Washington, DC — National Mall & Federal Core
Smithsonian Castle and the National Mall
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Pause near the red sandstone Smithsonian Castle and turn your attention to the space around it. The Mall feels natural only because generations of planners worked very hard to make it look inevitable.
Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan imagined a grand ceremonial landscape connecting the legislative and executive branches. The nineteenth-century Mall, however, became a much messier place of gardens, paths, railway tracks and institutional buildings. The broad open axis familiar today owes much to the McMillan Plan of 1901–1902, which revived and reinterpreted the monumental geometry of the original plan.
The Smithsonian itself grew from an unusual bequest. James Smithson, an English scientist who had never visited the United States, left money for an institution in Washington devoted to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846.
Notice the contrast: the Castle looks vaguely medieval, while the Mall beyond it became the setting for a modern democratic ritual — museums, demonstrations, inaugurations, festivals and mass gatherings. The Mall is federal monumental space, but it is also a public stage. Washington’s most imposing landscape works partly because ordinary people keep occupying it.