The Mess on the Mall
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Mess on the Mall Confusion reigns supreme on America's promenade BY ANDREW FERGUSON If you want a vision of hell, look here: the national mall in Washington, D.C., at noon on a summer's day....
...Dad wears a muscle-beach T-shirt stretched over a Cheesecake Factory body, his hair matted in shiny ringlets round the crown of his head...
...And just getting in and out of the museums is a pain...
...the unavoidable word is "iconic...
...But by 1900 the frontier had been declared closed...
...There were false starts and missteps...
...Fifty years after Downing's death, the mall was—yes—a mess...
...She wanted to make the course as participatory as possible, so she took her students to meet architects, designers, urban planners, and especially the bureaucrats who oversee the mall...
...We make the mall bigger...
...Everyone seemed to agree the moratorium was long overdue, but it came with an unavoidable catch: Congress can override the ban whenever it wants...
...As a consequence something squirrely entered the mall's architecture...
...Tickets for the mall's only bus service, the Tourmobile, cost $17.50 for adults, $9 for children...
...It's incoherent," she said...
...We want to bring people onto the mall," Feldman said, "to enjoy it and be inspired by it...
...Worse, one begins to feel that one is supposed to feel like a nuisance...
...Except the unexceptional isn't very interesting, and neither is the museum...
...Judy Feldman and her coalition know this but are undeterred...
...It's enormously popular...
...They share classical materials—light-shaded marble—and they have classical massing: solid and rectangular...
...The landscape Downing set down on paper was republican: a series of gardens of different sizes, full of winding carriageways and tangled bowers, a "public museum of living trees and shrubs...
...The National Park Service at first declared the closing "temporary...
...Meanwhile, slyer alterations are being made to the mall's landscape that have nothing to do with the threat of terrorism...
...A college professor by trade, Feldman came to her activism late...
...The next urgent step, Feldman told me, is to push for some kind of unitary oversight of the mall...
...You could have a beautiful piece of architecture here, facing Virginia and all the waterfront, and if you bridge it here, or maybe here, you create a whole new circulation pattern...
...Just when you think there's nothing the curators won't put in a glass case, you remember the stuff they really aren't putting in a glass case...
...Though the mall is generally credited to Pierre L'Enfant and his plan of 1791—the idea was a grand promenade extending from Capitol Hill to the Washington Monument, then turning northward to take in the President's House—Downing was the first man to have the practical opportunity to impress on the land an artistic vision of his own...
...People who frequent the mall can cite the moment when they began to notice something was up, and such moments often pre-date September 11, 2001...
...A few years ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation did the same...
...Much of it was built, in fits and starts, and patches remained, in varying states of cultivation, for nearly 80 years...
...It authorized construction of a massive subterranean visitors center for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial...
...The idea was to have little concessions and food stands all along here, where people walk...
...favorite spots for picnics or loafing suddenly recede behind bollards or are rendered inaccessible altogether...
...Civic improvers had dredged the Potomac and pushed its banks westward to the future site of the Lincoln Memorial, but the landfill lay vacant, covered in stub grass and dotted with malarial pools...
...But they have gone on to gain new allies with an organization called the National Coalition to Save Our Mall...
...So we propose continuing the tradition...
...Downing's vision of pastoral republicanism was dispensed with altogether...
...But the mall, for all its obscured majesty, is improbable, too...
...The word most commonly applied to the character of the new additions to the postVietnam mall is "balkanized...
...what we got instead, in the mid-1970s, was Constitution Gardens, a Downing-like meadow of willow trees and duck ponds and little bridges and islands, looking slightly out of place amid the mall's otherwise angular geometry...
...But the classical lines are laid out with modernist austerity and lack of ornamentation, while the modernist simplicity is weighed down by the classical bulk...
...In fact, the bill imposing the moratorium contained the first exemption to itself...
...Watching Feldman spin her fantastic vision, I remembered reading a statement of Charles Moore, one of the geniuses behind the McMillan commission...
