Some days no one turns up for a tour at all. Most days there are only a few, including those curious about all the reports of ruin. When people do come, what do they see?
In the Opera House, which no longer has an opera, there is an empty orchestra pit scattered with trash. On the grand terrace overlooking the Potomac River, the flower beds are wilting and weedy. In the corridors and lounges, artwork has disappeared.
And yet Sandy Weiswasser, a retired sixth grade teacher who for 18 years has given hundreds of people free tours of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, keeps reporting for duty. In a dogged demonstration of love and loyalty for an institution that has elevated life for her and millions of visitors, she still arrives every Monday for her tour day, knowing she may soon find the doors locked.
“This place used to be really thriving and busy and crowded,” Ms. Weiswasser, 87, said. “Now it’s a black hole.”
No one yet knows whether President Trump, who in his second term gutted the center’s leadership, purged its programming and whose handpicked board had his name drilled into the building front, will close the Kennedy Center in the coming weeks, as part of what he says is a two-year renovation plan. The center’s board is expected to make a final determination in August. But at this point it scarcely matters, Ms. Weiswasser said.
Last month the National Symphony Orchestra played its final Kennedy concert for the season, unsure of when or if it will return. Marquee bookings and artists have fled. Everywhere is the heavy, closed-curtain silence of an institution that has lost some 90 percent of its employees and 100 percent of its paying audience.
Ms. Weiswasser keeps coming to give tours, she said, to bear witness, to tell her dwindling visitors that the shabby emptiness they see is not what the Kennedy Center was. For more than half a century it was a grand democratic project, she tells them, bringing the beauty and inspiration of the arts to everyone.
Ms. Weiswasser offers herself as proof its mission did not fail. She is a daughter of Polish immigrants whose grandmother was lost in World War II and presumed by the family to have died in a Nazi concentration camp. She grew up in Detroit taking piano lessons and listening to classical music on AM radio with her mother, and said she had seen more live performances at the Kennedy Center than anywhere else.
So on tour days, she said, “I don’t count success by the number of people who hear me. Every person is valuable.” She invoked a Talmudic proverb that “Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.” Besides, she said, laughing only a little, “I don’t do anything half-assed.”
Once she was among 140 volunteer guides who gave tours in 10 languages to up to 400,000 people a year. Last week on her Monday shift, only five out of more than a dozen tour guides showed up, and only three people took a tour. A spokesman for the center declined to say how many guides still volunteer. Ms. Weiswasser said her plan is to turn up until she is told otherwise.
She is haunted by memories: Her grandson’s visit to a musical “petting zoo” that let children try all the instruments in a symphony. Ushering fifth graders through the Opera House wings. Telling a group of shy Chinese 12-year-olds that “it’s never too late to learn an instrument.” Watching her granddaughters dance in a Washington Ballet performance. Taking them to see “An American in Paris” and “The Lion King.’’
“I cried inside, I was so happy to have brought them,” she said.
On a recent Monday Ms. Weiswasser was at the tour guide information desk on the center’s lower level, waiting with three other tour guides, all women, for something to do.
Ms. Weiswasser jumped at the chance to show off the center, even in its current state. I — her lone visitor that day — followed her into the hollowed-out building.
‘Memorials Are to Dead People’
She began in the Hall of Nations, a red-carpeted entry hall festooned with flags from around the world. Energetic and assertive, with a near constant smile, Ms. Weiswasser wore her tour guide credentials on a University of Michigan lanyard (her alma mater) that was hung with a pair of silver opera glasses, a gift from a granddaughter.
The center’s story, she said, began with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1958 signed legislation to establish a performing arts center in Washington. President John F. Kennedy championed the cause, and after his assassination Congress passed a bipartisan bill dedicating the institution to him.
“That’s how it got its name,” Ms. Weiswasser said, adding pointedly, “This is a memorial. Memorials are to dead people.” She did not mention Mr. Trump, whose board members in December had his name added to the front of the building to make it the “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” It was removed under court order last month.
As the building took shape in the 1960s, she said, more than 60 nations contributed furnishings and art. Italy’s gift was the largest: 3,700 tons of Carrara marble that sheaths the center’s facade and interior walls, from the same region as the marble for Michelangelo’s David.
Ms. Weiswasser moved to Washington in 1966, three years after Kennedy’s death, when her husband — they have since divorced — took a job as a law clerk. For years, the family of four had little money for movie tickets, let alone symphony seats. But Ms. Weiswasser still plays the piano and is skilled in photography, so when she retired two decades ago, she was eager to volunteer at the arts institution. In those busy early years, “it warmed my heart seeing all the yellow school buses lined up, knowing that they were having this special experience at the Kennedy Center,” she said.
Now there is frustration.
Once Mr. Trump took over the Kennedy Center, she said, “even friends of mine would say, ‘I won’t step foot in there.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, but you’re only hurting the performers.’” The box office would often give away tickets to help fill empty seats, and Ms. Weiswasser used the freebies to try and lure her friends back. Last month she scored two discounted tickets to the gala awarding Bill Maher the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
But she did not go, because she could not find anyone willing to accompany her.
