THE MALL IS A MESS
If you want a vision of hell, look here: the national mall in Washington, D.C., on a summer’s day. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis stand on the treeless expanse looking lost. Dad wears a muscle-beach T-shirt stretched over a Cheesecake Factory body. Sweat begins to show at the waistband of Mom’s stretch pants. The air is hung with scrims of haze. To one side the Capitol building shimmers in ghostly outline. To the other, the Lincoln Memorial looms in what might or might not be Hellenic grandeur; it’s hard to tell through the waves of heat. Both landmarks seem unreachable. Buddy’s fanny pack won’t stay hitched up, and the intense physical discomfort is the only thing that keeps Sis from dying of boredom.
To be an American family in such a situation is to be primed for indignities. Mom and Dad and the kids have driven in from the Motel 6 where they’re lodged, but they’ve discovered too late that the parking lots on the mall have all been closed. Street parking is beyond the dream of anyone who doesn’t arrive at sunup or after sundown. Tickets for the mall’s only bus service, the Tourmobile, cost US$17.50 for adults.
The Smithsonian museums that line the eastern stretch of the mall are air-cooled. Yet aside from the Air and Space museum and the art galleries, the museums are a bit bewildering. There’s a curious lack of stuff. And just getting in and out of the museums is a pain. Already the family has been through half a dozen metal detectors and had their fanny packs poked and probed just as often. When the family gets back outside in the pulsating sun, the heat is made even less bearable because — hey, where are the water fountains? The lack of water might be a blessing, though. If you drank too much you’d soon discover there aren’t many bathrooms, either.
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. The scramble for seats can get ugly. Sometimes it looks like a game of musical chairs in an old folks’ home. Oddly for a promenade, fences are everywhere. And your chances of finding food depend heavily on luck. The federal government has never bothered to print a map showing concession stands and restaurants.
Nowhere to park, nowhere to sit, nowhere to eat, nowhere to pee. Do I exaggerate? Only a little. One doesn’t have to spend too much time on the national mall before one begins to detect a certain lack of hospitality. One begins to feel like a nuisance, in fact. Worse, one begins to feel that one is supposed to feel like a nuisance. And one would be right.
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.” Wright could have applied the same remark to the monumental core of Washington, D. C. The mall is a mess.
The D.C. Preservation League recently placed the mall on its list of the capital region’s most-endangered places. A few years ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation did the same. The mall, the League said, “is nothing short of America’s premier civic expression in landscape, monuments and public buildings of the concept of American founding principles.” 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.
The most immediate problem is ham- handed security, overdone, unaccountable, unexplained, and, to the non-specialist, apparently irrational. People who frequent the mall can cite the moment when they began to notice something was up. Mine came nearly a decade ago, when I drove an aged visitor into town for a close-up look at the Washington Monument. The nearby parking lot was suddenly closed. It has never reopened. Late last year, the small parking lot adjacent to the Jefferson Memorial was sealed off to all but authorized vehicles.
The National Park Service at first declared the closing “temporary.” It will be permanent. Four of the eight windows at the top of the Washington Monument have mysteriously closed; the porch around the Lincoln Memorial is fenced off. And so it goes.
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.” That “careful urban planning” is a misapprehension, for one of the mall’s charms is its serendipitous accumulation of accident and anomaly. Yet the real problem with the League’s declaration is that it didn’t go far enough. Overweening security is only the most immediate threat to the mall.
A recent report by the Government Accountability Office complained about water damage and inadequate maintenance in Smithsonian museums, two of which are now closed. Thanks to an unbroken procession of festivals, concerts and other special events, acres of the mall itself are stripped of grass and gone to dust. Every mall rat has his favourite spots. One of mine is in the Enid Haupt Garden. In a small circle of decorative grasses sits a weathered marble urn, carved in friezes of wreaths and fronds, overdone to suit Victorian taste. The urn has travelled the mall over the last 150 years, coming to rest here only in the 1990s. It is a monument to A. J. Downing, the first celebrated American landscape architect. In 1850 he was hired by President Fillmore to make of the mall “a national Park, which should be an ornament to the Capital of the United States.”
Though the mall is generally credited to Pierre L’Enfant and his plan of 1791, Downing was the first man to have the practical opportunity to impress on the land an artistic vision of his own. L’Enfant had foreseen something continental. The landscape Downing set down on paper was republican: a series of gardens of different sizes. Much of it was built and patches remained for nearly 80 years. 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. But a visitor today would look up and see nothing that Downing knew. The urn makes for an eerie tribute.