...L'Enfant had foreseen something continental, almost regal, like Versailles...
...It will be permanent...
...To the other, the Lincoln Memorial looms in what might or might not be Hellenic grandeur...
...It's not a design...
...Preservationists have a weakness for extravagant overstatement, yet even a non-preservationist would have to admit that the League is right to draw attention to policies that choke the mall, threatening to change it irretrievably, and for the worse...
...Thanks to an unbroken procession of festivals, rallies, concerts, and other special events, acres of the mall itself are stripped of grass and gone to dust, or mud, depending on the weather...
...They're not allowed...
...Many of these new memorials were stylistic heirs as well to the Vietnam design...
...There's little coordination among the agencies, and what there is consists mostly of log-rolling and wagon-circling...
...The FDR memorial is similarly huge, and like the others, sprawls horizontally rather than rising vertically...
...Now you've got a shift away from the pedestrian-friendly experience and toward the Tourmobile experience...
...A Ferris wheel might have been nice...
...The mall coalition has Judy Feldman...
...Last year the coalition held city-wide workshops before launching The Third Century Mall Initiative, whose chairman and master publicist, Judy Scott Feldman, I first met on a blustery day this spring, in the visitors center at the Smithsonian castle on the mall...
...The federal government, caretaker of the mall, has never bothered to print a map showing concession stands and restaurants...
...As the architectural historian Richard Longstreth put it, it "is treated like a secret garden—an inward-looking world that is hardly discernible until one enters its confines...
...The commissioners got much of what they wanted, and much of what they hoped for is still here, and still thrilling...
...In 1850 he was hired by President Fillmore to make of the mall, then little more than a floodplain, "a national Park, which should be an ornament to the Capital of the United States...
...It can be painful to watch Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis make their way through such exhibits, to see their quickening steps and the boredom unmistakable behind their wan, expressionless faces—not getting it, of course, but not wanting to admit they're not getting it...
...The Smithsonian has the largest holding of American Indian artifacts in the world—objects of great beauty and historical interest, such as Sitting Bull's pictographic autobiography—yet all but a handful of them are put away in a warehouse in Suitland, Maryland...
...Yet the real problem with the League's declaration is that it didn't go far enough...
...Information" has rolls of teletype paper, and "Transportation" has, of course, cars, plus a slab of paving from an old highway...
...The mall's present scheme, in outline, is the work of a commission impaneled in 1900 and chaired by Senator James McMillan of Michigan...
...The most recent monument, the World War II memorial, set off a furious protest from people who objected to its size, its design, or its placement around the Rainbow Pool at the foot of the Washington Monument...
...The Smithsonian museums that line the eastern stretch of the mall are air-cooled, of course...
...I thought, I'm a native Washing-tonian...
...Some nervy officials even dared to mention that of the 58,000 military dead in the war, only 8 were women, and that the 10,000 women who served in Vietnam constituted 33/100 of 1 percent of the total American force...
...These two facts—that the demand for memorials will be insatiable, and that once a memorial is here it will never become unpopular—make the congressional moratorium on new mall construction all the more important...
...The country's post-Vietnam self-flagellation was entering its most intense phase, and Scruggs quickly raised more money than he needed...
...the porch around the Lincoln Memorial is fenced off...
...On her laptop Feldman showed me the outlines of the Park Service's 1976 mall master plan...
...As it is, seven different governmental agencies control different bits of territory in the symbolic core...
...The Korean veterans memorial—though representational, unlike the Vietnam memorial, and with a beautiful inscription suggesting heroism— shares the same mirrored black granite and outlandish size...
...Mine came nearly a decade ago, when I drove an aged visitor into town for a close-up look at the Washington Monument...
...To be an American family in such a situation—on your first trip to the national mall, where (your textbooks taught you) those monuments of creamy marble rest among vast squares of green, set nobly along America's grandest promenade—is to be primed for indignities, one after another...
