The Kennedy Center’s board of trustees voted Tuesday to immediately close the performing arts complex’s main building, citing mounting safety concerns, hours after a federal judge blocked another attempt to place President Donald Trump’s name on the landmark.
The vote accelerated a shutdown that had been planned as part of a two-year renovation. Center officials have pointed to deteriorating conditions inside the building, including a roughly 4-by-5-foot section of ceiling plaster that broke loose during a Sept. 4 storm and fell about 60 feet into the Grand Foyer. No one was injured. Inspectors later identified at least seven other areas showing water-related deterioration, according to materials prepared for the board.
Trump, who chairs the board, said after the vote that the building would close immediately for safety reasons. But he also tied whether the renovation proceeds to an ongoing court battle over efforts to honor him on the building.
“The Renovation and Reconstruction … cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. If the courts ultimately rule against the board, he added, “the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”
Congress has already appropriated $257 million for renovations at the center.
Earlier Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper barred the board from adding an inscription to the building saying it had been “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump” and from renaming the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” Cooper ruled that the board could not create a new memorial to Trump at the Kennedy Center without congressional authorization.
The decision marked the latest turn in a months-long legal fight over the presidential memorial. In July, the D.C. Circuit rejected the center’s request to restore Trump’s name while its appeal proceeded, finding that officials had not produced specific evidence that keeping his name off the building would cause irreparable financial harm.
The dispute has become intertwined with the center’s increasingly dire finances. Draft resolutions prepared for the board warned that the institution had exhausted its fiscal resources and could soon struggle to meet payroll and routine maintenance expenses. The documents also suggested that Trump’s continued fundraising help depended on “appropriate recognition” of his role at the center.
Trump said Tuesday that $17 million he raised had been deposited into a Kennedy Center account “to keep it afloat.”
In a separate post before the vote, Trump described the Kennedy Center as being in a “virtual state of collapse,” pointing to the recent ceiling failure and saying a security guard had passed beneath the area about a minute before the plaster fell. He also attacked Cooper as “hostile and conflicted.”
The main building closed to the public Tuesday afternoon. Kennedy Center officials have said programming can continue at the Reach complex and at off-site venues during the shutdown, including performances by the National Symphony Orchestra.