The mall’s present scheme is the work of a commission impaneled in 1900 and chaired by senator James McMillan of Michigan. Fifty years after Downing’s death, the mall was a mess. Most of the gardens had fallen to ruin. Fountains dried up and railroad tracks criss-crossed the mall. Civic improvers had dredged the Potomac and pushed its banks westward to the future site of the Lincoln Memorial, but the landfill lay vacant. Seven years earlier, 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. Under the advice of Charles Moore, McMillan brought together the urban planner Daniel Burnham and the architect Charles McKim with the country’s greatest sculptor, Augustus Saint- Gaudens, and its greatest landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. The senator suggested they rescue the mall.
Downing’s vision of pastoral republicanism was dispensed with altogether. In its place the commission proposed a greatly expanded park fit for the capital of an empire: The railroad station and tangled gardens would be cleared to make way for white marble buildings, poised along walkways, stretching from the Capitol to the Potomac, where a temple to Lincoln would rise up. L’Enfant had wanted a mall open to the river and the western territory beyond. But by 1900 the frontier had been declared closed. So the mall would be enclosed, too.
Urban planners are like libertarians: They’re wonderful to have around so long as their advice is never, ever followed all the way through. Yet standing on the mall today, you can be astonished at the durability of the McMillan design. The commissioners got much of what they wanted, and much of what they hoped for is still here. It took awhile. The Lincoln Memorial wasn’t finished till 1922. It wasn’t really till the 1970s that the commission’s plan was substantially realized.
There were false starts and missteps. Some have survived, others haven’t. The mall’s great size is daunting, but it’s so big it’s hard to wreck. Starting in the First World War, masses of “temporary” office buildings were tossed up along what would become the reflecting pool and the last one wasn’t torn down until president Nixon insisted on it. He hoped to replace them with a three-storey underground parking garage topped with an amusement park; what we got instead was Constitution Gardens, a Downing-like meadow of willow trees and duck ponds. A Ferris wheel might have been nice.
Constitution Gardens was the best thing to happen to the mall in the second half of the 20th century, but it seems almost a concession to a longgone era. The general collapse of architectural taste following the Second World War has had more serious effects.
The McMillan plan was a creature of the neoclassical revival. Within fewer than 30 years neoclassicism had become an object of derision among the nation’s tastemakers and sophisticates. Yet no one on the National Capital Planning Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts quite had the nerve to abandon classicism altogether. As a consequence something squirrely entered the mall’s architecture.
The first building constructed on the mall after the National Gallery was the Museum of American History, followed by the Museum of Air and Space. In style these buildings are neither classical nor modernist, but manage to combine the worst elements of each. They share classical materials and they have classical massing. But the classical lines are laid out with modernist austerity, while the modernist simplicity is weighed down by the classical bulk. It’s hard to believe that structures so large can be so unimpressive.
The same squirreliness infects what happens within the walls of the museums, too. The Smithsonian was chartered on idealistic grounds and for more than a century it displayed its holdings with an eye toward edifying the public. But again the intellectual fashions changed. The National Museum of American History is a showcase of “social history,” the revisionist approach that downgrades the extraordinary while elevating the unexceptional. Except the unexceptional isn’t very interesting, and neither is the museum.
The permanent exhibits are built around concepts, the larger and more abstract the better — “Information,” “Electricity,” “Time.” These vague and expansive subjects are then illustrated with material objects displayed willy nilly. The objects chosen are seldom remarkable. In the “ Time” exhibit you find a sundial and a pocket watch. “Electricity” gives the curators a chance to show off their collection of . . . electric fans. “Information” has rolls of teletype paper.
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. At the Smithsonian uncountable collections of objects touched by great events sit in storerooms so the curators might have space for one more garage-door opener. The Smithsonian has the largest holding of American Indian artifacts in the world, yet all but a handful of them are in a warehouse.
At the recently opened National Museum of the American Indian, visitors find glass cases presenting slot machines and casino chips. It can be painful to watch Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis make their way through such exhibits, to see the boredom unmistakable behind their expressionless faces — not getting it, of course, but not wanting to admit they’re not getting it.
The Weekly Standard Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor
of The Weekly Standard.