Memorials and The Mall

I walked and biked across and around The Mall--Washington's long strip of grass from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial--many times. Sometimes it was to play host to visitors; sometimes it was to explore museums; sometimes it was to examine monuments; sometimes it was simply to walk or jog or run. The Mall was an easy destination because I lived so close to it.

I collected the pictures I took in various visits to the Mall. Some visits were short one-offs; others were day-long sight-seeing of memorials. The pictures are in chronological order, which means that often sites near each other are adjacent in the album but sometimes they're not if I visited them on separate days.

Annoyingly, the Mall gradually closed. When I arrived in Washington D.C., the area around the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial was entirely off-limits as it was being rebuilt. After I arrived, as winter approached the Park Service shut more and more grassy segments to do rebuilding or at least replanting over the winter. Though I laud the goals, I want to complain that these construction sites blighted the landscape. February became worse with more construction as building started for the African American Museum. The spring wasn't much better; if anything it was worse, with huge mounds of dirt of being dug up on the eastern half of the Mall in order to rebuild grounds for better drainage and more sustainable lawns.