Park Service Seeks Ideas for a Mall Makeover

The McMillan Commission was a panel of renowned architects and landscape architects charged with devising a plan to revive and extend the Mall. After visiting several European capitals for inspiration, the commission presented its plan, which expanded the Mall to include the Lincoln Memorial and the Tidal Basin, creating its current kitelike shape.

The National Coalition to Save Our Mall, an advocacy group that has been working for the past six years to get federal officials to rethink the Mall with a plan as ambitious as the McMillan Commission's, was pleased to hear that the Park Service is turning its attention to some of the problems.

"The Mall is deteriorating very quickly," said the group's chairman, Judy Scott Feldman.

One tourist at the Washington Monument yesterday said she felt as though she were in "a cattle call" by the time she passed all the security fences.

And Carol Jourdan, 40, visiting the nation's capital from Minnesota yesterday, looked down the long expanse of Constitution Gardens and felt a little lost. "I wish there was more information -- like where I am, where to go, what does it mean, that kind of thing," she said.

Feldman's group has proposed more signage, podcasts or audio tours. But even more important is to determine a vision for the Mall's expansion and what to do with all the museums, monuments and memorials waiting to be built, Feldman said.

"It's the elephant in the room -- what we're going to do with all these commemorative works and museums that are coming our way," said Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

"The sentiment is that there's a moratorium on these things on the Mall, but at the same time, they keep letting these projects into the back door."

In 2003, Congress passed the Reserve Act to declare the Mall a completed work of civic art and to prevent it from being overbuilt. But since then, three projects -- the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture -- have been approved for the Mall.

The Park Service will tackle the dilemma, working alongside the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal agency that must approve projects in the District. The commission created a Legacy Plan in 1997 that suggests that the Mall should expand.

"The Mall is a concept that really extends beyond the border of that green space," the commission's chairman, John V. Cogbill III, said yesterday.

In Senate testimony last year, Cogbill set forward the commission plan that he hopes will dovetail with the Park Service's new initiative.

"Legacy proposes expanding the monumental core beyond the Mall and the traditional center of Washington to North and South Capitol streets, the Anacostia River and adjacent areas," he said.

"By expanding the monumental core in this way, the Capitol would truly become the center of the city, with symbols of the nation radiating out in all directions."

To register opinions on the Mall, visit the National Park Service's interactive Web site athttp://www.nps.gov/nationalmallplan.