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Sad but True: In spotlight's glare, National Mall's blemishes are all too apparent
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Published: June 22, 2008
Updated: 06/21/2008 09:05 pm
Hooray, I get to be right.
I wish I had saved those e-mails I got last summer after I wrote a column saying that the National Mall in Washington was looking "ill-kempt and shabby."
A number of people, some of them in our circulation area and others in the D.C. area (in the Internet age, everything's accessible to everyone), wrote to chastise me. I didn't know what I was talking about, they said. Or, the mall looked bad only because I visited it right after huge crowds had gathered there for the Fourth of July, they said. Everything is fine and dandy, they said, and I could keep my uninformed criticisms to myself.
Now here we are almost a year later, and a lot of national attention is focusing on the continuing sorry state of the Mall, that 2¼-mile grassy area that stretches from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, past some of the nation's most famous memorials, monuments and museums.
"America's front yard," we call it, and the Mall symbolizes the nation to the estimated 20 million people who visit it each year, from across the United States and from many other countries. Lately, though, that "front yard" has looked as though its owners have fallen on hard times.
A story in The Washington Post last week (reprinted in part in the Journal Thursday) said that the mall "has long needed a facelift." Bloomberg News moved a story detailing sites that are "badly in need of repair."
The news accounts mentioned some of the conditions I described last year, including great bare patches where the grass has been worn away -- patches that turn into mud holes when it rains -- and lots of litter. Restrooms are falling apart, a pond festers with smelly algae, signs are outdated, light fixtures are broken. ...
Fortunately, as the Post reported, "People in power have started to notice the shabbiness."
In November, the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall was established to raise $500 million in private funds, establish an endowment and otherwise work to restore and preserve the mall and to develop educational programs and events there.
The National Coalition to Save Our Mall already had been working to raise money, to press for more comprehensive long-range planning and to question the need for obtrusive security structures.
This spring, the Bush administration announced a $2.2 million public-private effort to put new signs on the mall.
A U.S. House Appropriations subcommittee recently recommended providing as much as $100 million in extra money for fixing up the Mall, and the full committee may consider the request this week. The amount of money to be provided would be linked to how much the Trust for the National Mall can raise in matching funds.
It will take a lot more than that to get things the way they should be, of course. The National Park Service has said that it needs $350 million just to take care of maintenance at the Mall that has been put off for too long.
The problem is one that is common to most of the national parks, which have struggled for years without enough money to take care of basic maintenance and repairs, much less to improve or add anything. The price tag for deferred maintenance across the park system has doubled during the Bush administration, totaling an estimated $6 billion, according to the Post.
Of course, I don't really feel like cheering over all this evidence that I was right when I bemoaned the conditions at the Mall last summer.
It's distressing to read about the shortages of money and maintenance problems at all the national parks. The problems at the National Mall are downright embarrassing because they are so visible to so many, at the heart of the nation's capital.
For a couple of years now, the Bush administration has been talking about giving a lot more money to the national parks to prepare for the National Park Service's centennial celebration in 2016.
The $2.2 million for signs on the mall is a part of the first round of that effort. But with the economy in trouble, no end in sight for two costly wars and the deficit growing, the parks have not been and likely will not get most of what they need.
The administration is relying heavily on the prospect of donations from private donors, in what Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has called the parks' "new era of partnership with the American people."
Funny, but I thought we American taxpayers had always been partners in these parks that, after all, belong to us.
Come to think of it, the owners of "America's front yard" have fallen on hard times.
■ Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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