...It has never reopened...
...it is the memorial as therapy, flattering the visitor's sensitivity...
...Yet L'Enfant had conceived of Washington as a city of "magnificent vistas," and you can still stand at the base of the Washington Monument and see through to the Lincoln Memorial—a small victory, maybe, but one that can be laid to Feldman and her army of agitators...
...In 2000 Parsons told the Washington Post he hoped that eventually all unauthorized traffic, whether by foot or private car, would be moved off the mall...
...One begins to feel like a nuisance, in fact...
...The Jefferson Memorial, completing the north-south axis from the White House through the Ellipse and the grounds of the Washington Monument, opened in 1943...
...Instead, at the recently opened National Museum of the American Indian, visitors find glass cases presenting slot machines and casino chips and, in a tribute to the annual Denver March Pow Wow, a stack of bumper stickers and "go cups" from the Denver Coliseum, where the Pow Wow has been held since 1989...
...Nothing was discouraged...
...And we've got the better theme park...
...It's an idea...
...they seem to have been chosen, in fact, precisely because they aren't remarkable...
...The streets in the mall, for example, are under authority of the District of Columbia...
...Look," she said, "I'm not saying this is a detailed plan...
...There are lots of lessons to learn from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but two carry particular relevance for the mall's future...
...I know the history, I'm teaching architecture, I've got to do something...
...When the memorial was finished, the interest groups only metastasized...
...Yet standing on the mall today, knowing this history, you can be astonished at the durability of the McMillan design...
...But again the intellectual fashions changed, especially among historical curators...
...Still, our visitors make their way toward the restroom, and as they go they notice also that no one has thought to set out benches for the lame, the halt, or the merely footsore—just a few, here and there, usually splintered...
...Watching a rash of apartment buildings rise on the hills of San Francisco in the 1950s, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright told a local paper: "Only a place this beautiful could survive what you people are doing to it...
...The general collapse of architectural taste following World War II, and the collapse in national self-confidence brought on by the 1960s, have had more serious effects...
...The Park Service's ultimate desire was made public, indiscreetly, by John Parsons, associate regional park director for the mall...
...They succeeded in their demand that a life-sized, representational sculpture of three actual soldiers be included near the memorial, along with—creating still more controversy—an American flag...
...Urban planners are like libertarians: They're wonderful to have around so long as their advice is never, ever followed all the way through...
...Bob Kerrey opposing plans by the American Battle Monuments Commission to construct a memorial to World War II veterans on a spot between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument...
...But a visitor today would look up and see nothing that Downing knew: No hint of his work remains...
...This could be the Third Century Mall," she said...
...Didn't he save the country, too, after a manner of speaking...
...There was no one to teach his course...
...That's how I learned how things work—and don't work...
...The National Museum of American History is a showcase of "social history," the revisionist approach that downgrades the extraordinary and exemplary while elevating the everyday and unexceptional...
...It was clear from the start that this would be a different sort of war memorial...
...It was a way of encouraging people to get out in the mall...
...The senator suggested they rescue the mall...
...It's hard to believe that structures so large can be so unimpressive...
...She touched points up and down the mall...
...The results are seen in the ad hoc and redundant security measures, the lack of amenities, the thickening clutter, and the hostility toward any efforts to reverse the mall's decline...
...She grew up in Washington, moved away, married, and returned with her husband to the capital to teach medieval art at American University...
...Just like at Disneyland," Parsons told the Post...
...He hoped to replace them with a three-story underground parking garage (a great idea) topped with an amusement park (a less great idea...
...One is that memorials put up to satisfy an aggrieved interest group only spawn demands for more memorials from aggrieved interest groups...
...The laptop contained photographs, notes, architectural plans, historical drawings, government reports and studies, correspondence, power-point presentations—all the necessities of the activist life...
...Before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the mall's signature landmarks—monuments to Lincoln and Washington—were intended to be unifying...
