February 9, 2009
Dear Coalition Friends:
In yesterday's Washington Post, columnist John "Answer Man" Kelly tried to tackle what he probably thought was a simple question about our National Mall: Where is it?
Most of you probably think you know. I know that standing at the Washington Monument during the Inauguration I thought I was on the Mall. The National Park Service and Congress, though, disagree.
But isn't the bigger question, as Kelly writes, what the Mall means to all Americans and what it could become in the future? Our Coalition thinks so too and has taken up the topic in our call to action, "Rethinking The National Mall" -- at www.savethemall.org
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THE WASHINGTON POST
By John Kelly
Sunday, February 8, 2009; C03
In the days after Inauguration Day, The Post reported on the size of the crowd on the Mall. The writers seemed to focus only on the space from the Capitol up through the Washington Monument. I have always thought the Mall included the Washington Monument and all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial. Am I crazy, Answer Man?
-- Melanie Dolan, Silver Spring
Answer Man is not qualified to venture an opinion as to your exact mental state.
Unfortunately, the situation is not much clearer when it comes to the Mall. As with pornography, we know it when we see it. And yet what exactly the Mall is may influence what the Mall could be.
Bill Line, a spokesman for the National Park Service, said: "We are well aware that Washingtonians -- let alone Americans from other parts of the country -- typically refer to the National Mall as the east/west two-mile swatch of land from First Street to basically the Potomac River."
However, he said, what Congress and the Park Service consider the Mall extends only from the Grant Monument at First Street west to 14th Street. It's bounded on the north by Constitution Avenue and on the south by Independence Avenue. The area from 14th to 17th streets is referred to as the Washington Monument grounds. West of 17th Street to the Potomac River and then down to the railroad bridge near I-395 -- an area that includes the Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, World War II, Korea and Vietnam memorials -- is called West Potomac Park. South of the bridge and down to Hains Point is called East Potomac Park.
Not so fast, said Judy Scott Feldman, an art historian who heads the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, a nonprofit group founded in 2000. "There are at least four Park Service definitions and none of them include the Capitol or the White House," Judy said. Why should anyone care whether the Mall includes the Capitol or White House? Well, they are buildings whose purpose is symbolically noted in Pierre L'Enfant's original design for the city.
L'Enfant illustrated the separation between Congress and the president by sticking their buildings at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. He honored George Washington by placing a monument to him at the intersection of lines drawn south from the Capitol and east from the White House.
He envisioned the Mall as something like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, said Don Hawkins, a local architect well-versed in the development of Washington. "L'Enfant would have thought of it as a promenade," Don said. "There was a time when people would simply parade up and down and nod at each other, and ride carriages slowly as they did in Paris and London in the 19th century."
That didn't really happen with our Mall, which until the 1840s was pretty much just a big blank space bounded on the west by the canal that ran where Constitution Avenue is now. Then landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing reconceived the Mall as a series of Victorian naturalistic landscapes filled with trees and meandering paths. Railroad tracks bisected the Mall and there was a station where the National Gallery of Art is today.
The McMillan Plan of 1902 -- carried out in the afterglow of the Columbian Exposition -- rediscovered L'Enfant's plan. It wasn't until the 1930s that the trees from Downing's day were cut down (FDR was decried as a tree killer) and grass was planted. Even so, the last of the temporary buildings erected during World War I and II didn't come down until the early 1970s.
But what -- and, in a sense, where -- should tomorrow's Mall be? In 2003, Congress put a moratorium on new Mall construction -- and then promptly started making exceptions. Anyone angling for a new museum or monument wants to be "on the Mall," threatening the greensward (and, often, brownsward) that people love to gather on for inaugurations, Independence Day festivities and protests.
Judy's group thinks there's an easy solution: Expand the Mall. Make the Mall all the places people think it is already, plus plenty more -- from the White House to the Tidal Basin and beyond. You could build roofed facilities out near Hains Point and hold the Folklife Festival there. The annual event would still be on the Mall. So would whatever statues, monuments or museums future generations see fit to erect.
And it would preserve the open space for we the people.
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