"D.C. and D.C. is looking beautiful. The fountains are almost all open. We had 28 of them, and we have one in particular, a very long lake, we call it. They're reflecting lake between the Lincoln Monument. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. You take a look at between Lincoln and Washington. You have the longest, like 2,400 feet long. That's longer than the tallest building in the world, if you set it on your side. And it's almost 200 feet wide. And for-- actually, it was built in 1922. And from 1920 to '21, it really never worked. It always leaked. And it was a problem about things. And hundreds of millions was spent. The Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed. And we'll be spending-- you'll give me a number. But I think it's very low numbers, like in the number that we originally talked about. Where we cleaned it, we fumigated it, that we had 10 major truck dumpsters of garbage taken out. Can you believe it? Friend of mine came in. Very substantial person from Germany. Want to see the Washington Monument. I wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial. He said, I look, but that horrible reflecting pond is disgusting. It's filthy dirty and disgusting. I said, really, I drove down. I said, secret shares was taken dry. And we went down. I said, that's terrible. And for the most part, it didn't work. I mean, they wouldn't even have water in there. But when they did, it was just dirty, filthy water that leaked out. And we got to work on it. And they were supposed to cost almost 400, think of it, 400 million dollars, because it's like putting the skin on a skyscraper. But bigger, much bigger, many skyscrapers, you could almost say, other than for the world. So I think of it, the world's tallest skyscraper is shorter than 2,400 feet. So we went to work. And over the years, I built hundreds of pools. I built them every time I built them. I always like to build the Olympic size swimming pools. And I was very aware of swimming pool, what goes into making a swimming pool. It's not as simple as people think. You never wanted to leak. You want a beautiful surface. I said, you know, I have an idea, Doug. We sat down. I said, let's take that long thing where we're going to fix it with concrete, which leaks, concrete, all sorts of other materials that all leak and don't look good. They're gray. And swimming pool, I have a swimming pool right up the road. I built it 22 years ago. It's perfect. I said, does it ever leak, though? It's good contractors. I actually called it a couple of the contractors, got some ideas from them. And I gave it to Doug and Doug's done an unbelievable job. And so they were going to spend maybe 400 million dollars. I don't know. You never know with cost overruns and everything. But it was going to take years to build three years, four years. And we'll have it done before July 4th substantially, before July 4th. If we didn't have such a bad weather the last four or five days, it could have been almost done. We have to-- you can't do this substance in the rain. And what they did is they cleaned it. They took out, as I said, more than 10 dumpsters of garbage. Shovels, it was disgusting. Well, every corner, every corner, had massive amounts of-- I guess that's the way the tide goes. But at massive amounts of garbage, we then steamed clean it. We then sandblasted it. And then we pebble blasted. That's a bigger version of sand. We made the surface as good as it can be. Now we're now covering it with the most beautiful blue. Very thick, you think of it as a very sophisticated form of rubber. No leaks, no problems. And it's beautiful. It's called American Flag Blue that was the color we chose.
And we are probably 70% finished with it. It's going to be finished. The heart part's done. And then we decided to do much more than we originally. What I originally I thought I was just going to do the surface. But we said the problem is the outer ring looks pretty bad, too, where you walk on. So we sandblasted that. This is all additional work we didn't want to do. When you do something like this, when you do the one, you think the other looked OK. But then when the other, you see the new surface, the old stuff that looked OK looks really bad. So we cleaned that sandblasted it. The walkways, all of it's tremendous amount of area. So again, it's thousands of feet long, very wide. This is where the people stand, not the water part, the dry part. And we had a combination of granite and stone. And we're pointing it, fixing it, the joints were terrible, everything. The whole place was a mess. And when it opens in a couple of weeks, long before July 4, we want to have a fidget life for the weekend, but it'll be long before that. You will see something that's really going to be beautiful. And now we're looking at the World War II found, because that's also a pretty bad shape on the bottom, whether I'm duplicated, I think, with the-- maybe with a slightly different color, actually. We'll go with a lighter color. But Doug and I have a lot of fun doing it. Your staff is fantastic. They've really worked well. But the concept, so think of it, on set of spending $2,300 million, and it will never work. We're going to spend like $10 million, maybe $12 million. And set of spending four years, we're going to spend like if you edit all up like a couple of months. And instead of going through four fourth of July, it's a horrible construction site. We're going to have it open before the fourth of July. And the difference is it's better. Somebody said, oh, well, but it's not the same. Some of the fake days will say, well, but it's not. Now it's like the pen is better at $2 than it was a $2,000. This is the same thing. This is far better. It'll last for 50 years, maybe 100 years, if they didn't even know. I said, how long will this last? Oh, I think you'll get 50 years out of it. We did the swimming pool treatment, but they said, sir, for a little more money, we can get industrial strength. I said, that sounds good to me. Same color, same everything, same stuff. But it's much-- it's actually much stronger. It's used for industrial. I said, I love that. So we're going to have that open. It's going to be really, really beautiful. And it's a very important thing. We can't have people looking at the Washington Monument going the memorial. You take a look, the Lincoln Memorial. It was built, I guess, a little after the Lincoln Memorial. It's embarrassing. It was so horrible. I never saw anything like it. It was filthy dirty. It was Biden. And they spent-- between the two of them, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix this thing. Now, when Biden-- when no, Obama did it, he spent way over $100 million. And they had a great idea. Let's use the water from the Potomac, because environmentally, they liked it. Somebody said that was good. But the water from the Potomac was not suitable for this to put it mildly. It was disgusting what happened. And so they spent hundreds of millions, over $100 million.
And they immediately closed it. It was closed for many months, and nobody did anything. It was closed. It's basically been closed. But go back to 1922, it was always sort of people think of it as beautiful, but it was always a mess. It's going to be unbelievable. It will be unbelievable. It's actually exciting. I want to write over there today, if I can. I always have a problem with secret services in love with my walking along, checking-- checking the sidewalk, the new sidewalk, to see whether or not they pointed it correctly. But they do. We have great contractors doing this. But we'll spend a very tiny amount of money. And it'll be better than it ever was when it was built in 1922. It's very exciting, actually. To me, I love construction. It's very exciting. And we do many things. We did 28 or 29 fountains. I made a contribution to redoing Lafayette Park. That's the entrance to the White House. And it was an embarrassment. Flores were broken. They had bricks. The bricks-- some of the bricks were missing. You know, they were missing. They took them out and throw at people. They were going with them. It's going to be a world-class park. It'll be open pretty soon. They're doing a lot of work over there. That was a contribution that I made with some other people. And it's going to be really beautiful. That was really the front door to the White House. But you couldn't even use it. It was so terrible. People would come to the White House. And it was so terrible. So with that, I'm going to ask Pete to talk about some of our great success."
