THE MALL

Here by night is perhaps the city's most classic view, the Capitol dome behind the shaft of the Washington Monument viewed through the Lincoln Memorial's fluted Doric columns. The concept seems to have been cast in stone. By George, it was cast in stone. Could the nation's capital have possibly looked any other way?

Actually it was meant to. Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, George Washington's Engineering Corps protege, planned the City of Washington with an east-west axis running from the Capitol to the river. On the Mall (which he planned as an embassy-lined, bustling pedestrian thoroughfare, not a sylvan retreat), this line would cross the meridian, (the north-south of 16th Street) through the White House. Where these lines intersected, L'Enfant would dip the knee to his benefactor: an equestrian statue of General Washington would arise.

It did not. L'Enfant lost the power to make it happen. His aesthetic vision, though inspired, was crippled by the artist's arrogance. Less than a year into his grand city design, he was brought low by the city commissioners, politicians, and property-holders. Though his city plan was, in the main, adhered to, he was fired and died penniless and disgraced.

Decades passed without a monument to Washington arising. Finally a private group, the Washington Monument Society, called for designs. Architectural competitions were a thrifty source of building plans (the risk was in the designer's court). The 1836 competition was won by the eminent South Carolinian architect Robert Mills, already responsible for the nation's first major monument to George Washington, the 165-foot column in Baltimore. It was Mills's view that "monuments have always served as beacons of safety to public virtue and beacons of warning to the vicious."

Mills called for a 700-foot shaft with a 100-foot-tall circular temple at its base, ringed with Doric columns and topped with classical statuary. Over the entrance would be a quadriga like the one atop Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. Mill's winning entry seems to recall such notable antique sources as Hadrian's Tomb (Tosca's jumping off point, the Castel Sant' Angelo) and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus as Mills would have known it (or at least, pictures of it) in the Comte de Caylus's 1759 reconstruction, an obelisk atop a colonnaded base mixing "les formes Egyptiennes & l'elegance des ornemans Grecs." Though the Washington Monument rose only 555 feet without Mills's planned temple base, the diminished obelisk was still too heavy for the site where L'Enfant's two axes intersected. And so the shaft rose a hundred yards to the southeast on higher, firmer ground. To our eyes, it seems to have belonged there from the start.

The mysterious seated figure who seems to perfectly define the era with his studied nonchalance is none other than Eric Menke, Mr. Wentzel's long-time friend.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLKMAR K. WENTZEL (CC ‘74); TEXT BY JUDITH W. FRANK (WASHINGTON BY NIGHT)

---

Return to WASHINGTON BY NIGHT Main Page
Return to COSMOS 1998 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page