...The mall and its history form a sketch of the country's aspirations and ever-changing image of itself...
...If traditional memorials were designed to lift the viewer out of himself and thrust him into a larger drama of enduring significance—this had been one of the principal purposes of the mall, as it developed and grew— then the Vietnam memorial careens violently in the other direction...
...In 1996 they got one on the other side of the Reflecting Pool from the Vietnam memorial, taking up an equivalent and carefully measured square footage...
...Because look: We really do need to get started...
...Do I exaggerate...
...The mall would have to grow, he told the skeptics...
...In style these buildings are neither classical nor modernist, but manage to combine the worst elements of each...
...In 1986, it passed the Commemorative Works Act to discourage runaway construction on the mall...
...The first building constructed on the mall after John Russell Pope's neoclassical National Gallery (1941) was the Museum of American History (1964), followed by the Museum of Air and Space (1976...
...Wright (who despised the mall's classical dimensions, incidentally) could have applied the same remark to the monumental core of Washington, D.C., as it limps into its third century...
...The pleasures of the mall are many, and most depend on its openness and accessibility: It is at once a municipal park, with fields for soccer and softball, a stage for democratic agitation, with space for marches and rallies, an educational center, with two or three of the country's most distinguished museums, and a place for patriotic edification, with a landscape encompassing not only the seat of government but also magnificent tributes to the man who founded the country and the man who saved it...
...And if Lincoln could have a memorial, what about FDR...
...Constitution Gardens was the best thing to happen to the mall in the second half of the twentieth century, but it seems almost a concession to a long-gone era...
...The mall's great size—it runs more than two miles in length—is daunting, even overwhelming, but it's so big it's hard to wreck...
...The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for example, is the most-visited monument in Washington, and easily the most influential structure placed on the mall in 75 years...
...At first the popularity wasn't universal...
...The League's statement of alarm continued: "Centuries of careful urban planning that created a city symbolic of openness, freedom, and democracy have been overturned by spontaneous, ill-planned measures...
...Overweening security is only the most immediate threat to the mall...
...Of course, the Park Service has its offices down there, with a big parking lot...
...The urn has traveled the mall over the last 150 years, bumped from one spot to another as the landscape changed, coming to rest here only in the 1990s...
...Partly in response to Feldman and her allies, the Battle Commission's subsequent proposals reduced the size of the design and modified its excesses...
...Jesse Jackson, who would periodically put the strike on hold so he could get a bite to eat...
...One of mine is in the Enid Haupt Garden, behind the Smithsonian castle...
...A recent report by the Government Accountability Office complained about water damage and inadequate maintenance in Smithsonian museums, two of which—the Old Patent Office (a few blocks from the mall), housing the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum, and the Arts and Industries building—are now closed, the latter with no reopening scheduled...
...She tapped a key and a new slide popped up on her screen...
...The permanent exhibits are built around concepts, the larger and more abstract the better—"Information," "Transportation," "Electricity," "Time...
...They want to keep people off...
...One Christmas a decade ago, she recalled, "the professor who taught Washington architecture dropped dead...
...We found a bench near a wall outlet, so she could plug in her laptop...
...The moratorium is a bit like the intermittent hunger strike once undertaken by the Rev...
...Yet at any other moment in history it would have been understood as a loud, sputtering raspberry directed at the mall's celebrated virtues...
...They lost, of course...
...For weeks at a time the mile-long stretch between the Capitol and the Washington Monument takes on a provisional look, like the scene shop for a complicated stage production, as tents and platforms and various temporary structures are set up, taken down, and stored in the open air...
...The urn makes for an eerie tribute—more a reminder of the transitory condition of the mall, where the grandest ambitions are played out and then disappear...
...This area is gorgeous...
...Hard to believe, but even the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was controversial when it was first proposed . . . ) Both the World War II and Vietnam memorials are fully as obtrusive and tasteless as their early critics feared...
...The 1976 Master Plan was oriented toward the pedestrian," she said...
