nothing but mud.

From the Jefferson Memorial, she leads me clockwise around the Tidal Basin path, as we gingerly try to avoid the muck. At high tide, when the Potomac River swells and the basin fills with millions of gallons of water, this area is completely submerged. “If someone wanted to walk from here to the FDR Memorial across the way, how would they even do it?” asks Durkin. “It’s hazardous.”

We pass by the exposed roots of the famed cherry trees, which run like twisted veins just beyond the water’s edge. Many of the trees in this section west of the Jefferson Memorial are dying—or dead—from soil compaction and exposure to the brackish water. In one 100-foot-long swath, no cherry trees remain at all. Instead, there’s a small flock of Canada geese poking in the mud.

Durkin points to a pile of driftwood under a tree. “You don’t expect to find driftwood under the cherry trees, do you?” she asks. “I’ve found river snails up on the lawn.”

Frankly, I’m kind of shocked. “I didn’t realize conditions were this bad,” I say.

“Most people don’t,” she says.

Due to climate change and runoff caused by development along the river, water levels in the Potomac River have risen since the Tidal Basin’s construction as part of the National Mall in the late 1800s. Scientists estimate an increase of 11 inches or so in the past 90 years. That makes a huge difference in the severity of storm surges and high tide flooding. Making matters worse, the basin was constructed on manmade land and is slowly sinking. It’s an unsustainable combination, and conditions are only expected to get worse.

Another problem is that the basin was never meant to accommodate the sheer number of people who come every year. The National Mall is the country’s most visited national park, with some 36 million sightseers annually. More than 1.5 million of them stroll among the cherry trees during the 4-week National Cherry Blossom Festival each spring. Without a navigable walkway, people clamber over tree roots and turn the soil into hardpan, which doesn’t drain properly. And if they arrive in a wheelchair or with kids in a stroller, maneuvering around the Tidal Basin Loop Trail becomes nearly an impossible feat.

“It’s just over the top in terms of use and the amount of people who come here,” says Durkin, who has worked at the Trust for the National Mall since 2012. “But we want them to come here and come back. We want children to be inspired. We want to be able to teach something. It’s a matter of pride, too. This is our nation’s capital and a symbol of democracy, but it just becomes harder and harder to physically maintain it under these conditions.”

In the spring of 2017 officials from the National Park Service met with representatives from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to discuss the threat to the Tidal Basin. Later, the Park Service connected the National Trust with Durkin and her team. They all agreed that the status quo was untenable. Total restoration costs are estimated to be between $300 million and $500 million—and that doesn’t include an additional $650 million in deferred maintenance for the entire Mall. The group’s efforts laid the groundwork for “Save the Tidal Basin,” a fundraising and public awareness campaign overseen by the two nonprofit organizations and the Park Service.

To help kick off the campaign, the National Trust added the Tidal Basin to its list of National Treasures in April of 2019 and distributed “Save the Tidal Basin” buttons and T-shirts to thousands at the National Cherry Blossom Festival last spring. The Tidal Basin also made it onto the National Trust’s 2019 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

Seri Worden, acting senior field director at the National Trust, says the publicity created by the campaign and the Ideas Lab should go a long way toward helping create greater awareness of the basin’s condition, with the general public as well as a Congress tasked with appropriating funds. “It’s such a remarkable place,” she says. “The public goes there and it’s almost like they don’t want to see the damage because they’re so focused on the beauty and significance of it. It’s easy to ignore the challenges there—until you point them out.”

Flooding in Washington, D.C., isn’t new. The Tidal Basin was built in response to a flood in February of 1881 that was so severe, people couldn’t access the southern part of the city except by boat. Water from melting snow and storms flooded sections of the National Mall, nearly up to the Capitol building. One year later, Congress appropriated funds to build the basin in order to control future floods as well as to help clear the Washington Channel of silt.

The renowned cherry trees—more than 3,000 of them—arrived in 1912 as a gift from Japan. On March 27 of that year, First Lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda Iwa, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the basin, about 100 feet south of what is now Independence Avenue SW. In subsequent years, workmen planted the remaining trees around the basin and the Washington Monument and along East Potomac Park, creating a tapestry of pink blossoms every spring. After several small celebrations marking the trees’ bloom, local civic groups organized the first official Cherry Blossom Festival in 1935.

In the basin’s earliest years, Washingtonians used it to cool off during summer. Congress funded the construction of a Tidal Basin bathing beach on its southern edge in 1918. Beachgoers lounged under umbrellas, took swimming lessons, and demonstrated their diving skills from several platforms into the water, which is about 10 feet deep. Despite hosting an annual beauty pageant, beach officials prohibited women’s bathing suits that were more than six inches above the knee. The rule was strictly enforced by a Tidal Basin “beach cop,” with tape measure in hand.

Kennealy is anxious to hear the concepts proposed in the Ideas Lab. First on his wish list is a creative solution for the seawall, which, he says, essentially impacts everything else—the walkways, the health of the cherry trees, and how people access the trees. Also high on his list is security, particularly around the Jefferson Memorial, which relies only on temporary Jersey barriers to deter vehicular traffic. He’s also concerned about how people get to the Tidal Basin itself. Currently, visitors must cross several congested thoroughfares in order to reach the area from the Mall.

What the outcome might ultimately look like, Kennealy doesn’t know, but he’s ready for a fresh approach. “I think at this point we should be open to a variety of ideas,” he says. “Now is the time to be creative. We’re not wed to anything. It’ll be good to get some outside-the-box thinking.”

Durkin, who was trained as a landscape architect and worked for years in land management issues for public institutions, anticipates the five design firms will not disappoint. In the process, the Tidal Basin may well become a very public example of how cities deal with saving historic sites threatened by rising sea levels. And she realizes that some people might not be as enthusiastic as others about the results. “It’s going to require a change of thinking,” she says. “How are we going to preserve these historic places and keep them exactly the way they are? It just might not be possible. How much can you fight the river?

“Look,” she continues, “you can’t build a wall around every city. You have to come to terms with having to lose some of these places. What are we willing to do in order to preserve this place in some form or another? Does it get de-structured a bit? Does it get bridges where some of the wall is going away? Do we create wetlands on the edge? Do we fill part of it in? There are so many ways to look at it. We have to start identifying solutions based on what we know how to do now and accept that we might need to start thinking about things differently and be open to change.”

Historically, altering the Tidal Basin landscape has not always gone over well. In 1938, before construction started on the Jefferson Memorial, a group of more than 50 women marched on the White House to protest the destruction or disturbance of 171 cherry trees that were to be affected by the work. The next day, the women, whose ranks had swelled to about 150, symbolically chained themselves—as well as a park police officer—to trees at the construction site in an effort to stop the work. Ultimately, the protesters were unsuccessful, but they had made their point. The event would famously be remembered as the Cherry Tree Rebellion.

Nathan Heavers, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Virginia Tech who is also a member of the Ideas Lab advisory committee, says he understands that significant changes to a beloved landscape might not go over well. But he points out that the Tidal Basin’s use has already changed dramatically over the years.

“It’s a question of what we mean by preservation of a pretty dynamic landscape that has come together piece by piece,” he says. “I sort of hope that people see it as a landscape that can continue to change and try to think about what aspects of it we’d like to preserve.”

Like Durkin and Worden, he believes the Ideas Lab has an important role to play. Some ideas won’t be implemented at all, but everyone involved believes it’s vital to get the conversation started.