From the Hall of Nations she led the way to the Grand Foyer, two football fields in length, with a wall of windows offering sweeping views of the Potomac and monuments beyond. The foyer once channeled audiences to the center’s three largest performance spaces — the main Concert Hall, the Opera House and the Eisenhower Theater — now all idle. At either end are the Millennium Stages, also idle after the audiences for their free live performances dwindled to a few dozen. The remaining bookings have moved to The Reach, a newer space next door.
At the entrance to the Concert Hall, Ms. Weiswasser paused to chat with Judith Skolnick, one of the center’s volunteer greeters, who opens the locked space for tourists. Ms. Skolnick became a volunteer in 2017, a week after she retired from a property management job. “You feel useful here,” she said. It was good, she said, to contribute while “you have the brain to be able to do something.”
The prospect of a closure worries her. “In two years I have no idea if I’m going to be here or not,” she said. “I’m going to be 80.”
The volunteers get plenty of questions about Mr. Trump’s renovation plans. The center’s new management supplied them with a list of upcoming repairs and encouraged them to read them verbatim. Among them are “replacing compromised expansion joints,” “modernizing rigging, stage flooring and lighting systems in the Opera House,” and “replacing decades-old theater seating and carpeting.”
The volunteers don’t mention what employees called “Firing Fridays,” when waves of them were dismissed and given 20 minutes to leave, escorted by security. Or when Richard Grenell, who served one tumultuous year as Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the center, yelled at staff and attacked performers online. Or when the elegant dinner gala honoring the volunteers for milestone years of service was replaced last month with a two-hour reception at which they received souvenir bottle openers and dish towels.
Ms. Weiswasser led the way to the Concert Hall’s main entrance, past a bust of the Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók — a gift from the Academy of Hungarian Scientists, Writers and Artists in U.S.A. and Abroad— that was damaged. A chunk of stone the size of a silver dollar, chipped from Bartok’s jacket front, lay at its base.
Inside, Ms. Weiswasser pointed out the crystal chandeliers (a gift from Norway) and the organ, whose 5,000 pipes range from 32 feet to the length of a pencil. “The National Symphony Orchestra plays here from September through June,” she said, then paused.
“Plays, or played? When I give my tours now, do I give present tense or past tense?” The orchestra’s future has been in limbo for months, because Mr. Trump has not approved its budget request. At the symphony’s last performance of the season on June 13, the concert hall was dotted with empty seats.
A Grand Pause at the Opera House
A short walk away was the silent Opera House, where the darkened orchestra pit yawned open, empty but for the trash and an upended tangle of music stands. In January, the Washington National Opera severed its 15-year residency at the Kennedy Center after clashes with the center’s new leadership, and now performs elsewhere.
Perching on the arm of a seat, Ms. Weiswasser recalled a magical day several years ago, when she led 30 fifth graders to the Opera House. The head stage manager happened to be there. He invited the whole group backstage a space so large it has a basketball hoop and half court, shot a couple of baskets and raised and dropped the curtain for them.
“To stand on the stage of the Opera House and see the wings?” Ms. Weiswasser said. “They were really memorable, those moments.”
She loved chance encounters with the people who made the center what it was. She once met the renowned mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton at a reception. A few years ago she rode the elevator with David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist who was then the chairman of the center and bankrolling its evolution into a community hub.
Ms. Weiswasser greeted and thanked him. “He had this sort of deadpan face,” she recalled in a conversation after the tour. “So I said, ‘You do a lot for Washington. I think we should change the name of the city to Rubenstein, D.C.’” She said that Mr. Rubenstein, still deadpan, replied, “I don’t think so.” Last year, Mr. Trump gutted the Kennedy Center’s board, stacking it with loyalists. They voted to replace Mr. Rubenstein as chairman with Mr. Trump and add the president’s name to the facade. When Mr. Rubenstein left, he took his money with him.
In the corridor outside the Opera House, Ms. Weiswasser stopped by a newly renovated bar and lounge for high-level donors.
The space had been called the Russian Lounge after a big gift in 2011 from a Russian oligarch, Vladimir Potanin. The Kennedy Center dumped that name after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Then Trevor Milton, a convicted securities fraudster and a Trump donor pardoned by the president last year, spent millions to sponsor the space. It is now called the SyberJet Lounge, after his company, whose logo glows over its backlit quartz bar. Mr. Milton partied here after the Kennedy Center Honors, the center’s most prestigious event of the year, when he sat in the president’s box.
Inspiration, and Uncertainty
Outside on the center’s back terrace, a lone security guard sat at a weathered picnic table eating lunch. In the shimmering heat, he had a view of the Potomac and the engraved quotes from Kennedy on the center’s white marble facade, including his hope for “an America which commands respect around the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.”
Ms. Weiswasser said she tries not to say anything partisan about the Kennedy Center’s plight. For her, the institution remains bigger than that, a symbol of government’s power to deliver opportunity and inspiration.
“I remember being a young girl and thinking ‘I’m so lucky I was born in America,’” she said on a recent day. “I still feel that way. But I don’t have quite the pride that I used to have.”
