Ford's Theatre: Education, leadership center to open

More than 750,000 people visit Ford's Theatre annually to ponder Abraham Lincoln's assassination: Booth's single shot and histrionic leap to the stage, the mortally wounded president's death across the street at a boarding house, where Lincoln was carried after the shooting.

New dimensions to that story will be added at Ford's with the opening of the $25 million Center for Education and Leadership this month. Situated in a refurbished 10-story office building directly across the street from the fabled theater and next door to the house where he died, the center will feature expanded museum and education spaces.

The new exhibit goes beyond Lincoln's assassination and tracks his funeral, legacy and the evolution from American liberator to pop icon, memorialized in everything from marble monuments to disguise kits and trading cards. The museum showcases such items as Booth's saddle as well as a video that shows images of him in modern films.

"That's the biggest change," says presidential scholar and Lincoln historian Richard Norton Smith, who helped plan the new center as well as the redesigned museum beneath the theater, which opened in 2009. "People used to be exposed to a fairly narrow slice of history, with a clear-cut ending. Now the whole package is not about endings. It literally is a story that is unfinished, and in some ways is reinterpreted by each generation."

The ribbon-cutting of Ford's Center for Education and Leadership on Feb. 1, with timed entry tours for the public beginning Feb. 21, will complete a $60 million revisioning. The annual slate of theater productions and the cautiously preserved and displayed historic site, managed by the National Park Service, have long operated without much integration. The new campus, created by Ford's Theatre Society in coordination with the Park Service, aims for greater harmony.

"This is redefining who we are," says Ford's Director Paul Tetrault. The theater is creating more Lincoln connections in works as diverse as the recent musical "Parade" (about the 1915 anti-Semitic lynching in Georgia of Leo Frank) or in the current premiere "Necessary Sacrifices," dramatizing meetings between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Meanwhile, the historical displays have grown more theatrical. The glass facade of the new center features a giant image of Lincoln's face staring across 10th Street at the theater. Videos by the History Channel animate the museums on both sides of the street. The exhibits in the new center feature touch-screen displays and interactive elements to go with the artifacts under glass.

Visitors will be channeled through the Peterson House to the fourth floor (via elevator) of the new center. Permanent exhibits on the assassination's aftermath and Lincoln's legacy occupy the fourth and third floors; the second floor is being billed as the "leadership gallery," for talks and events. The first floor will be a gift shop (augmenting the pair of gift shops in Ford's itself).

Administrative and production offices are already humming in the top floors, and education gets its space in the middle.