Freedom Park (Arlington, Virginia)

Freedom Park is a former outdoor museum in Arlington, Virginia, located at 1101 Wilson Blvd, site of the old Newseum building in Rosslyn. It was founded in 1996 to celebrate the spirit of freedom and the struggle to preserve it.

The Freedom Park is a joint-venture with the Newseum and Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial, both operated by the Freedom Forum. It was built on an elevated concrete structure originally constructed for use as an automobile overpass, and as such, rises above and over the surrounding streets.

Most of the exhibits and the Journalists' Memorial were removed in 2008. Only the Spectrum of Freedom remains. The park remains open to the public.^{[citation needed]}

Exhibits

Spectrum of Freedom, 7 tile murals created by Karen Singer and 270 children from Arlington schools ^[1]

Former exhibits

Former exhibits included:

Stones from the Warsaw Ghetto.
A headless statue of Vladimir Lenin, one of many that were beheaded when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
A bronze casting of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birmingham jail-cell door.
A bronze casting of a boat used by Cuban refugees.
A casting of a South African ballot box from the apartheid era.
Pieces of the Berlin Wall — the largest display of the wall outside of Germany.^[2]^[3]
Journalists Memorial, a 24 foot tall spiraling memorial made of dichroic glass that honors reporters, editors, photographers and broadcasters who gave their lives reporting the news ^[4]

A reproduction of the Statue of Freedom, which caps the dome of the United States Capitol, and the Goddess of Democracy, originally constructed for the Tiananmen Square protests in China, were also on display.

References

^ Arlington VA Public Art Collection
^ Germany.info : 15 Years After the Fall of the Wall
^ The largest section of the Wall to be preserved can be found at the 1420-yard East Side Gallery in Mühlenstrasse, Germany (found on German Embassy site: Germany Info: 15 Years After the Fall).
^ http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4000 Freedom Forum: Journalists Memorial

[1] Arlington VA Public Art Collection

[2] Germany.info : 15 Years After the Fall of the Wall

[3] The largest section of the Wall to be preserved can be found at the 1420-yard East Side Gallery in Mühlenstrasse, Germany (found on German Embassy site: Germany Info: 15 Years After the Fall).

[4] ttp://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4000 Freedom Forum: Journalists Memorial

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