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Wednesday, January 23, 2002
By Linda Wheeler, The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- City planners have always been conscious of the capital's elemental virtue, and most first-time visitors recognize it, too: Washington is a city of views, and monumental ones at that.
No doubt that's why the concrete, metal and wood security barriers now enveloping almost every downtown federal building and monument have triggered revulsion among residents and tourists alike. Stark, haphazard and unsightly, the hodgepodge of fences, planters, gates and Jersey barriers is the antithesis of the visual harmony for which Washington is famous.
Renowned architect Arthur Cotton Moore calls the multiple, mismatched layers of protection "a trashing of the city. ... We are creating a monument to the Jersey barrier."
Lonnie Bremby of Moreno Valley, Calif., in Washington last week on business, was equally distressed. Although he approved of increased security for the president and the rest of federal Washington, he was struck by how much the concrete slabs and gray metal fencing along Pennsylvania Avenue detracted from the White House's grandeur.
"Can't they make it look presentable, less like a prison?" he asked.
Each set of barriers in the city's monumental core can trace its origins to a particular terrorist attack against the United States, starting with the concrete sewer pipes placed in front of the Capitol in 1983 after a bombing outside the Senate chamber doors.
The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing begat the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House and the massing of Jersey barriers at the 15th and 17th street entrances. The 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania produced a ring of Jersey barriers around the Washington Monument.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 set off the most ambitious round of barrier-building, with more sewer pipes around the Capitol, chain-link fences along the Ellipse, a double row of 100 Jersey barriers at the Lincoln Memorial and dozens more placed at the Jefferson Memorial.
Despite official assurances that the ugly obstructions would soon be replaced by elegant forms of security, virtually all have endured, a testament to government inertia.
What made the barriers' spread especially disturbing was that it began when the Mall had never looked as good. For most of its history, the Mall envisioned by Pierre L'Enfant was a work in progress. Construction on the city's first major memorial, the one honoring Washington, was halted for decades, and large sections of the Mall were taken over by the federal government during World War I for War Department buildings that remained in place for 50 years.
There are recent signs, however, of a commitment to restoring Washington's look of openness. Over the past month, the urge to safeguard buildings through the easiest means available seems to have run its course, and the prospect of permanent, attractive solutions is coming into view.
"The Jersey barrier defense is behind us," said John Parsons, assistant regional director of the National Park Service.
If federal review commissions and congressional budget writers cooperate with current plans, all the makeshift barriers will be gone from the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials by January 2003 and from the Washington Monument by summer 2003.
At the Capitol, a project to replace all the plaza's concrete pipes, slabs and planters with eagle-decorated, cast-iron posts -- known as bollards -- is fully funded and slowly proceeding. The bollards are to be in place on three sides of the Capitol by year's end, with the east side not completed until 2005, when a visitors center now under construction is to be finished.
Although the Sept. 11 attacks prompted another wave of what Moore calls the "bunkerizing" of Washington, they also made discussion of permanent changes a much higher priority. Congress ordered the Park Service to come up with security designs for the three major memorials and, in legislation passed in December, authorized the agency to sign design and construction contracts.
That's a rocket's pace compared with the process followed at the Capitol, where debate on a permanent security perimeter began in the mid-1980s but the first bollard didn't go into the ground until last summer.
Bollards also have emerged as the leading choice at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The Park Service wants to encircle both with Victorian-style bollards similar to those placed at Lafayette Square several years ago. Planners say a ring of the three-foot-high posts would be as effective as Jersey barriers in stopping a truck attack. The proposal needs approval from two federal review commissions.
Although there is near-universal impatience to be rid of the Jersey barriers, bollards aren't the answer for everyone.
Even when they are spaced several feet apart, a row of bollards looks like a solid wall to a person walking by it, said Washington landscape architect Jeff Lee. And they endanger trees: Each must be anchored in a footing of concrete extending three feet from the curb and about three feet below ground. "Where trees are planted near the curb, the footings would mess with the roots and destroy the trees," he said.
Parsons, who represents the Park Service on the National Capital Planning Commission, agreed bollards aren't always the right choice. The Park Service and the commission won't accept a one-design solution, he said, and top designers will be asked for imaginative solutions that fit the character of each building and its landscape.
The Fine Arts Commission concluded that a necklace of bollards wouldn't fit the scale of the Washington Monument, and the Park Service has proposed a combination of sunken pathways and an underground visitors center connected to the monument by a tunnel.