The story of the Mall is the development of
a particular space at the symbolic and economic center of the nation's
capital. Embodied in that story is the changing face of a nation: how
abstract democratic ideals were translated into physical space and
transfigured by slavery, secession, urbanization, and by the
bureaucratization and expansion of a central, federal power.
L'Enfant intended that the city's development would be diffuse and
democratic. He dispersed federal and ceremonial spaces throughout the
city, gave the states an equal say in the business of memorial-making in
the capital, and planned for the coexistence of federal and private
industry in the local economy. However, the first large-scale federal
development of the Mall, modelled after Andrew Jackson Downing's plan in
1851, bore little resemblance to L'Enfant's plan and can be read as a
response to the twin crises of slavery and secession, and to growing
anxiety over urbanization. The naturalistic, picturesque gardens planted
on the Mall in the latter half of the nineteenth century were meant to
affirm the refinement of slaveholding society and to offer a pastoral
retreat from the "wilderness of bricks."
Urbanization accelerated during the period, and by 1900 the response to it
had changed. As John Kasson has noted, the naturalistic retreat (like
Central Park, or Downing's Mall) and the grand, geometric Beaux Arts
design characteristic of turn-of-the-century urban planning (White City at
the 1893 Columbian Exposition, or the 1901 McMillan Plan for D.C.) both
offered critiques of city life. But where the former tried to diminish the
city and to provide an intimate, pastoral antidote, the latter elevated it
and celebrated its massive scale as a symbol of authority and of control.
Following the McMillan Plan, and growing out of a corresponding expansion
of federal presence and power, the Mall became a monumental and
symbolic space. At the same time that private industry (the Central
Market, the railroad) disappeared from the Mall, the federal government
became the dominant economy of the District. The latest plans for the
District prepared by the National Capital Planning Commission represent
further expansion of this symbolic, federal themed space.
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