During the fall and winter months of 1934, the Washington Monument was prepped for repairs and cleaning, due to cracking at the base. Scaffolding was built around the 550-foot monument to allow the workers to make the repairs with Public Works…

Restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool began in November 2010. The two-year, $30.7 million renovation project almost completely rebuilt the structure. The 1923 original pool was built on an unstable foundation that sank and cracked. The…

The National Museum of African American History and Culture was established by an Act of Congress in 2003 and is the only national museum devoted to African American life. The goals of the museum are: to educate about African American history and…

Located on the grounds of the Washington Monument, the Survey Lodge was originally a boiler and steam house for the machinery necessary to power the Washington Monument's elevator. It was constructed of leftover marble and granite from the…

President George Washington and city planner Pierre L'Enfant chose the land for the new capital of the United States, in part, because of the beauty of its landscape. Rolling hills, the meeting point of two rivers, flat lands along the river banks,…

Tiber Creek raced through the city from the base of Capitol Hill to the Potomac River. In the early 1800s, it was about 800 feet wide, flowing just below the hill where White House was built. Swimmers, boaters, and fishermen navigated its waters.…

The original botanic gardens in Washington were built in line with the Capitol building, where the Capitol Reflecting Pool is today. The new design proposed for the Mall in the early 1900s called for an open green space from the Capitol to the…

This article from the Baltimore Sun discusses the establishment of the National Botanic Garden in Washington. The main source of the collection for the garden were botanic specimens gathered during the United States Exploring Expedition, which…

This detail of the bird's eye view of the city, "The national capital, Washington, D.C. Sketched from nature by Adolph Sachse, 1883-1884" shows the National Mall before the Army Corps of Engineers began to dredge the Potomac River to fill in the…

In this passage, Margaret Bayard Smith describes the Mall as it was when she first arrived in Washington in 1800, a plain covered in trees, shrubs, and flowers. By the time she wrote this passage in 1837, the banks of the Tiber had been transformed…