IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Park Service seeks ideas for a Mall makeover

The Mall needs a facelift, and the National Park Service wants Americans to recommend a new look for the historic space, worn and tattered by 25 million visitors every year.
The National Mall is shown, looking east
The National Mall is shown, looking east toward the U.S. Capitol, in April. The Park Service is looking to revamp the space for the first time in 100 years.Tim Sloan / AFP - Getty Images file
/ Source: a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/front.htm" linktype="External" resizable="true" status="true" scrollbars="true">The Washington Post</a

The Mall needs a facelift, and the National Park Service wants Americans to recommend a new look for the historic space, worn and tattered by 25 million visitors every year.

A nationwide effort, officially launched today, will begin with a symposium this month and an interactive Web site that will ask people across with country who have opinions on the Mall's 600 acres to register them online. The suggestions will be culled into a report and action plan next year.

The initiative is the first time in 100 years that the planning and future of the national space will be revisited.

Officials acknowledge that the nation's front yard does not present a welcoming face.

Tourists often complain about the lack of restrooms, restaurants, visitor information and parking, as well as bald spots on the lawn, rusty benches and cracked pavement.

"We'll be the first to admit, the appearance does not match its significance," said Vikki Keys, superintendent of the National Mall and Memorial Parks for the National Park Service.

In addition to attracting millions of tourists and demonstrators, the Mall is also the preferred address for dozens of monuments, memorials and museums. Federal officials have tried to encourage pocket parks and intersections throughout the city as future sites for dozens of projects waiting in the wings, but the quandary is that everyone wants to be on the Mall.

Architects, planners, historians and tourists will be among those asked to suggest a future look and feel for the Mall: Should it be about formal gardens and fountains, or baseball games, gift shops and hot dog stands?

Many purposes, many demands
The Mall serves many purposes: It is the equivalent of Paris's fabled gardens of the Tuileries, the political gathering space of Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the open space of London's Hyde Park, the sports haven of New York's Central Park and the museum row of any international city.

Trying to meet all these demands in one space can create a park that is frayed, unable to handle the crowds and not true to its iconic nature.

The Park Service hopes to learn from the public and from the way other cities handle the challenges. At least one city limits public demonstrations to areas with a hard surface, to avoid the stampede that kills the Mall's green space, said Susan Spain, a planner hired by the Park Service to shepherd the Mall planning effort.

The last time the nation formally rethought the concept was in 1901, when the Mall was a stretch of land between the Capitol and the Washington Monument.

The McMillan Commission was a panel of renowned architects and landscape architects charged with devising a plan to revive and extend the Mall. After visiting several European capitals for inspiration, the commission presented its plan, which expanded the Mall to include the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin, creating its current kitelike shape.

The National Coalition to Save Our Mall, an advocacy group that has been working for the past six years to get federal officials to rethink the Mall with a plan as ambitious as the McMillan Commission's, was pleased to hear that the Park Service is turning its attention to some of the problems.

"The Mall is deteriorating very quickly," said the group's chairman, Judy Scott Feldman.

'A cattle call'
One tourist at the Washington Monument yesterday said she felt as though she were in "a cattle call" by the time she passed all the security fences.

And Carol Jourdan, 40, visiting the nation's capital from Minnesota yesterday, looked down the long expanse of Constitution Gardens and felt a little lost. "I wish there was more information -- like where I am, where to go, what does it mean, that kind of thing," she said.

Feldman's group has proposed more signage, podcasts or audio tours. But even more important is to determine a vision for the Mall's expansion and what to do with all the museums, monuments and memorials waiting to be built, Feldman said.

"It's the elephant in the room -- what we're going to do with all these commemorative works and museums that are coming our way," said Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

"The sentiment is that there's a moratorium on these things on the Mall, but at the same time, they keep letting these projects into the back door."

In 2003, Congress passed the Reserve Act to declare the Mall a completed work of civic art and to prevent it from being overbuilt. But since then, three projects -- the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture -- have been approved for the Mall.

The Park Service will tackle the dilemma, working alongside the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal agency that must approve projects in the District. The commission created a Legacy Plan in 1997 that suggests that the Mall should expand.

"The Mall is a concept that really extends beyond the border of that green space," the commission's chairman, John V. Cogbill III, said yesterday.

In Senate testimony last year, Cogbill set forward the commission plan that he hopes will dovetail with the Park Service's new initiative.

"Legacy proposes expanding the monumental core beyond the Mall and the traditional center of Washington to North and South Capitol streets, the Anacostia River and adjacent areas," he said.

"By expanding the monumental core in this way, the Capitol would truly become the center of the city, with symbols of the nation radiating out in all directions."

To register opinions on the Mall, visit the National Park Service's interactive Web site at .