One day late in August, with Congress out of session and the magazine enjoying a late-summer lull, I decided it was a good time to uphold the Monthly tradition of fleeing work while the boss was otherwise occupied for a rare bit of relaxation. One of the nicer features of our office is (or ought to be) its proximity to the National Mall, which, it suddenly occurred to me, I had never fully explored during my two years in Washington. Spurred by the exotic freedom of being outdoors on a workday, I resolved to take full advantage of this historic treasure and stroll its entire length, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol.
This particular day was like most summer days in Washington--hot. As I approached the Lincoln Memorial, I spotted a water fountain shimmering in the distance beyond a cluster of parched and deserted baseball diamonds, but arrived to discover it was broken. So was the next one I encountered. And the next. Finding refuge in the shade of the Great Emancipator, I decided that the fun quotient for my afternoon escape was sorely lacking, and sought professional assistance. The Mall was conspicuously free of National Park Service employees, but eventually I found some huddled in the icy splendor of their air-conditioned kiosk. Grudgingly, one leaned forward and cracked a window, looking none too pleased at the perspiring interloper in his midst. I politely inquired about refreshments. Immediately he looked scandalized. "We don't sell beer on the National Mall . . . It's federal property!"
As luck would have it, a passerby overheard this exchange and beckoned me over. It turned out that he manned one of the booths that sell Vietnam War memorabilia at the base of the Lincoln Memorial and that we shared similar tastes. Pointing to a refreshment stand not 50 feet from the rangers' kiosk, he assured me that I could indeed buy a beer. He was correct. But as a Park Service police officer gruffly announced after stopping me as I tried to proceed up the Mall, enjoying the beer was another matter: It is against the law to leave the tiny plot of dirt on which the refreshment stand sits--not for a shady bench or even for the restrooms a few dozen yards away in the Lincoln Memorial. He regarded me suspiciously as I drained my cup and slunk off.
My encounter is typical of today's National Mall. Instead of a public sanctuary for Americans to celebrate and enjoy, visitors are treated like ill-mannered museum-goers, endured but unwelcome. Approaching the Korean War Memorial, for example, signs forbid smoking, eating, drinking, biking, running, and--seriously--cross-country skiing. (Actual sign: "Honor those who served: KEEP OUT.") For many of its 16 million annual visitors, the Mall is a profound disappointment. Much of it is fenced off to visitors. There are no picnic tables, few restrooms, and little in the way of shade or fountains. Its museums take pride in drawing great art from around the world, but its cuisine is drawn primarily from Coney Island. Those whose culinary interest transcends hot dogs and limp pizza slices must either intuit the existence of a food court hidden deep within the bowels of the Air and Space Museum or wander into downtown Washington to jostle with lobbyists for the privilege of paying $28 for a salmon lunch.
Trekking on toward the Capitol, I noticed that no one else was enjoying themselves either. Overheated parents pushed catatonic youngsters in strollers. Seniors staggered through the heat and dust. With no relief from the beating sun, tourists fanned themselves with brochures and wrapped T-shirts around their heads. Like me, most were sunburned, thirsty, and exhausted, possibly experiencing the late stages of heat stroke. Instead of the nourishing patriotic uplift that the Mall should provide, their weary stares betrayed a sober realization that they had encountered not the joyous public sanctuary they imagined, but a civic burden--in a metaphor for the way Washington works, one that cruelly ignores the needs of the very Americans whose taxes enable it.
This isn't the way it was supposed to be. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, whom George Washington commissioned to design the capital in 1791, envisioned the Mall as a "place of general resort" that would be "attractive to the learned and afford diversion to the idle." L'Enfant had in mind the great places of France: the parks and avenues of Paris, the stately precincts of Versailles. According to the architectural historian Pamela Scott, "The Mall was to be the center of the intellectual and artistic life of Washington."
Instead, it is a parched and barren expanse presided over by a despotic Park Service bent on stamping out any trace of fun or enjoyment. By day, oppressive heat and choking dust clouds frustrate its users--not Washingtonians but beleaguered tourists. By night it is bereft of human activity and controlled by marauding gangs of rats. For more than 200 years, Congress has been charged with stewardship of the Mall. The results are plain.
Were Washington indeed like a great European capital, this heart of the city would be a place where families, professionals, and tourists could gather at all hours in lively cafes arrayed along the Reflecting Pool to enjoy a cold drink and a good meal, laugh and socialize, or simply gaze in wonder at the marble symbols of America's greatness. Instead, on a hot summer day or a cool spring evening, there is no worse place to be in the nation's capital than the National Mall.
