May 21, 2008
Del. Norton Says We Should Be 'Ashamed' of National Mall
Both the Post and the Examiner have stories covering testimony provided by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, among others, to a congressional subcommittee yesterday about the state of the National Mall.
"We should all be ashamed" of what the average Mall visitor sees, Norton told the panel. “There’s no great national park that suffers from this kind of neglect." Norton introduced a bill last year to revitalize the Mall.
Anyone who spends time on the National Mall knows what Norton is talking about: trampled, dead grass, mud, cracked sidewalks, dying trees and a lack of basic facilities like bathrooms or shaded areas for tourists to rest in.
John E. "Chip" Akridge also testified, calling the state of the Mall a "disgrace" and estimating that it has accumulated about $350 million in deferred maintenance and needs about $100 million in building repairs and upgrades for better food and restroom facilities.
The National Park Service is expected to complete its 50-year National Mall plan by the end of this year. In the meantime, officials are also once again worrying about safety issues on the Mall after a stabbing there over the weekend. Twelve people were attacked on the National Mall in the summer of 2006, but crime in the area was relatively quiet last summer.
Photo by erin_m
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I think the simplest change you could make that would improve the untidy nature of the Mall at present would be to pave the paths currently left as sand and gravel/pebbles. They would have to be paved in some sort of brick or pavers, but it would eliminate the puddles, unevenness, messy gravel and sand migrating into grassy areas and onto sidewalks, pebbles getting stuck in your shoes, and in general make for a much neater appearance.
Grass isn't easy to maintain when 100,000-people events are held there every other weekend. The solution: astroturf! Hey, if it works for Silver Spring...
Sure blame the tourist, but I have to point the finger at the Smithsonian. Why in the hell are they setting up the Folk Festival a good 3 months before the damn thing is held? The place looks like a construction area for the nice part of spring and half of summer. Plus with all the platforms, tents and construction trailer, which are just idling around till July, are depriving grass of sunlight and water. It is time to fork up a couple of bucks more and hire more than 3 guys to set the damn thing up.
All they need to do is officially declare the Mall part of the Capitol Hill Visitor Center. Congress will then be forced to spend another $600,000,000 turning it into an overpriced sinkhole full of animatronic Country Bear Jamboroo exhibits about Freedom and Liberty that will frighten the children and cause disabled veterans to weep bitter tears of regret over losing their limbs for this kinda horses**t.
See, the toilet isn't half full. It's half empty.
Speaking of toilets on the Mall, tourists are not to be trusted with public restrooms. The men's room at the Air and Space Museum smells like a cholera epidemic, complete with Indian tourists cursing in Hindi. Your best bet is to just hold it in until you get back to your hotel. Barring that, make a detour to Shaw and take a leak there. Everybody else does.
The "problem" is the people that use the Mall. There are too many of them. The soil has been compacted to the density of concrete so it's hard for trees and grass to grow. The trees are also underpressure from people damaging their roots as well as Dutch elm disease (DED). The NPS spends a lot of time taking care of the elms and while they are a hardy tree it's hard to compete with millions upon millions of people trampling the very ground they live in. DED is very devastating to a healthy tree, if the disease were to get into an already compromised tree it can kill it very quickly and spread to nearby trees through root grafts. Even though the gravel paths do get muddy the water at least makes it into the ground. If they were to pave all of those paths there would be that much more runoff into the streets and that means more pollution running into the rivers.
I got nothing for bathrooms other than I usually pop into a museum to use the loo. And people have been surviving on street meat for years, why should future generations have better food options than us?
yeah, the national mall kinda looks like crap in many places. and smells similarly sometimes. but come on. its not disneyland/world or a museum. sure, it could use some upgrades. for god's sake, the grass looks spottier than nicholas cage's hair. but are they really gonna go all disney and hire an army of rollerblading park guards with tiny brooms and spray casks of miracle-gro to keep everything up?
its a real place that gets used, trampled, stomped on - like everyone's college futon. its loved, and you're not afraid to use it. well, maybe you should be sometimes.
i think people have unrealistic expectations when they come to mall that need to be checked. i think of it as a a microcosm of the U.S.. people want to make it perfect, but its not. there are variations that you have to deal with. and what's ugly is subjective. but all in all, its not that bad of a place. -cue lee greenwood music-
Hey whats more important a well manicured national site symbolic of American culture and prosperity or a 500 million dollar embassy with olympic size pool and resort in the middle of a fucking battlefield in a country where the citizens are killing the people that freed them....
