National Capital Parks

Pierre Charles L'Enfant

The Washington that you see today had its birth two centuries ago in a rational yet visionary design unprecedented in its scale. Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s plan for the city and its core mall area was influenced by urban planning then current in Europe and neoclassical landscape design exemplified by Versailles. Brilliantly adapting those ideas to Washington’s terrain, L’Enfant place the Capitol on Jenkins Hill and the President’s House on a lower terrace then overlooking the Potomac River. Between them ran Pennsylvania Avenue, to symbolize the separate but connected executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. The spirit of that plan lives in the city still.

A place created and planned as the seat of government; a young city that powerfully evokes the past; treasury of a nation’s heritage; home to hundreds of thousands of people. The nation’s capital can be seen from a number of perspectives, all of which are better understood after a visit to the heart of Washington, DC – the National Mall area. The Mall’s formal structures, ceremonial spaces, and carefully planned vistas have their roots in earlier European capitals designed to showcase autocratic regimes. But these are, in Walt Whitman’s words, democratic vistas, where the American people can freely assemble to play, attend cultural events, or petition the government for change. In 1933 stewardship of the Mall area passed to the National Park Service.

Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches

In Washington, DC, you can view the magnificent buildings that house the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches of government – White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court. Washington is also where the nation commemorates the wars the country has fought and men and women who served and gave their lives in them. Less well known than some memorials but quite moving is the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial near the Capitol. The soldiers flanking Grant show the fear, the fatigue, the strain of battle; they give a haunting face to war. The nation’s great presidents – those to whom the nation is in debt for their leadership during the republic’s formative years or during crisis – are honored here: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smaller, quieter places such as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site and the Sewall-Belmont House commemorate the struggles by African Americans and women for equality before the law. The National Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington’s other great museums – these are the repositories of all the nation holds significant, because it is beautiful, rare, instructive, or because it helps us remember. Architecturally the buildings and monuments of Washington can be powerful, often handsome, sometimes controversial, but they are most important in what they say about us. We read in each the changing concerns, attitudes, and tastes of the culture that built them. Beyond the sites and structures, beyond the events and people they commemorate, are the truths they embody: justice, equality, courage, honor – the tools of a free society. Just as the Mall is the symbolic heart of Washington, Washington is more than simply the governmental center of the United States. This city gives shape to our common heritage and to the diverse culture that is our source of renewal; it is a place that defines us as a people.