Monuments and Malaria
Throughout American history, the world's greatest architects have sought to realize the Mall's potential--and each has been thwarted. Pierre L'Enfant was never able to see his grand plan through to completion. In what would become a familiar pattern, he grew fed up with the federal commissioners overseeing the city's creation and resigned just months into the process. For the next half-century the Mall's development proceeded apace, overseen by Congress with not entirely unexpected results. L'Enfant's plan was largely ignored. During Andrew Jackson's presidency, many of the Mall's trees died due to the poor soil. The Washington Monument, which was to be erected at the axial convergence of the White House and the Capitol, was accidentally built off center. What today is known as the Ellipse--the green space between the White House and the Washington Monument--became "a fetid swamp created by sewage from the executive mansion." Waste from the Patent and Post Offices emptied into a malarial canal that lawmakers permitted to run directly down the middle of the Mall. Not surprisingly, the Mall was hardly the civic gathering place L'Enfant had imagined (though it was center to the city's booming slave trade).
In 1850, Congress again set itself to the task of beautification. The Smithsonian Building Committee envisioned "an extended park," which "by its picturesque style of architecture will form a prominent and most attractive feature." No less than President Fillmore himself formally invited the leading landscape architect of the day, Andrew Jackson Downing, to design the plan. Downing aimed for public comfort, submitting a plan that featured 130 new species of trees, a fountain garden, and a triumphant marble arch. In a fit of patriotism, he declared to his patrons, "If you gentlemen who have influence in Washington will stand by me I will make the Capital blossom like a rose." Congress responded by appropriating only enough funds to landscape a fraction of the Mall and permitted the B&O Railroad to cut across it at the foot of the Capitol. Downing died shortly thereafter, his dream unrealized. By the end of the century, the Mall--that part of it not overrun by steam engines--was divided into nearly a dozen zones, each controlled by a different government bureau, each with its own architect and gardening staff, and each accountable to a different congressional committee.
For 50 years, Downing's remained the guiding vision for the Mall. And for 50 years, Congress found reason to deny it funding. Not until the turn of the 20th century did lawmakers try once more. When they did, they had in mind nothing so noble as improving the lives of Americans, but instead wished to stop criticism from foreigners and luminaries like Henry James who considered the capital to be "ugly." In a renewed bid for cultural parity with the great European capitals, Senator James McMillan appointed three prominent landscape architects--Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.--to what became known as the Senate Park Commission. By way of encouragement, Congress allotted them so little money that they were forced to "volunteer" as public servants, and paid for the architectural model of an improved Mall out of their own pockets.
When they presented their plan in 1902, Congress demonstrated its appreciation by terminating all appropriation and disbanding the commission. Its offense had not been aesthetic, but political: Speaker Joseph Cannon of Illinois cited the Senate's "politically egregious error" of failing to secure House approval to improve the Mall. Instead of acting on what became known as the McMillan Plan--which envisioned such public amenities as playgrounds, baths, theaters, gymnasiums, and athletic facilities--Congress built itself new House and Senate office buildings and a new headquarters for the Department of Agriculture.
It took nearly three decades and a world war for Congress to act again. When it was ready, it did so in characteristic fashion, establishing a commission to enact the McMillan Plan and allotting it so little money that it could only afford to hire a 27-year-old director. Though it managed to erect the Lincoln Memorial (after a lengthy skirmish), the commission also eliminated the "intrusive trees" along the Mall and eschewed new fountains because a prominent adviser despised them. Through the mid-1960s, lawmakers ignored numerous plans designed to restore the spirit of L'Enfant's "grand and majestic avenue." In 1965, the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill tried once more, introducing a widely hailed plan that would have added public pavilions, kiosks, bandstands, fountains, and refreshment and recreational facilities that would at long last cater to the taxpaying public. It was roundly ignored. It is little surprise, then, that modern historians have concluded that the sorry state of our National Mall is a "pragmatic response to low budgets" and "a clear reflection of congressional indecision."
Scenes from a Mall
For as long as Congress has refused to fund the Mall, lawmakers have used it to flaunt their power and construct grandiose shrines to their egos. In the 1960s, House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas initiated construction of the ghastly $135-million Rayburn House Office Building, which one architecture critic memorably dubbed "the Texas Penitentiary" for its imposing blocks of concrete and flights of stairs that lead nowhere. (The architect who assisted with the project was reportedly so ashamed of the result that it haunted him till his death.) Rayburn and his successor, House Speaker John McCormick, also pushed through an unwanted extension to the east front of the Capitol, known as the "Texas Front," since both lawmakers viewed its construction as evidence of their power. In 1904, when Theodore Roosevelt refused to let the Agriculture Department extend its headquarters onto the Mall, its secretary, James Wilson, instructed architects to build only the wings, which one critic likened to a "decayed tooth." Congress's aesthetic philistinism shows no sign of abating. As recently as the 1960s, lawmakers proposed building an eight-lane highway to cut across the Mall where the railroad once did at the foot of the Capitol.
