The National Mall is a roughly 2-mile-long open symmetrical landscape that functions as the central arena for democratic identity and protest in the US, stretching from the US Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Lined with more than 30 monuments and memorials and 11 Smithsonian museums, the Mall is a deliberately planned civic space intended to symbolize openness and egalitarianism.
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Architect Nicholas Potts leads a walking tour of the National Mall, noting that many buildings adapt European neoclassical styles into an American form, such as replacing traditional motifs with corn cobs on the columns of the US Capitol building.
In the 1800s, the National Mall looked nothing like it does today. Canals, rail lines, markets, and industrial uses crisscrossed the Mall before later redesigns cleared it into a unified civic landscape.
With 21 museums and the National Zoo, the Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum complex. Eleven of those museums sit directly on the National Mall, and all offer free admission to the public.
The Smithsonian Institution was established through a gift in the will of James Smithson, a British scientist who never visited America but left his fortune to establish an institution dedicated to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
Pierre Charles L’Enfant was an engineer who fought in the American Revolution. George Washington chose him to design the capital for his military service, artistic training, and vision of a monumental national city.
In the 1790s, L’Enfant designed a capital defined by broad avenues, public squares, and long sight lines between major civic buildings. Much of his vision for the Mall was disrupted for decades and was finally realized through later 19th- and early-20th-century redesigns.
Drafted by the Senate Park Commission, the McMillan Plan called for the removal of railroads, markets, and industrial uses from the Mall; revived key elements of Pierre L’Enfant’s original layout; and established the framework for the Mall’s long lawns, museum placement, and monumental core.
In the late 1910s, sheep grazed near the Lincoln Memorial and on the White House lawn. Under Woodrow Wilson, their wool was auctioned for charity, briefly making the grazing animals the subject of a federal cost-saving experiment.
In 1981, a 21-year-old Yale architecture student, Maya Lin, won the national design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The design was controversial for rejecting heroic statues, using a black wall, and avoiding overt patriotic symbolism.
Opened in 1910 on the Mall, the National Museum of Natural History is among the Smithsonian’s oldest museums. Its scientists steward more than 148 million objects and specimens—making it the largest natural history collection on Earth.