...A memorial placed on the mall nowadays, no matter how initially offensive or widely criticized, can never be undone...
...Yet aside from the Air and Space museum, with dozens of tons of flying machines suspended from the ceiling, and the art galleries, for people who like that sort of thing, the museums are a bit bewildering...
...Besides, I asked Feldman, what could a new commission do about the clutter, which is an inevitable function, as the economists say, of a limitless desire (for commemoration) and a limited resource (space on the mall...
...I've met Baptist ministers with less enthusiastic handshakes...
...Carved in memory of Downing's early death in 1852, the urn's inscription asks the visitor to look around and admire the great designer's artistry...
...It is a monument to A.J...
...Already the family has been through half a dozen metal detectors and had their fanny packs poked and probed just as often—even at the Botanical Gardens, which has recently been locked down against evildoers bent on anti-fuchsia terrorism...
...But they're here to stay...
...President Bush has insisted that room be found on the mall for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and at least one public committee ponders a Latino museum, too...
...Needless to say, the mere whisper of the word "Disney" sends shudders through the aesthetes at the Coalition...
...The McMillan plan was a creature of the neoclassical revival...
...Since the moratorium was passed, the World War II Memorial has been built, two concession stands and Tourmobile turnarounds are under construction near the Lincoln Memorial, plans proceed for two similar buildings at the Washington Monument, the National Museum of the American Indian filled up the mall's southeast corner, designs have been approved for a four-acre Martin Luther King memorial and a memorial honoring black Revolutionary War soldiers, and several Republican congressmen have declared their intention to reserve space on the mall for a monument to Ronald Reagan—which, they stipulate, must be at least as big as the 7.5-acre FDR memorial, and not one hectare less...
...To one side the Capitol building shimmers in ghostly outline...
...It was a continuation of our history, this expansion of the public space...
...Within fewer than thirty years neoclassicism had become an object of derision and contempt among the nation's tastemakers and sophisticates...
...The nearby parking lot, by custom reserved for just such drop-ins, was suddenly closed...
...I love Washington, I love Washington architecture...
...They evoked a common patrimony that Americans shared by virtue of being Americans...
...Now look," she said...
...And one—I hate to say it, I really do—would be right...
...For twenty-five years an overabundance of new permanent structures— museums, memorials, and monuments—have begun to complicate the simplicity of the mall's arrangement...
...The scramble for seats can get ugly, especially for the benches set in the shade of the overspreading elms...
...After the controversy over the World War II memorial, "we realized the whole system of regulating the mall was obsolete, doomed, mortally wounded...
...Seven years earlier, the "White City" of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago had launched the City Beautiful movement, and the attention of its partisans fell upon the tumbledown mall as the place for a grand experiment...
...She tapped Hains Point...
...Nowhere to park, nowhere to sit, nowhere to eat, nowhere to pee...
...Visitors could park in distant satellite lots and be bused to nodal points, where they would be watered and fed, allowed to tour a monument, and then reboard a bus and head for another monument...
...Iconic, too...
...And it's totally under-utilized...
...The sculpture, once installed, faced charges of sexism...
...It's a long and honorable line of visionaries Feldman and her friends invite us to join, stretching back through Moore to Downing, and beyond him to the great L'Enfant himself, who had the imagination and pluck to look out on a mess and dare to see a mall...
...At least they've got parking...
...You find hints of it all over...
...Then this World War II thing blew up...
...She traced her finger on the screen, conjuring up new walkways and bike paths, food courts and restrooms, uncluttered space for new monuments and museums, foot bridges over the Washington channel, even streets and lots for private cars...
...One doesn't have to spend too much time on the national mall—the "place of resort" for public walks that Pierre L'Enfant, the capital's designer, dreamed of—before one begins to detect a certain lack of hospitality...
...Needless to say, there is now a Vietnam Women's Memorial too, in a stand of trees thirty yards off to the side...
