Is the National Mall closed?
Trump's trying to remake Washington. He's painting a pool, demolishing history and proposing a (tragic) Triumphal Arch. This woman saw it coming.
It’s not just the swimming pool treatment of a Washington icon that gets her.
Or the huge-ass “Triumphal Arch” Trump is planning, which she calls a “wake up call”, that moves her to action.
Dr. Judy Scott Feldman has been fighting for the National Mall for decades.
As Americans across the nation awaken to Trump’s Napoleonic thirst for edification – but with roadtrip-motel-meets-dictator vibes – the importance of rational discussion and process when it comes to our nation’s sacred spaces becomes clear.
This is what Dr. Feldman has been Loraxing about, for decades. She speaks for The Mall.
She’s often the only member of the public testifying at long meetings in weird rooms tucked away in federal buildings, on Zoom, at podiums and rickety tables facing bored bureaucrats. She tirelessly persists, submitting public comments, challenging whack plans and fighting for the renovations she may not live long enough to see. The reception she gets is wildly different from the reverence given to the two men who took on the monumental cause years ago. She doesn’t get paid to do this. She carves the time out of a busy, modern life of parenting, lecturing and teaching college classes.
Why?
“I was born in Washington and I still think it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to,” she said.
I met Dr. Feldman, who was raised in Anacostia, two decades ago when I got a new beat at The Washington Post covering the National Mall. (The local staff was THAT determined to report on all the workings of Washington back then.) She was the one I saw at all those long meetings, the one not getting paid to be there.
This was right after Congress determined that the National Mall “is a completed work of civic art” in 2003, an act to prevent overcrowding and overbuilding in the “reserve,” the cross-shaped land most of us know as “The Mall” bounded by the U.S. Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and the Jefferson Memorial. “Sorry folks, The Mall is closed.”
And yet, they kept building.
So this is what the National Mall Coalition, the non-profit Dr. Feldman founded, is proposing: expansion, vision, growth and, most importantly, a plan. Because she isn’t a typical art history PhD who skews preservationist. No, she’s all for building, changing and growing.
The history of our nation keeps evolving, after all.
Her coalition sees a plan for a National Mall area that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Kennedy Center, and includes the Potomac waterfront on the D.C. and Virginia sides. Her coalition even supports a “National Mall Underground” that includes flood mitigation, a welcome center and lots of parking, especially for tour buses. It is practical and smart, realistic about what’s happening there today.
How we got here
In the nation’s first century, the White House, Capitol building and the Emancipation statue in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill (I’m going to tell you more about the woman who is responsible for the way that played out in a future piece – it’s an amazing story) was all the federal splendor we had.
The growth of the nation’s capital was guided by Pierre L’Enfant, a French architect who fought for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and was appointed by George Washington to envision a capital city. The L’Enfant Plan of 1791 laid out a metropolis of diagonal avenues cutting through a grid of city streets, all planned around the three main events: the “Congress House”, built on Jenkin’s Hill (he described the future Capitol Hill as a “pedestal awaiting a monument”), the “President’s House”, and the American Public, the green space connecting the two.
But as the nation and city grew, the capital city’s grandeur did not.
It tried to brand itself the “City of Magnificent Distances”, but the “City of Magnificent Mud” was what stuck, as L’Enfant’s ambitious plans were subsumed by open sewage canals, roads that became muddy quagmires during rain, livestock that roamed freely and skeleton buildings that were never completed. Charles Dickens was appalled during his 1842 visit, calling D.C. the “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “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.”
The pretty parts were cloistered, winding Victorian parks and gardens, which did little to symbolize a robust and ambitious young democracy.
The city needed a plan.
Sen. James McMillan, a Canadian who moved to Detroit for work, took charge of this problem with the Senate Park Commission. That became known as the McMillan Plan in 1902, an expansion of the National Mall to include sweeping parks, museums, fountains, reflecting pools and monuments.
“The task is indeed a stupendous one; it is much greater than any one generation can hope to accomplish,” the commission wrote in The Washington Post on Jan. 16, 1902. The plan “shall enable future development to proceed along the lines originally planned—namely, the treatment of the city as a work of civic art.”
What now?
Feldman and the other historians, planners, engineers and architects she’s been working with disagree that the Mall is done.
The Mall just needs a new plan, one for the 3rd Century of our history.
“I never intended to be an activist,” she said. But while teaching medieval art and architecture at American University, she was asked to take on the university’s Washington Semester Program in Architecture.
That was when the controversial World War II monument was being discussed, and there were fireworks over the plan to take over the Rainbow Pool, which had been part of the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool.
“The attention of the public is called to the splendid opportunities that will be afforded by these pools for model yacht racing which is now growing to be so popular throughout the United States,” Col. Clarence O. Sherrill, head of public buildings and parks, told the Washington Evening Star in October 1924, when the pool was opened and named because the water jets summoned a rainbow in the sunlight. It was supposed to be a place where children can splash and play, race boats and skate in the winter.
Feldman joined others siding with Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, who wanted to preserve the Rainbow Pool as it was, a place to play and reflect. They argued that bisecting the important stretch of the National Mall — it’s symbolic, honoring the presidents who helped found and then save the nation — with a war memorial was wrong.
“So I got kind of sucked in, and was testifying and would tell history – because I always thought it mattered – during the hearings,” she said. “And you know, during those hearings, I learned they don’t care about history.”
They lost that argument and the World War II Memorial took over the Rainbow Pool in 2004. But Feldman persisted, banding with others who saw the chaos in the planning.
“We knew somebody had to lead the charge,” she said. “So I figured, I was born in Washington, I crazy love it. I know the history. I know the process. So I took it on.”
It’s an onerous task.
No one agency has authority over the entire mall, there are little fiefdoms.
And even though the Mall was “closed” to new construction in 2003, Congress approved four new memorials and two more museums for the increasingly crowded space. They’re all good ideas, including memorials to victims of the global war on terror, fallen journalists, National Medal of Honor recipients and Women’s Suffrage, plus museums about women’s history and American Latinos. But each one takes up more space, crowding the National Mall, cluttering the open plan and eliminating spaces for play, protest and recreation.
It needs to grow.
And that’s why Feldman is fighting for a 3.0 plan that acknowledges we need for the future, for a nation that will keep growing and changing and evolving.
“The Mall belongs to the American people,” she said, explaining her mission. “Nobody’s in charge and everybody’s in charge and everybody’s got different mandates…this is the people’s place and we need to not just preserve it, but give it a future, a vision for a future.”
“If you don’t have a vision, you end up with what we’ve got now, a painted Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, a destroyed East Wing, a triumphal arch,” she said. “You’ve got the whim of whoever wants to come in, and there’s no plan.”
She is advocating for something she may never live to see. It’s an urban planning version of the old parable about the optimism and generosity of elders planting trees whose shade they will never enjoy.
The National Mall is America’s Acropolis, Feldman believes. And she hears awe in the voices of all the foreign experts and historians who tour it with her.
“What do they love about the Mall? Sometimes they can’t even say, but I’ll tell you what it is. It is both the design, which is an enlightenment layout, the geometry and the vistas,” she said. “But it’s also the symbolism, right? We’ve got the Capitol Building on the tallest spot. You’ve got the White House a mile away on a lower spot. You’ve got that grand vista down to Lincoln and across Arlington to Arlington Cemetery. People can feel it. It is worth preserving, and that is why we keep persisting. Even though, essentially, we’re ignored.”
Keep up the great work, Petula.
Thank you for having this recorded so I could listen while I drive. Loraxing as a verb - I snorted out loud! You are the best!