Visitors to East Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., may have noticed a new landform taking shape over the past few days: a massive mound of dirt going up one of the property’s three municipal golf courses.
But not only any dirt.
The debris came from the White House, where a $300 million East Wing renovation project ordered by President Trump is underway. Since the middle of last week, dirt has been arriving by truck at the federally owned park, which is home to two nine-hole courses and the main attraction: an 18-hole layout called East Potomac Golf Links, which was designed by Walter Travis and dates to the 1920s.
The movement of the earth was reported for the first time BY Washington Post and it’s been confirmed by GOLF.com, but exactly why the White House is dumping trash on the nine-hole white course of the East Potomac, toward the north end of the property, is unclear.
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of post reported that a portion of the dumping will be used to add landscaping to the East Potomac Golf Links. But the National Links Trust, the not-for-profit organization that operates and plans to develop the course, has not commented on the matter and is referring all questions to the Home Department. (The Interior Department did not respond to multiple emails from GOLF.com.)
When the National Links Trust released the lease on course, plus two more DC munis, in 2020, it announced plans for one Tom Doak-Guided restoration of what is a reversible design, meaning each nine can be played in two directions. More than five years later that work has yet to begin, but there are no indications that the organization’s long-term vision for the property has changed.
This story gets even more interesting because President Trump is said to have taken a shine to the golf course — or at least to the desirable real estate on which the course sits: a strip of land between the Potomac River and the Washington Canal that offers views of the Washington Monument. Last month POLITICAL reported that the President has “warmed up to an idea … of renovating the course” and renaming it the “Washington National Golf Course.”
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Google Earth
That change in strategy would be complicated because the National Links Trust owns the course’s lease through 2070 — an agreement it signed during Trump’s first term — and has its own plans to restore the design to its glory, as NLT aims to do with the other two courses it has been tasked with developing: Langston and Rock Creek. “We are very excited to take on the stewardship of these outstanding properties,” said NLT co-founder Michael McCartin when the lease was announced, “and are fully confident that our plans, which will be implemented over the next several years, will significantly benefit both golfers and the surrounding communities.”
East Potomac is the oldest of DC’s three munis and was the site, in 1923, of the second round of the US Public Links Championship. In the 1940s, it became the center of efforts to desegregate the city’s public golf courses and to this day attracts golfers from a wide range of backgrounds and demographics.
The pile of dirt that has accumulated over the past week from the White course has been pushed into a chain link fence. On Monday morning, a bulldozer could be seen pushing the earth around.
A visitor asked an employee about the mysterious migration of rubble from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
“It’s going on,” the employee said. “Still coming in.”