...The moratorium, they say, is merely a stop-gap—an effort to buy time...
...Congress had already sensed the problem...
...The air is hung with scrims of haze...
...Why, among the three soldiers, were there no women...
...It wasn't really till the 1970s that the commission's plan was substantially realized...
...And as long as we're all building memorials . . . World War II veterans started to wonder, where was ours...
...a chain-link fence closes off a shortcut there...
...Now and then I tried to raise practical objections—like, where's the money going to come from?—until at last she held up her hand...
...And if you get hungry, your chances of finding food depend heavily on luck...
...In 1997, Feldman read a newspaper op-ed by Sen...
...Her enthusiasm was infectious...
...Sometimes it looks like a game of musical chairs in an old folks' home...
...The memorial as it stands today—it was dedicated on Memorial Day 2004—is still enormous, covering seven acres...
...Feldman flipped up her laptop and began showing me slides to illustrate the divided oversight...
...visitors to the Reflecting Pool are unaccountably shooed away...
...Nobody drives through Disneyland...
...Late last year, the small parking lot adjacent to the Jefferson Memorial, also intended for quick visits, was sealed off to all but authorized vehicles (authorized: "not yours...
...Yet you don't have to share a horror at over-designed, overmanaged theme parks, with their subtle but ruthless crowd control, to see the threat this new bureaucratic sensibility poses...
...Most of the gardens had fallen to ruin...
...The Lincoln Memorial wasn't finished till 1922...
...Why not a museum of military history down here...
...Oddly for a promenade, fences are everywhere: snow fences of flimsy red slats and wire, more formidable cyclone fences painted black, placed to discourage unauthorized ambling and to cordon off vast acreage of greensward—or what would be greensward if it were green...
...It's an odd aesthetic to honor the most gregarious of public men, but the pall cast by Maya Lin's granite trench seems to demand it...
...Under the advice of Charles Moore, later chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, McMillan brought together the urban planner Daniel Burnham and the architect Charles McKim, the team that had designed the Exposition, with the country's greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and its greatest landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr...
...She pointed to the Banneker overlook, where Tenth Street meets the water...
...The mall, the League said in a statement, "is nothing short of America's premier civic expression in landscape, monuments, and public buildings of the concept of American founding principles...
...Unfortunately, they also make it impossible...
...Of course, in either case, it all sounds wildly improbable...
...Americans are hard to insult, especially when they're in from out of town...
...And isn't Martin Luther King easily as great a man as...
...Preservation League, a well-meaning group of aesthetes, hobbyists, architects, and civic-minded buttinskis, recently placed the mall on its list of the capital region's most endangered places...
...Sweat begins to show at the waistband of Mom's stretch pants...
...Some have survived, others haven't, to varying effect...
...And each agency is responsible to a different congressional subcommittee, sometimes two...
...is a thing that requires inexhaustible furnaces of human energy...
...And she hasn't stopped...
...Then it becomes popular, then beloved, and then, inevitably, beyond criticism...
...Every mall rat—as some of us call ourselves—has his favorite spots...
...In the "Time" exhibit you find a sundial and a pocket watch...
...In time, the original criticism will even be used as proof that any criticism of a new project must be misbegotten, too...
...It's a delicate and improbable balance, something easily undone by the thick fingers of bureaucrats intent on making their own jobs easier...
...These vague and expansive subjects are then illustrated with material objects displayed willy nilly...
...Only a little...
...The objects chosen are seldom remarkable...
...So I offered to do it...
...The mall is a mess, and getting messier...
...Downing, the first celebrated American landscape architect...
...That "careful urban planning" is, as we'll see, a misapprehension, for one of the mall's charms is its serendipitous accumulation of accident and anomaly, frustrating the meticulous schemes of generations of urban planners...
...The most immediate problem is ham-handed security, overdone, unaccountable, unexplained, and, to the non-specialist, apparently irrational—measures undertaken, it seems, more for the convenience of the mall's caretakers than its visitors (and owners...
