How to See Washington, DC: A City of Edits

Washington is a city in which the federal axis is the only thing the founders drew once. The capital has spent two and a half centuries arguing with what they drew. The L'Enfant plan of 1791 is on the welcome posters; the city you walk through is the McMillan plan of 1902, edited by every era since. The Washington Monument has a literal seam where the consensus that started the building fell apart for a quarter-century. The Lincoln Memorial was sited more than a century after the founders drew the federal axis. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was approved against the objection of half its own commissioners.

Washington is the capital that committee-built itself, and that has been editing the minutes ever since.

That is the thesis. Understanding DC is the work of reading the city as a working document, not a finished monument. The federal axis is the table of contents. Every neighborhood is a footnote with an argument inside it. The interesting question in any block is never what was built; it is who fought for it, what was removed to build it, and what was added later to answer the first thing.

The plan was never one plan

Pierre Charles L'Enfant drew a plan for the federal city in 1791. President Washington dismissed him in February of 1792. Andrew Ellicott completed the survey on a revised version. Most of what L'Enfant proposed was never built. The grand ceremonial avenue west of the Capitol existed on paper for over a century. The mid-nineteenth century filled the Mall with railroad tracks, a depot, a market, and Victorian gardens.

What you walk through today is the McMillan plan, named for Senator James McMillan of Michigan, who chaired the Senate Park Commission that drew it in 1901 and published it in 1902. The other names around the table were Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted Junior, Charles McKim, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. They redrew the axis as a cruciform with four anchor points: the Capitol to the east, the Washington Monument at the center, the White House to the north, and the Tidal Basin to the south. They cleared the railroad depot. They graded the Mall to a flat sweep of lawn. They wrote a working draft and trusted that successive congresses and commissions would execute it.

Per John Reps, in his 1967 book Monumental Washington, the McMillan Plan was never formally adopted by Congress. It has nevertheless governed Mall design for a century and a quarter, because the institutions Washington built between 1902 and the present chose to treat it as authoritative. In 1910, President Taft signed the legislation creating the US Commission of Fine Arts. The commission became the room where every monument's design got minuted. The National Capital Planning Commission was added later. Every new structure on the federal axis passes through both rooms. The plan is what survived the meetings.

The four monuments that were the four edits

A useful way to walk the Mall is to read each monument as the political answer of the era that built it.

The Washington Monument is the eighteen-forties answer that became the eighteen-fifties argument that became the eighteen-seventies resumption. The cornerstone was laid on July fourth, 1848, to a design by Robert Mills. By 1854, construction had reached approximately one hundred and fifty feet, and the donations ran out. In February of 1855, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party seized control of the Washington National Monument Society. Work stopped for twenty-one years. The second phase, beginning in 1879, used marble from a different quarry. The horizontal band visible on the obelisk's south side, approximately one quarter of the way up, is the seam.

The Lincoln Memorial is the early twentieth-century answer. The McMillan plan had named the swampy patch of ground at the western end of the Mall as the site of a future monument. Speaker of the House Joe Cannon opposed the site as unstable swampland. Per Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette Lee, in their 2006 book Worthy of the Nation, Cannon lost the fight in 1913 when Congress approved the design and the location. Henry Bacon's Greek temple, with the seated figure by Daniel Chester French, was dedicated on May thirtieth, 1922, twenty years after the plan was drawn.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the early-1980s answer. A twenty-one-year-old Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin won the public design competition in May of 1981 with a recessed black granite wall of names. At Commission of Fine Arts hearings in 1981, critics called it a black gash of shame. The compromise added Frederick Hart's bronze Three Soldiers near the entrance plaza, dedicated in 1984. Per Kirk Savage's 2009 book Monument Wars, this is the monument that broke the Mall's vocabulary of figural-classical temples above grade.

The Second World War Memorial is the early-2000s answer. The Park Service called the Rainbow Pool site the most prominent spot for a monument on the National Mall since the Lincoln Memorial. The Memorial, designed by Friedrich St. Florian, opened on April twenty-ninth, 2004. Architectural critics raised the vista issue and lost the argument. The most carefully protected open sightline in twentieth-century American urban design became, in a single competition, editable.

Four monuments, four eras, four arguments that won. None was the founders' decision. All were locked in by committee minutes that the public never reads.

The other axis, the parallel axis, the writable axis

The federal axis is one document. There is a second document, written on top of the first.

On Easter Sunday, April ninth, 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of approximately seventy-five thousand people. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused her the use of Constitution Hall before an integrated audience. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest. The Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, introduced Anderson on the Memorial steps. The performance was the first time the federal axis had been used as a Civil Rights stage.

Twenty-four years later, on August twenty-eighth, 1963, two hundred and fifty thousand people stood on the same axis. A. Philip Randolph chaired the planning. Bayard Rustin ran the day. The coalition called the Big Six included Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young Junior, John Lewis, James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Junior. King delivered the closing address. Approximately twelve minutes in, Mahalia Jackson, seated behind King on the platform, leaned forward and said, Tell them about the dream, Martin. The phrasing is documented in Drew Hansen's The Dream (2003) and Clarence B. Jones's Behind the Dream (2011). King pushed the prepared text aside.

