Two weeks after the National Park Service called on the American public to help guide the preservation, management and future look of the National Mall, roughly 1,000 people have already offered suggestions on how to improve the park experience.
The common critiques should come as little surprise to regulars: Visitors want better access to basic amenities, from parking to food to bathrooms to direction, as they tour the 600-acre park.
“It’s ranged from people saying they want the Mall better taken care of, but they don’t provide specifics as to how they would do that, to people who want an increased number of restrooms available, to people who want increased availability of food services to people who want the area signed better,” said William Line, park service spokesman.
The Mall planning process, which continues today with a symposium at the U.S. Navy Memorial downtown, is a study not only of the fundamentals, but also how the park will look in the next 50 or 100 years.
Both need the park service’s attention, said Richard Layman, an urban revitalization activist and local planning consultant.
“We need to be a tourist in our own city sometimes to understand these issues,” Layman said in an e-mail. “For me, recently it was herding around an old girlfriend and her family and two children. You see things through their eyes, when they can’t find directions, have to go blocks to find something to eat, don’t know where to find a rest room, realize that the Downtown Circulator bus for ‘the Mall’ doesn’t go to monuments such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial etc.
“That doesn’t mean that we avoid the big picture,” he continued. “But focusing on the vision for the next 100 years while failing to recognize that people need places to sit, to go the rest room, and to eat won’t serve anybody either.”
The recommendations so far have come from residents of 30 states, Line said, reiterating this is a “dialogue” for the Washington region and beyond. The process could take as long as two years, allowing plenty of time for constructive commenting from some of the Mall’s 25 million annual visitors.