...The original plans included a museum, a visitors center, a theater, an eternal flame, an above-ground coffin symbolizing the war dead, and a large berm ringed with a colonnade, blocking views the length of the mall and cutting off pedestrian access from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial...
...After watching a mawkish antiwar movie called The Deer Hunter, Scruggs began a national campaign for a memorial on the mall...
...The second lesson sheds light on what might be called the "life-and-death-cycle" of commemorative projects...
...It sounds high-minded and admirable, though a quick flip through the arts pages of the New York Times will reveal a notable lack of heirs to McKim, Saint-Gaudens, Olmsted, or Burnham...
...Mom and Dad and the kids have driven the minivan in from the Motel 6 where they're lodged, way out on Route 1 in suburban Virginia, but they've discovered too late that the parking lots on the mall have all been closed...
...Before too long it takes on the neutrality of the familiar...
...You've got all these jurisdictions, but the mall as a whole is an orphan...
...Street parking is beyond the dream of anyone who doesn't arrive at sunup or after sundown...
...Like that...
...The same squirreliness infects what happens within the walls of the museums, too...
...It could never be completed because if it were, he said, "then the nation itself would be finished, destined only for stagnation and decay...
...You could object that expanding the mall only compounds the problem, opening up new territory to the second-rate stuff that's characterized it for the last forty years...
...Electricity" gives the curators a chance to show off their collection of...
...L'Enfant had wanted a mall open to the river and the western territory beyond...
...The D.C...
...it was suited to a country that had ceased to exist...
...Now anyone who would like to see Jefferson in his memorial must park nearly half a mile away, duck under a pair of freeway exits, cross a street blurry with careening Tourmobiles, and, after a while, pass through the now-closed parking lot, from which the memorial is a thirty-second walk...
...According to a report by the National Capital Planning Commission, one of the regulatory bodies overseeing the mall, if present trends continue—always a safe bet in Washington—fifty new memorials will be added to the mall by the middle of this century...
...When the family gets back outside in the pulsating sun, the heat is made even less bearable because—hey, where are the water fountains...
...Now memorials and museums have the purpose of getting one group or another to stop complaining...
...Korean war veterans began to wonder out loud where their memorial was...
...She is, as activists are, a blur of constant motion...
...Both landmarks seem unreachable, impossibly distant, in opposite directions...
...Who would have thought that a monument as chaste-looking as the Vietnam memorial could have so many offspring...
...she said...
...On the new map the mall filled its familiar space and then spilled over—into West Potomac Park, down to Hains Point, swooping back up Tenth Street, where the present L'Enfant Plaza is, taking in the Banneker overlook, and back down South Capitol Street to the Anacostia waterfront, and even over to the river banks on the Virginia side...
...These things are eternal...
...A "coalition" that holds "workshops" and launches "initiatives" (does the English language contain three more ominous words...
...The first century mall was quite limited, from the foot of the Capitol to just beyond the Washington Monument...
...The mall reflects America back to itself, as it always has...
...Like the Vietnam memorial, it is anti-commemorative in mood...
...electric fans...
...What we need, says the coalition, is a new McMillan commission, a Board of Regents—civic-minded architects, landscape designers, politicians, historians—charged by Congress to set down a plan that could last a century, as McMillan's did...
...The Smithsonian controls its own buildings and one sculpture garden, the National Gallery of Art controls two art galleries and another sculpture garden, the Park Service handles the monuments and the lawn, the Capitol Police and the Architect of the Capitol oversee the Botanical Gardens, and so on...
...At the Smithsonian uncountable collections of objects touched by great events and great men sit in darkened storerooms, far from public view, so the curators might have space for one more garage-door opener...
...There isn't one...
...The original design's morbid inwardness, its meticulous avoidance of any elevating or patriotic symbolism, created a reactive special-interest group of its own—Vietnam Veterans against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, who hoped to correct, or at least complicate, its overt pacifism and its sly denigration of the war and the warriors...
