April 12, 2005
The National Mall should be expanded, made more visitor-friendly and placed under the control of a conservancy or board of regents that would guide and coordinate its future development, architect W. Kent Cooper told a Senate subcommittee today.
"When your constituents come to the Mall this summer, they're going to find barriers, too few places to sit, lack of convenient and good food and long walks in the hot sun to get from place to place," said Cooper, whose firm was the architect of record for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and designer of the Korean War Veterans Memorial.
The National Mall needs a "third-century vision" that would include expansion along South Capitol Street and the L'Enfant Promenade, creating a continuous route from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial along a two-mile stretch of the Potomac River, said Cooper, coordinator of the National Mall Third Century Initiative.
Sen. Craig Thomas (R.-Wyoming) chaired the hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources' National Parks Subcommittee.
Three major issues confront the Mall, Cooper said:
1. Public use is discouraged by security fences, construction and National Park Service policies that treat the Mall as a "theme park, to be experienced by tour bus." Cooper called for "policies that enhance public use rather than restrict it."
2. The Mall is not "visitor-friendly." There are too many barriers and fences, too few places to sit, too few places to eat and it is too hard to get from place to place. "The Mall needs more visitor amenities and things to do in the public open space," Cooper said.
3. It's full. Despite Congress' declaring the Mall "substantially completed," dozens of memorial projects are waiting for sites on the Mall. "The Mall should expand to meet this need, as it did a century ago," Cooper said.
Cooper noted that today's National Mall is the result of two visions - the L'Enfant Plan of 1791, which established the portion of the Mall that includes the Washington Monument and the McMillan Plan of 1901, which resulted in the addition of the section encompassing the Lincoln Memorial.
In the 100 years since the McMillan Plan, the Mall has become the "stage for our democracy - a place of celebration, recreation, demonstration and healing," Cooper said. "Today's Mall is as much about public use of the open space as it is about memorials and museums."
Cooper proposed creation of a National Mall Conservancy that would establish policies for the entire Mall in collaboration with the federal stakeholder agencies and the public, similar to the Smithsonian Institution's Board of Regents.
The conservancy would be responsible for assembling a year-long planning commission - similar to the McMillan Planning Commission of 1901-1902 - to develop a long-term vision for the Mall's next 100 years.
Cooper's organization, a volunteer citizens' group, is a project of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall.
