Democracy Needs Room to Breathe

From Park to Prototype: Franklin Square’s New Urban Role

Purchased by the federal government in 1832, Franklin Park’s much-needed spring water was diverted through hollowed-out logs and into the White House, starting with President Andrew Jackson and lasting until President William McKinley. Sprucing it up in 2021 and raising the site two feet for better sight lines and drainage cost $18.4 million.

Last October, the National Capital Planning Commission picked Rubin’s landscape architecture, urban design, and planning studio, Land Collective, to lead the design work for the current Pennsylvania Avenue plan, which has not been altered since 1974.  The real estate and economic development consultants HR&A Advisors is also working on the plan. 

Rewriting Pennsylvania Avenue for People, Not Just Power

The one-mile, cavernous stretch from the Capitol to the White House is written as a “L’Enfantian big gesture,” Rubin said. The plan currently creates “a north-south abyss,” a “monumentality,” and enough lanes of traffic to prevent pedestrians from venturing from one side to the other. The number of car lanes could be reduced by two or more, suggests Rubin. That leaves room for expanded sidewalks, especially on the northern, more commercial side.  

Each side of the avenue is different. The south side is lined with institutional buildings – including the National Archives, the Old Post Office Pavilion, the District’s city council, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Gallery. The Brutalist-style FBI headquarters is an outpost on the north side, along with the more contemporary Johns Hopkins School for Advanced and International Studies building.    

If Land Collective’s plan works, the north side can come alive with activities that “can be everything from intimate farmers’ markets to significant events that take up the entirety of the avenue itself,” Rubin said. “What is seen as an abyss in the breadth of the avenue could be seen as much more humane and habitable while still being monumental.”   

Rubin said the way to look at Pennsylvania Avenue was to look at it as three “urban rooms.” The first western room includes the World War I memorial and Freedom Plaza, just a couple of blocks from the Treasury and the Willard Hotel.

At a recent NCPC meeting, Rubin said Freedom Plaza, a home to skate boarders and protestors, was the same size as the Place de la Republique in Paris and that it could be redone while leaving room for Americans to exercise their first amendment rights much as the park in Paris does now for the French.    

“The status quo is not working,” Rubin said. The plaza is “incredibly hot and very exposed. And it’s not serving medium, small or large events well.”  

The second “room,” known as Market Square — featuring Indiana Avenue, C Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Navy’s war memorial — could be “stitched” closer together with the third eastern “room,” which features a statue of the famous Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall near the courthouse.    

Rubin said that the areas have “a holistic interest” and “should not be designed as two parts.” They made up “a living, breathing connective tissue of the city” and a “gateway to downtown” D.C. across the mall where the Hirshhorn Museum and sculpture garden stand, and north to the National Portrait Gallery.   

That way, the plan would merge the needs of the burgeoning neighborhood with the everyday needs of downtown residents, Rubin said.   

The park officially closes at 9 pm, but it has “ambassadors” trained to extend assistance, “whether a tourist trying to find the White House or someone in need of services.”   

“Even when a public space project has been completed without the involvement of people with lived experience, it is never too late to incorporate this point of view and make the effort truly inclusive and successful for the long term,” said Lucho Vásquez, executive director of the District’s Coalition for the Homeless, in an email. He would not elaborate.  

“Everyone has the right to occupy civic space,” