Kennedy Center suspends free tours, citing review of tour routes

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is suspending its free public tour program, a tradition that has run continuously since the center opened in 1971 except for a one-year pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an internal memo.

Brooks Boeke, director of the center’s volunteer program, told tour guide volunteers the program would go on a “temporary pause” effective Friday and instructed them to stop reporting for duty “until further notice,” according to the memo. The memo did not give a reason for the suspension.

A Kennedy Center spokesperson, P.J. Elliott, said the center was “conducting a review of campuswide tour routes” to improve the visitor experience, according to a statement given to the New York Times.

The suspension follows a Times profile of a volunteer tour guide that detailed what the paper characterized as President Trump’s overhaul of the cultural institution. Three volunteers reportedly told a Times reporter, before the internal memo went out, that they feared the tour program could be targeted in retaliation. The Kennedy Center has not addressed that timing beyond the tour-routes statement.

The tour pause comes against the backdrop of separate, ongoing disputes over the center’s leadership. In May, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the board’s decision to rename the center after Mr. Trump was unlawful, writing that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” The same ruling temporarily blocked the board’s vote to close the center for two years for renovations. There is no indication the tour program’s suspension is connected to either dispute beyond its timing following the Times report.