The federal axis, drawn by L'Enfant and locked by the McMillan plan, was made to tell a story it had not been designed for. The axis has been writable ever since. It has been added to: the African American Civil War Memorial in 1998, the engraved step at the Lincoln Memorial in 2003, the MLK Memorial in 2011, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, the Black Lives Matter Plaza in 2020. It has been corrected by sandblasting: the abbreviated Drum Major inscription at the MLK Memorial, removed in August 2013 after Maya Angelou's critique in the Washington Post. It has been erased: the BLM Plaza mural, removed by DC crews in March 2025 under federal pressure. Every one of those moves is an edit.

The two axes share the same ground. They do not share the same authors. To see Washington is to hold both at the same time.

The neighborhoods that grew up beside the federal precinct

The Mall is a federal precinct. Most of Washington is not. The interesting half of the city is the half that lived next to the federal half and figured out how to stay residential.

Capitol Hill is the working example. There are roughly eight thousand contributing buildings in the Capitol Hill Historic District, designated on the DC Inventory in June of 1973 and listed on the National Register in 1976. The federal precinct stops at Independence Avenue on the south and at First Street on the east. Past those lines, the rowhouses begin. The parish at Christ Church of Washington Parish, three blocks south of the Capitol on G Street, was incorporated in 1794 by an act of the Maryland General Assembly, six years before the Capitol's first full session arrived in November of 1800. The neighborhood predates the federal city. It survived because the federal expansion stopped where it stopped, and because the residents and the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, founded in 1955, fought to keep the rowhouse fabric in place against repeated federal-office expansion proposals through the 1960s.

U Street is the other example, four kilometres north. The corridor between roughly Howard University and Fourteenth Street was, between approximately 1900 and 1968, the cultural capital of Black America outside Harlem. The journalist and historian Blair Ruble, in his 2010 book Washington's U Street, treats the corridor as a single biography. Howard University, chartered by Congress in 1867 and named for the Freedmen's Bureau commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, is the corridor's parent institution. The True Reformer Building at Twelfth and U, dedicated July fifteenth, 1903, is the first building in the United States to be designed, financed, built, and owned by African Americans after Reconstruction. The Howard Theatre opened on August twenty-second, 1910. The Lincoln Theatre opened on January twenty-second, 1922. Ben's Chili Bowl opened on August twenty-second, 1958.

The corridor's first life ended on April fourth, 1968. Doctor King was shot in Memphis that evening. Crowds gathered at Fourteenth and U Streets. The unrest lasted four days. Thirteen deaths. Twelve hundred homes and businesses in the U Street neighborhood damaged. The corridor's commercial life took more than twenty years to begin to come back. Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove's 2017 book Chocolate City documents what came next. The U Street census tract was seventy-seven percent Black in 1990. It was thirteen percent Black in 2020. The institutions that defined the corridor's peak are still here on the corridor's own terms. The residential community that sustained them is largely not.

Capitol Hill kept its residents and edited the rowhouses. U Street kept its institutions and lost its residents. Both are still telling the same city's story, in opposite directions.

How to walk it

Four tours hold the argument together.

Walk the National Mall first if you have one morning. Walk it knowing what it is. The McMillan plan of 1902 made flesh by every committee that has met since. Look at the Washington Monument's seam, the Lincoln Memorial as a 1922 building, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a counter-monument, the Second World War Memorial as the vista that the McMillan plan lost. Read each as the political answer of the era that built it. The next one will argue back.

Walk the Civil Rights Corridor next if you have an afternoon. Same axis, different document. The Lincoln Memorial steps as the August 28, 1963 stage. The 2003 engraved step. The 2011 MLK Memorial with its 2013 sandblasted scar. The 2016 Smithsonian museum that put the corona of an enslaved African American artisan's ironwork on the federal axis. The 1998 African American Civil War Memorial seven blocks north of the Mall. The 2020 plaza north of Lafayette Square, removed in 2025. The two tours read the same ground. They do not read it the same way. Walk them in sequence.

Walk Capitol Hill third. The four civic temples and the residential laboratory that wraps around them. The Library of Congress Jefferson Building, completed 1897, holds approximately one hundred and seventy-three million items and is the largest library in the world by catalogue size. The Supreme Court, opened in 1935, did not have its own building for the first one hundred and forty-six years of its existence. The Folger Shakespeare Library, opened in 1932, holds the largest collection of Shakespeare materials in the world and reads at residential scale because it sits at residential scale. Eastern Market, opened 1873, survived a 2007 fire and reopened in 2009. The decision to keep this neighborhood residential is itself a piece of architecture, written into the boundary line at Independence Avenue.

Walk U Street fourth. Howard University at the north end. The Howard Theatre, the True Reformer Building, the Lincoln Theatre, Ben's Chili Bowl on the central blocks. The Duke Ellington childhood residence at Thirteenth and T. The African American Civil War Memorial at the eastern end. Hold both frames at once. The corridor that was. The corridor that is. Both are true.

What it adds up to

Washington is not a museum. It is a working document. The L'Enfant plan was a sketch. The McMillan plan was an edit. Every monument since has been an edit on the edit. Every Civil Rights inscription has been an edit the original authors could not have authorized. Every neighborhood next to the federal precinct survived because someone fought to keep it. The next edit is being negotiated now in commission hearings the public does not read.

The city that looks finished is not. That is the most useful thing to know about Washington before you walk it.