The Monumental Core, What the Mall Was Designed to Say

Stand anywhere on the Mall on a clear day and the geometry is unmistakable. The Capitol anchors the east end. The Washington Monument marks the center. The Lincoln Memorial closes the west. The reflecting pool runs between them. The White House sits to the north of the monument on a slightly offset axis. The whole arrangement reads as deliberate, classical, permanent, which is somewhat ironic given that almost none of it was built when L'Enfant drew his plan and a great deal of it was not built until the twentieth century.

The Washington Monument was authorized by Congress in eighteen thirty-three, but the Washington National Monument Society ran out of money in eighteen fifty-four with the obelisk standing at only one hundred fifty-two feet, barely a third of its eventual height. It stood that way, a stump of marble on the Mall, for twenty-five years. The color change in the stone that is visible today marks where the construction paused in eighteen fifty-four and resumed in eighteen seventy-nine, when Congress finally appropriated federal money to complete it. The monument was dedicated in eighteen eighty-five.

The Lincoln Memorial was not built until nineteen twenty-two. The choice of Henry Bacon's Greek temple design was itself a deliberate statement about Lincoln's place in the American civil religion, and the seated Lincoln inside, seventeen feet tall, was sculpted by Daniel Chester French, who made Lincoln's hands in the shape of the American Sign Language letters A and L, a detail that may be apocryphal but that the Smithsonian has investigated without definitively resolving.

The McMillan Plan of nineteen oh two reorganized the Mall along the Beaux-Arts lines we recognize today: the formal lawns, the symmetrical museum buildings, the tidal basin to the south. The plan cleared a railroad station that had occupied the area below the Capitol and redesigned the central grounds the Smithsonian had partially occupied in an informal and, in the eyes of the commission, aesthetically unfortunate manner.

The Mall today receives approximately twenty-four million visitors per year and is the most visited park site in the United States.