I like the pebbles, but I agree that they may create more problems than they're worth. I suspect they are the source of most of the mid-summer dust storms.
It would be great if the Mall were like Central Park, but the thing is that it isn't anything at all like Central Park. Central Park is significantly larger with much more landscape variety, surrounded by residential neighborhoods which actually use it, and yet not subject to nearly the same high stress uses (at least the grassy parts that is).
As long as the mall is used for every festival and protest that views the use of the mall as a god-given right, it will be over-taxed.
How about a condo development on the Mall? Call it South of Swampoodle. And then SOS will come into the local real estate lexicon like NoMa, FoBo, and CityCenter.
In the 19th Century, the Mall used to be a lot like Central Park: rolling tree-lined hills, carriage pathways running through, heavy ground cover, homeless people everywhere. The Mcmillan Plan transformed it into the wide-open, shadeless, scorching, sunbaked dog turd vista we know today.
Until we have a world-class mall that includes shaved-panda-powered ski lift gondolas (zero carbon footprint), Slip-n-Slides full of barbecue sauce, and poledancing meter maids, the terrorists have already won.
what the Mall is missing is a giant casino and a brothel. call them "The Borfata" and "Deep Throat" respectively. i'd recommend the casino be built near the WWII Memorial, that way all of the old fogies can hit up the one arm bandits as soon as they're done reminiscing over how many japs they shot down. the brothel should be built, obviously, as close to the Capitol as possible.
just think of all that tax revenue!
it's just a lawn for christ's sake. granted it a really big lawn, but a lawn nonetheless. how hard can it really be to maintain? you water it. you mow it. if it gets too trampled you rope it off and let it grow back in peace. leave it to dc to somehow turn the easiest landscape feature in the world into a disgrace.
RJ-
They need every single day assembling that festival. it's a huge undertaking
McGillicuddy,
There used to be a brothel one block away from the Dome so the reps could get some dome. On a serious side the trash in the reflecting pool is atrocious....cant they pay someone minimum wage to use a pool skimmer and skim that trash out at least once a day.
tigerflight,
Yes it is a huge undertaking, and I see them working everyday, but it doesn’t take 3 months to get it up. I seen similar sized festivals constructed in a fraction of the time this one does.
There are a few easy solutions they could use to improve:
1) Actually enforce the moratorium on events on the Mall. There are alot of large open spaces (RFK, Haines Point, etc) in this city that can be used for events, they don't all have to be on the Mall. The time would allow the Mall to recover and let the Park Service catch up on it's Back log of maintenance.
2) Actaully allocate a decent budget to the Park Service. I really hate government on the cheap that the Baby Boomers think is so awesome. All we get is cheap government, not good government.
3) There was an idea of turning the Capitol Reflecting pool into a giant plaza specifically desigend for protests and demonstrations. This should be done, and another one should be placed at the opposite end in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The space is already closed off to regular traffic and could easily be turned into a great plaza, a la St. Peter's Square in Rome. Right there you have two huge areas for protests and festivals that won't kill grass and destroy the Mall.
3) Kill all tourists, but that's a general DC sentiment anyways, and solves alot of problems...
"leave it to dc to somehow turn the easiest landscape feature in the world into a disgrace."
Whoah. Don't put this on DC. DC has nothing to do with the Mall. That's purely a federal screw up. Much like many of our downtown squares, this is all on NPS and Congress.
