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2005

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Most Endangered Places for 2005

WASHINGTON'S SYMBOLIC CORE

THE NATIONAL MALL AND BEYOND

STEWARD: FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, WITH SOME QUASI-GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS
NOMINATED BY: THE COMMITTEE OF 100 ON THE FEDERAL CITY
DC INVENTORY OF HISTORIC PLACES (1979)

The area encompassed by Washington’s Monumental Core is the symbolic heart of the historic L’Enfant and McMillan Plans for the Nation’s Capital and the embodiment, in monuments, public buildings, and open public space, of the U.S. Constitution. The 1791 L’Enfant Plan located the Capitol Building, seat of representational government, at the city’s center and highest spot, which Peter L’Enfant called “a pedestal awaiting a monument.” Pennsylvania, site of the Constitutional Convention, gave its name to the avenue connecting – and separating – the Legislative Branch from the Executive in the White House. The National Mall was conceived as a 400- foot wide “Grand Avenue” extending from the Capitol to the Washington Monument at the banks of the Potomac River, and intersecting the President’s Park. L’Enfant and Thomas Jefferson envisioned the Mall as a public open space, a “place of general resort” and “public walks.”

In 1901-1902, the McMillan Commission—composed of renowned City Beautiful architects Charles McKim and Daniel Burnham, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and sculptor Augustus St.-Gaudens—revived and updated the L’Enfant concept. The kite-shaped plan extended the Mall westward and southward over former riverbeds to form new parkland and sites for monuments honoring presidents Jefferson and Lincoln. To meet the needs of the growing government, the McMillan Commission envisioned new building complexes in the Federal Triangle and contiguous areas. During the twentieth century, the L’Enfant and McMillan conceptual framework for Washington’s Symbolic Core expanded yet again, to encompass the relocated Union Station, the Supreme Court Building, and the Kennedy Center.

Washington’s Symbolic Core is nothing short of America’s premier civic expression in landscape, monuments, and public buildings of the concept of American founding principles, the Constitution, and the idea of Democracy.

Extreme security measures, street closures, barriers of varying size and configuration, and security agents, have been posted and/or installed in an ad-hoc manner throughout the entire Symbolic Core, distorting its representation of freedom, openness, and democracy while ignoring the needs of the city’s residents and impeding visitors to the nation’s capital. These measures have yet to be adequately explained or justified in a public forum. Centuries of careful urban planning that created a city symbolic of openness, freedom, and democracy have been overturned by spontaneous, illplanned measures.

The threat of continued ad-hoc security measures is current and immediate. Each day, the Secret Service and the National Park Service propose, or simply install, new measures for limiting access to the nation’s monuments, memorials, museums, and places of governance. Only by sheer perseverance, and the unwillingness of Congress to appropriate funds, were citizen activists able to defeat the National Park Service’s plan to close on-grade entry to the Washington Monument; a plan that would have required visitors to enter by way of a four-hundred-foot tunnel. And, although this proposal was defeated, spy cameras, blocking half of the windows at the top of the Washington Monument, remain.

Actions/Next Steps:

• Coordination amongst all agencies that have purview over the Symbolic Core, its buildings and open spaces;
• Implementation of the Federal 106 process for all proposed alterations to the Symbolic Core;
• Enactment of an easement on the view corridor of the Symbolic Core;
• Creation of an organization dedicated to the preservation of openness and accessibility to the buildings and public spaces within the Symbolic Core;
• Creation of a coalition of existing organizations that have an interest in preserving the Symbolic Core
• Retention by the above-referenced organizations of an attorney willing to challenge Congress’ right to overturn decisions of commissions charged with reviewing alterations to the Symbolic Core