National Park Service Begins Major Planning Initiative for National Mall
NPS will hold a public meeting on the process on Wednesday, November 15. ASLA staff is working with the Park Service as the process moves forward.

While the grounds around the Washington Monument were substantially improved in the last year, the National Park Service has undertaken efforts to plan for the future of the entire National Mall.

Earlier this month, the National Park Service (NPS) announced the beginning of a public planning process to improve the visitor experience at the National Mall and provide direction on how it will be managed for the foreseeable future. The NPS is providing the public with multiple opportunities to be involved in the planning effort, including a new interactive website that will give the public the opportunity to submit their ideas for the Mall directly to NPS. ASLA encourages its members to submit comments to the NPS regarding the National Mall planning process and indicate on the submission form that they are ASLA members.

On Wednesday, November 15, the Park Service will host a symposium titled the “Future of the National Mall,” which will formally launch the planning effort and begin a national dialogue around planning for the future of the National Mall. During the symposium, local, national, and international experts in the fields of landscape architecture, city planning, and related industries will discuss the possible solutions for preserving the Mall, while meeting the needs of millions of visitors each year. This meeting will be open to the public and will be held from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm at the U.S. Naval Heritage Center at 70 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest in Washington, D.C.

ASLA representatives will attend the meeting and will meet individually with decision makers at NPS to ensure that the expertise of the Society and its members is fully used as the planning process moves forward. In an interview with LAND Online, Vikki Keys, NPS superintendent, National Mall & Memorial Parks, said she looked forward to working with ASLA and the larger landscape architecture profession as the plan moves forward, adding, “the involvement of landscape architects will be critical to the project as it moves forward.”

According to Keys, the NPS has been preparing for the planning initiative “behind the scenes” for about a year and is currently in the scoping phase of the plan. She says what is most important now is to receive public comments on what the National Mall should look like going forward, and she hopes the symposium and website will garner that input. After the first of the year, Keys says, the NPS will begin developing various alternatives for the plan along with cooperating federal agencies. She says the plan is to have a draft plan for the Mall—which will also be subject to public review—by late spring or early summer, with a final plan targeted for the end of 2007. The master plan for the National Mall will be drafted by the NPS, Keys says.

The NPS expects built facilities, such as bathrooms and concessions, to be a topic of conversation as the planning process moves forward, Keys says, noting that most of these facilities are more than 40 years old, and 25 million visitors stream through the Mall per year—a number that does not include vehicular traffic.

However, Keys adds that security design will not be addressed during the planning process. She notes that the NPS has identified three areas of the National Mall—the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and Lincoln Memorial—that required comprehensive security design plans, and that these efforts are in various stages of completion. The Washington Monument plan by Olin Partnership has been implemented, while improvements are currently under construction at the Lincoln Memorial, and the design process for the Jefferson Memorial is under way.

Funding for the planning effort is available to the NPS, Keys says, while the funding for design and construction will be done in a public/private partnership, with fund-raising being conducted by the Trust for the National Mall. The Trust, which was founded in early 2004, is similar, from an operational standpoint, to the Central Park Conservancy, Keys says, and will also be looking forward in the process toward sustaining the improvements made to the National Mall as a result of the planning process.