...Four of the eight windows at the top of the Washington Monument have mysteriously closed...
...As you'd expect, two of the four entrances to the garden have been clamped shut with rusted locks and heavy chains, but with a little effort you can find this place: In a small circle of decorative grasses sits a weathered marble urn, awkwardly oversized, carved in friezes of wreaths and fronds, overdone to suit Victorian taste...
...There's a wheelchair from 1978, and a shoe shine kit from the 1950s, and cue balls and bags of grass seed...
...stuff...
...It took awhile...
...The lack of water might be a blessing, though...
...The design committee specified that the winning design could not exalt the war—no guts, no glory...
...It is an invitation to commune with one's own sad feelings...
...So the mall would be enclosed, too, a self-contained symbol reflecting the country's history, destiny, and grandeur...
...Umbrellas, tables, chairs in the shade...
...Appropriately enough, William Line, the park service's notoriously inaccessible press officer for the mall, declined to return phone calls seeking comment for this article...
...It was gigantic, monstrous," she said...
...She poked another key on her laptop, and the screen filled with a map of the symbolic core...
...Fountains dried up, slag heaps smoked, and railroad tracks criss-crossed the mall, terminating in a Gothic brick pile at the foot of Capitol Hill...
...It was conceived in 1979 by a veteran named Jan Scruggs...
...Yet no one on the National Capital Planning Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts—two of the kibitzing bodies responsible for approving new construction on the mall—quite had the nerve to abandon classicism altogether...
...The Smithsonian was chartered on idealistic grounds—"for the increase and diffusion of knowledge"—and for more than a century it accumulated and displayed its holdings with an eye toward edifying the public...
...The costs of executing the commission's plan, back in 1902, were estimated at between $200 million and $600 million—real money in those days...
...Buddy's fanny pack won't stay hitched up, and the intense physical discomfort is the only thing that keeps Sis from dying, like totally dying, of boredom...
...Are they hurt to be insulted so...
...We persisted, we persisted, we persisted," she said...
...Moore was unyielding...
...Feldman is a spirited person anyway, but suddenly she looked almost giddy...
...For the second century, the McMillan commission more than doubled the size...
...In 2003, Congress tried again...
...It's something for everyone to think about, to get the conversation started...
...Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis stand on the treeless expanse, baked by the pitiless sun, looking lost...
...The memorial's sponsors pointed to the granite inscription, which dedicates the structure to the "men and women" who served in Vietnam...
...The chosen design, by a Yale University undergraduate named Maya Lin, is now recognizable all over the world: a shiny black granite wall showing the names of the dead angled sharply into the earth, creating a trench into which visitors walk and from which no emotion but grief can emerge...
...it's hard to tell through the waves of heat...
...It declared the mall a "substantially completed work of civic art" and imposed a moratorium on any further construction there...
...And so it goes: Overnight a wall of Jersey barriers arises here...
...Current Park Service plans will concentrate food service, restrooms, and gift shops on street corners—where the Tourmobile stops...
...Starting in World War I, masses of "temporary" office buildings were tossed up along what would become the reflecting pool and the last one wasn't torn down until 1971, when President Nixon insisted on it...
...In its place the commission proposed a greatly expanded park fit for the capital of an empire: The railroad station and tangled gardens and rock piles would be cleared to make way for white marble buildings of uniform height, poised along walkways and parallel drives, stretching from the Capitol to the Potomac, where, at the mall's terminus, a temple to Lincoln would rise up...
...This sort of clutter at least is temporary...
...The shutdowns usually occur without public notice, much less a public hearing...
...If you drank too much you'd soon discover there aren't many bathrooms, either, and they're usually out of soap anyway, sometimes toilet paper too, and they always seem to be a quarter mile away from where you are, wherever you are...
...On the other hand, this might also be a chance to start fresh...
...There's a curious lack of Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
Vol. 10 • August 2005 • No. 45