Often it was easier to exhibit one's power and bad taste by preventing improvements to the Mall. Speaker Cannon held up construction of the Lincoln Memorial for a decade because he didn't approve of the chosen location. It took the full weight of President Taft to get construction underway. Memorial Bridge, proposed in 1902 to connect the Lincoln Memorial with Arlington National Cemetery, was only built in 1923 after a traffic jam delayed the president's arrival at the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for more than an hour. In 1952, Michigan's Rep. George Dondero, chairman of the House Committee on Public Buildings, delivered a memorable speech declaring that modernism was a "Communist conspiracy" that threatened to deprave American museums, and held up approval of modernist works like the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that line the Mall today.
But there is perhaps no greater anathema to civic improvement than the Commission on Fine Arts--a sinister cabal of local elites who conspire to thwart public enjoyment of the Mall. Granted oversight by Congress in 1910, the commission controls everything from monument placement to signage, though its primary purpose seems to be crushing attempts at betterment of the Mall by haughtily denying modern-day proposals for fountains, cafes, and bandstands, while allowing such blights as the World War II Memorial to speed ahead. Because it is at the mercy of Congress--which itself cringes before well-organized interest groups like World War II vets--the Fine Arts Commission invites the worst of both worlds: It blocks public-spirited improvements yet is powerless to stop congressional eyesores.
Indeed, there are currently no fewer than 13 memorials that have been approved by Congress and await only a location. These include monuments to such former presidents as Dwight Eisenhower and John Adams, but also to the likes of Tomas Masaryk (the first president of Czechoslovakia) and Benjamin Banneker (the black mathematician who measured the moons of Jupiter). Many more are pending in Congress. When it comes to the Mall, admits Charles Atherton, executive secretary of the Fine Arts Commission, "Congress can do anything it damn well pleases." This tradition encompasses more than just caving to the fearsome Czech-American lobby (to say nothing of Jupiter's political clout). For those lawmakers who feel compelled to compensate for a perceived shortcoming, ramming through some architectural atrocity predates even sports cars and powerboats as a desperate symbol of virility. It is time once and for all to free this national treasure from the pestilence of congressional influence.
I Have a Dream . . .
These days, the experience of visiting the National Mall is a lot like a junior high school civics class--there's lots of history and statesmanship in the air, but it's more pedantic than enjoyable, and going to the bathroom is all but out of the question. This is partly because bluenose historic preservationists wish to preserve the Mall in amber, partly because Congress's interest in it is limited to appeasing whichever ominous-looking interest group happens to be demanding public tribute. Today's Mall is completely isolated from the life of the city, a far cry from the intended civic gathering place. Save for the odd march or protest, it is ignored (so much so that it's a popular place to dispose of corpses, which surface every now and then in the Tidal Basin).
Most of the people I encountered in late August were tourists, many of them foreigners, or unlucky folks who, like me, were forced either through ignorance, filial obligation, or a misplaced sense of patriotism to attempt the Bataan Death March from Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol. Apart from the occasional lobster-hued jogger panting along through the blazing sun, no one appeared to live in the District.
Rather than mirror the great capitals of Europe as L'Enfant wished, the Mall mirrors the culture of Washington workaholism, promoting the belief that nothing of interest occurs after dusk and reinforcing the "state capital" quality from which the city suffers. As Richard Guy Wilson, chairman of the architectural history department at the University of Virginia, points out, "Politicians view the Mall as no more than a backdrop for national pageantry." In other words, they don't actually use it. Consequently, the Mall is not a symbol of America so much as of the average American congressman--stately, aloof, and not much fun after 6 p.m.
Were such a space in Rome, Paris, or London, it would undoubtedly be a vibrant haven, teeming with life and full of fountains, plazas, bars, and restaurants that pick up--not empty out--when the sun sets. It's time to end the stifling curatorial tyranny plaguing our nation's capital and democratize the National Mall--to finally realize L'Enfant's vision of a bustling, "grand avenue." Anyone daunted by the prudes and preservationists who insist this would be ruinous need look no further than L'Enfant's beloved Paris to see how easily national monuments can sit among congenial public amenities. The possibilities are practically limitless: morning espresso in the half light of spring cherry blossoms, lunch under the gaze of the Lincoln Monument, margaritas and nachos along the Reflecting Pool, a beer garden in Constitution Gardens--and why not a moon bounce for the kids? The time has come to liberate the Mall from its elitist death grip. Anything less is simply un-American.
