Virtual Tour of the Lincoln Memorial and the National Mall | Walking 4k | Washington DC
It was cold in late February, but the National Mall and Lincoln Memorial saw thousands of visitors as they do every day. Take in the sights, listen to the different languages the passerby speak, and enjoy a beautifully planned portion of one of America's best-planned cities.
HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL MALL:
To understand how the National Mall evolved into its current image, it helps to break its development into three stages that correspond to different master plans: the L’enfant Plan, the Macmillan Plan, and the National Park Service Plan.
Despite its becoming the national capital in 1790, Washington, D.C. remained underdeveloped and underpopulated well into the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, George Washington sought the planning of Pierre Charles L’enfant to plan the new capital. Educated at the Royal Academy in Paris, L’enfant drew on contemporary trends in European urban planning including broad avenues and sets of axes running throughout the entire city. In fact, L’enfant benefitted from plans of Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg provided by Jefferson thought the planning process.
How did this plan envision the American capital? The L’enfant plan mirrors the enlightenment-era European city: broad axis and avenues that act as throughways for the entire city while serving as sites of mercantile commerce and recreation. As it pertains to governance, L’enfant envisioned a central axis, which would become Pennsylvania Avenue, to directly connect the executive and legislative centers. At the city’s center, a central garden, or mall, would function as a hub from which parks, avenues and vistas would stem. L’enfant wanted individual spaces within the mall to correspond to the American states. Overall, L’enfant’s D.C. embraced a grid-like, European model based on long-running axis that while placing political power at its core.
Based on the city’s strategic and economic irrelevance, however, the plan did not materialize, and for much of the nineteenth century Washington, D.C. remained a swamp. On a trip to the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote of the capital: “Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament - are its leading features.” Dickens’ impressions highlight the continuity and long-term nature of urban development. While we may look on the National Mall today and see resolute concrete and monuments that look as though they date to antiquity, we must acknowledge that for much of its history, the mall and the city itself were in flux, works in progress that continue to change and develop to this day.
The only monument built during the L’enfant era was the Washington Monument, and moving into the 19th century, the mall, and specifically the construction of monuments on its lands, became an interest of planners and politicians. Drawing on this momentum, the Mcmillan Plan emerged after a commission formed in 1900 to further redesign the city. The central tenet of the Mcmillan plan was formality and the removal of naturalist elements, primarily gardens, in favor of geometric landscapes. The commission hired architects from the Beaux Arts movement who were inspired by the city beautiful movement, an urban planning extension of the twentieth century progressive social movement. The mall under this plan would become a quiet and symmetrical sanctuary lined with elm trees.
In 1933, the National Parks Service assumed direction of the mall, and by the 1960’s the mall witnessed a fury of construction and action. The 60s and 70s saw the JFK inaugural parade and the bicentennial ceremony, and in the 80s and 1990s the Congress organized the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the FDR Memorial. The National Parks Service era can be considered the most influential in constructing a collective social meaning on the mall as monuments, both anonymous and dedicated to political figures.