Besides, while it may be relatively simple to grow grass (but not that simple by the way) it's a whole nother matter to grow grass while at the same time answering to every demanding organization that wishes to trample said grass to death.
It is literally the tragedy of the commons.
BigL: Actually, the brothels used to be north of the Mall in Federal Triangle. That's where the term "hooker" was coined:
Another new tour, on Saturday from 1:30 to 3:30, is "Within Sight of the White House: Hooker's Division and Murder Bay." The one-mile tour, which contains adult content, will be led by park ranger Michael Kelly and Heidi Dietze. It traces the history of the Federal Triangle neighborhood, from a slum filled with brothels to an enclave of neo-classical government buildings. "One finds an infinitely interesting human dynamic that can be developed through [the] study of neighborhoods."
I think it's about time that Federal Triangle really started living up to it's heritage.
"how hard can it really be to maintain?"
I don't know, but try having millions of people trample through your front yard, set up tents, park vehicles on it and generally treat it like crap, and let me know how it looks. My guess is: not very good.
Here's my 50 year plan:
Year 1 - concrete and bumper cars.
Years 2 - 50: teh awsome!
big stick,
reflecting pool to ginormous plaza. what the? but what about the ducks? will someone please think of them? i mean, they already have to deal with looking at tourists with fanny packs. they certainly a (albeit filthy) body of water in which to sink their bad-fashion-besieged eyes.
plus they're cute and have been dcist centerfolds in several recent pics.
although there is quite a gnat problem around the reflecting pool. could be related to stagnant water?
however, "big stick" might be a passable name for the National Mall brothel.
I think it is the perfect sybmol of us, a bunch of mismatch buildings with leaky roofs surrounding an under valued patch of nature which mainly serves as a space to bitch and display crap on. The mall, what could be more American! If we cleaned it up, and the grass started growing and shit people would get confused and think they are in Europe or something.
I do find it interesting that similar giant lawns in London, like Hyde, Regents or St. James get as much traffic, festivals and what not and look perfect every time I see them (including gravel that appears to be glued in place or something the paths are so perfect).
Eleanore is right, we should scream at the Fed's lazy underfunded asses for being such slackers. And I agree with Zippy, we should have a mall at least as tidy as the green zone Hilton in Bagdad.
Between "big stick" and "federal triangle" I'm giggling like a schoolgirl at my desk.
I've got an idea: how about DCist holds a serve-a-thon for the Mall? Put some volunteers in those spike shoes to areate the turf, paint the bathrooms, rake the dirt paths, etc. And we put monkey in charge of entertainment for the troops.
This will totally work.
Maybe if we stop putting damn museums on it that would be a great start.
It's just grass. Get over it. People can pee at the museums.
Isn't this almost the same amount of capital improvement money WMATA is saying they need to keep Metro running properly over the next five years? I find it odd that we can spend that much on a park. I can understand buying railcars and upgrading electrical system, but $450M seems like a lot for the mall. I could be surprised.
y'know what i'm ashamed of? what i said about ted kennedy's dad and gloria swanson. and what i did in the reflecting pool after six mickeys big mouths and a chili cheese big bite from the Sev.
Vaughan: You do realize that the ducks will still have the main Reflecting Pool, Constitutional Gardens, the Museum of the American Indian, and oh yeah the Potomac and the Anacostia Rivers to land on and sit on and do whatever the fuck it is that ducks do on water.
So my point: They have other options, they can lose one.
Will one of you phonys tell me where the ducks go in the wintertime?
i know, big stick. sorry, it had been a long day and was just being stupid at work. i fully realize that this area has to be one of the swampiest, duck-friendliest cities. and that at most times of the year the reflecting pool is closer to a cesspool - not really reflecting anything so much as grossing people out.
speaking of cesspools, monkey, i've heard old salts tell that ducks winter in vegas. really, you can't keep them off the buffets.
I'm just glad it's still an open space of (mostly) green. But yeah, pull some money out of the defense budget and buy some Turf Builder.
plus one pair of ducks has the water feature in the courtyard at national geographic.