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Quoted from appended article:
But something more is happening. Like a lot of government- run public attractions nowadays -- historic homes, zoos, some national parks -- the Mall seems increasingly run for the convenience of its caretakers rather than the pleasure of its guests.
As a coalition report put it last year: "Maintenance and security concerns have begun to take priority over the deeper meaning of the Mall. We are heading toward a kind of 'Disneyland' on the Potomac, where tourists move from monument to monument by tour bus."
For more than seven years I have spoken of the "commercialization, privatization and motorization of our public lands", "the Corporate Takeover of Nature" and "the Disneyfication of the Wild." The appended article hits upon each of those points, but as foul a picture as the appended article paints, the ultimate fate of the Washington Mall is going to be worse and possibly very much worse.
In one vision, I see the Mall being further Disneyfied along the lines described in this article. That seems to be the fate awaiting virtually all of our National Parks. In another vision, I see the Washington Mall being commercialized and privatized along the specific lines of Bryant Park in New York City --- as a meeting place where young professionals can sip their lattes and dry-martinis and where the city's poor are unwelcome. In still another, I see the Mall being rented out to corporate interests as it was to the National Football League in the fall of 2003 during which a variety of dubious political programs such as "Take Pride in America" were subtly promoted. In a still darker vision, I see the Washington Mall being used and abused by those in power to stage events that explicitly advance particular political agendas and which actively stifle the speech of those who do not support that agenda. The handling of last week's Inauguration Ceremony is a perfect example.
Yet I have a much darker potential vision for the Washington Mall. It is one that haunts me and which grows more real with every passing day. It is a vision befitting of Albert Speer, first architect of the Third Reich. I'm sure you know the image.
From Disneyland to Fascism ---- is that really such a large leap???
Scott
-- begin quoted ---
Washington Mall Becomes Mickey-less Disneyland
Andrew Ferguson
Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- George W. Bush stood at the east front of the
U.S. Capitol last week and described a world transformed by openness,
trust and freedom.
As he let loose his lofty sentiment, he gazed out over the National
Mall, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument to the
Lincoln Memorial and the banks of the Potomac beyond. It is one of the
great public spaces in the world, and it is fast collapsing into a
symbol of fear, restriction, and bureaucratic control.
The irony was hard to miss.
The Mall has fallen casualty in part to the war on terror. For more
than a century, it has been a green space in the heart of the capital,
where U.S. citizens and visitors from abroad might wander footloose
from museums to shaded glens to endless promenades, along pools where
swans laze and stately willows dip in the breeze, before monuments
raised up in tribute to the heroes of U.S. history and inscribed with
prose as overwrought as this sentence.
That idea of the Mall as a usable national symbol survives, but just
barely. Instead, the Mall is becoming a place where visitors are
treated less as citizens than as an unavoidable nuisance.
The transformation moves forward in bits and pieces, in increments so
small that their larger pattern and ultimate end may be hard for the
casual visitor to discern.
Acropolis or Disneyland?
Judy Scott Feldman sees the pattern and knows the end. And she's not too happy about it.
"The Mall is our Acropolis," she told me last week. "It's a monument to
what we stand for, to our history and our values. That's what it was
intended to be and what it's been. And now it's under assault."
Feldman not long ago left her job as a professor of art history at
D.C.'s American University to head up the National Coalition to Save
Our Mall, a group that hopes to protect the integrity of the Mall from
bureaucratic encroachment and overreaching.
It's a big job, for the strangling of the Mall has been under way for
years, accelerating with the 2001 terrorist attacks but also predating
them.
Congressmen Only
At the Capitol building, the Mall's eastern terminus, a $500 million
visitors center (the price tag has doubled since its inception) will
corral visitors into tidy groups and place more than 80 percent of the
building off limits to anyone other than congressmen and staff.
From Capitol Hill to the Potomac, roads have been closed, parking lots
eliminated, gathering spaces roped off, and monuments encircled by
bollards of poured concrete, often without public announcement.
The latest attempt to make the Mall inhospitable to all but the
pluckiest visitor -- a move called "temporary" but soon to be made
permanent -- closed the parking lot at the Jefferson Memorial.
Anyone wishing to pay homage to the author of the Declaration of
Independence must now park a half-mile away, walk under a freeway
overpass and cross a busy street -- or spend $8 for a ride on a tour
bus authorized by the National Park Service.
But even walking on the Mall seems out of favor. Benches for the weary
and footsore are scarce, and so are water fountains and bathrooms.
Overkill
Much of this bureaucratic overkill takes place under cover of
"security" -- the most powerful conversation-stopper in the post-9/11
capital.
But something more is happening. Like a lot of government- run public
attractions nowadays -- historic homes, zoos, some national parks --
the Mall seems increasingly run for the convenience of its caretakers
rather than the pleasure of its guests.
As a coalition report put it last year: "Maintenance and security
concerns have begun to take priority over the deeper meaning of the
Mall. We are heading toward a kind of 'Disneyland' on the Potomac,
where tourists move from monument to monument by tour bus."
Tightening Grip
Freeing the Mall from the tightening grip of bureaucratic
decision-making is a tricky business. Feldman points out that no fewer
than seven governmental entities control parts of the Mall, including
the District of Columbia and the Smithsonian Institution.
Amid this tangle of bureaucracy, fighting projects one at a time makes
little sense, Feldman says. So she and the coalition are trying to goad
Congress into empanelling a commission to define the uses of the Mall
in the long term and perhaps create an agency to oversee the space in
its entirety.
"We need something that restores some rationality to the process and that can last fifty or a hundred years," she says.
There's precedent for this idea. In the 1890s, the Mall was in worse
shape than it is now. A train station belched smoke at the foot of
Capitol Hill. Light industries, including a brewery, littered the Mall,
which terminated in a sludge pit at the Potomac.
Congress created the McMillan Commission, a brain trust of urban
planners and architects, to restore the Mall to its original purposes
-- and the plan worked, for decades.
"The way it's going now, they'll turn the Mall into a theme park,
having people park in remote lots and then get shuttled around from
place to place," Feldman says. " They want to get people off the Mall.
We want just the opposite. We want to bring people back in.
"Otherwise, what is the M-all for?"
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- Various 
