The National Mall as a destination

Tour map from the National Geographic website.

Today's Examiner has a nice piece by Mike Rupert about the National Mall as a destination, "Battle Lines drawn on the Mall," which covers some of the issues in terms of how it works and doesn't work as a highly-visited space. From the article:

Washington has more than 400 municipal and national parks covering thousands of acres across all corners of the city. But for the estimated 26 million tourists who will converge on the District this summer, the National Mall is the only one most of them will ever see.

And although 98 percent of visitors were “satisfied” with the National Mall, according to a 2005 survey by the National Park Service — a statistic echoed in a recent informal survey of 100 tourists by The Examiner — a group of citizens now hopes to expand it and make it more visitor-friendly...

“Tourists that come to Washington for the first time are thrilled to be in the presence of government, thrilled to be among the beautiful monuments and the beautiful museums,” said Judy Scott Feldman, president of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall. “But what they don’t see during their short stay is how deficient the Mall, the actual park space, is and what it is rapidly becoming.”

A recent report done for the National Mall Conservancy Initiative showed a significant lack of drinking fountains, benches, parking, convenient restrooms, restaurants, historic signs and widely available maps of the whole park. The National Mall, Feldman says, is rapidly becoming a “Disneyland on the Potomac,” where people simply move from monument to monument, museum to museum, by tour bus and trolley.

Feldman leads a group that is asking Congress to enforce a 2003 construction moratorium and wants to convince officials to expand the Mall to the Potomac River and beyond. Pierre L’Enfant, who designed Washington, never envisioned the Mall as a “museum itself” filled only with monuments and icons, advocates say.

Tom, 38, who plays pickup soccer near the Ellipse, often is forced to sneak behind a tree in plain view of the White House to relieve himself...

Click here for reports from the National Mall Conservancy

And the Tourism Destination Areas development materials from the Nova Scotia Tourism Promotion Council are incredibly useful. The Tourism Destination Assessment Workbook (although loading very slowly today) provides a fine methodology that can help you think about the quality and potential areas of improvement for your own destination.

As I said in a blog entry (Town-City branding or "We are all destination managers now") in February 2005:

We are all destination managers now!

I think the points covered in the Nova Scotia workbook can be extended, but it's a great start.

Another point I have been making since at least 2000, is that it is important to DC to figure out how to extend the Smithsonian's evening hours throughout the year, even if the additional cost were to be paid out of DC tourism taxes...


Index Keywords: tourism; destination-development