April 17, 2007
Dear Coalition Friends:
Here below are two different takes on last Wednesday's "Framing a Capital City" day-long Symposium at the National Building Museum. I provide excerpts and links to the full stories in The Washington Post and The Washington Times.
My own comments, in the Commemoration and Symbolic Narrative session, focused on reconnecting the National Mall to the larger capital city by creating an updated, democratized national narrative for the National Mall as well as the city as whole that provides local residents as well as visitors and tourists with a more comprehensive, culturally rich, and exciting story of who we are as a city and a nation. This will require DC Government and Congress to work together.
THE WASHINGTON POST
By Philip Kennicott
Saturday, April 14, 2007; C01
First there was an idea, and then a plan. Then, over the course of Washington's first century of existence, there was a lot of building, a living-up-to the plan and a filling in of empty space. And with the 20th century, there was finally a city of sorts, though it's not clear if Washington really thinks of itself in those terms. What we have here is an identity crisis, a failure of urbanity.
That thumbnail sketch of local history may not seem to have much to do with Monday's planned D.C. Emancipation Day March for District voting rights. But when Deputy Mayor and City Administrator Dan Tangherlini addressed a crowd of about 200 city planners, activists and students this week, attending Monday's march was the best advice he could give to anyone concerned about the District's future.
The problem with D.C. planning, Tangherlini said, is that we are not taken seriously as a city. "The enterprise is illegitimate," he said, at least in the eyes of the federal officials who call so many of the shots.
That may have been the best summation of the strange malaise that hovered over the proceedings of "Framing a Capital City," an all-day symposium held Wednesday at the National Building Museum. It proceeded as so many well-intentioned symposiums often do, a day of tangents and digressions. And again and again, people kept coming to two paradoxical conclusions: That we are a great city, almost a model city, and yet we remain strangely inert, supine in the face of federal intervention, layers of bureaucracy and intellectual inertia.
...But at the end of the day, the entire symposium was really about our basic lack of self-confidence. Washington is a city defined by outsiders, by tourists who come looking to see their little piece of the American pie reflected back at them in a monument, memorial or museum, and by politicians who use the city (both literally as a place to gather and symbolically as a place to hate) but never really live here.
It seems we have internalized all this negativity. No one wants to make big plans for the city, the kind of plan that Pierre L'Enfant made for George Washington, or that the 1901-02 McMillan Commission made to bring the city some imperial splendor. And you see the confidence crisis reflected in small ways. We have the infrastructure of a great cultural city, but so many of the city's cultural organizations play it safe. Our architecture languishes in a cul-de-sac of vitiated classicism. Even restaurants close early, a small but telling symptom of the city's crisis of urbanity. Real cities are filled with people who eat late, mingle late and walk home late.
Unspoken, but lurking behind so much of the malaise at the symposium, is a basic philosophical sense of Washington's relation to the nation. Unlike the world's other great capitals, we are not an exporter of ideas. People come to Washington to do their local business, to refashion the nation and the city to their own image. Ideas are imposed from the outside. Washington is intellectually passive about its sense of self. So many of the arguments we have here about city planning are about balancing the demands of people who don't live here.
It doesn't necessarily have to be that.
...It took Washington a century to look like a capital. And it took another century to make it feel like a city. Now it needs to start thinking like a city, showing the 25 million annual tourists the cutting edge of architecture, sustainable design and development, and the bustle and bumptious energy of a real metropolis. A good start would be a few restaurants that serve until 4 a.m.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Tom Ramstack
April 12, 2007
The District's planners suggested yesterday that areas throughout the city be beautified to look like the Mall to make them ready for monuments and museums...
"Memorial and museum sponsors don't want to accept locations scattered across the city," said Judy Scott Feldman, chairwoman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall. "They want the Mall. Off-Mall locations seem to confer second-class status."
The National Capital Planning Commission, the federal government's planning agency for the District, has tried for a decade to direct proposed monuments to sites away from the Mall, such as along North, South and East Capitol streets. The efforts often were lost in bickering between the federal government and the District about where to build.
The commission has identified 100 off-Mall sites for monuments or museums, including a proposed Hispanic-American museum, a national health museum and a museum honoring women.
Ms. Feldman suggested a new option yesterday: expanding the Mall.
Federal property such as East Potomac Park, South Capitol Street and the land across the Potomac River in Virginia could be connected to the Mall through bridges, pedestrian paths and bicycle paths, she said.
"This wouldn't require tearing down parts of the city as was done during urban renewal in the 1950s," Ms. Feldman said...
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat and the District's nonvoting member of Congress, has supported Mall expansion plans, but no legislation has been introduced. So far, the proposal is "just ours," Ms. Feldman said...
Copyright © 2007 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
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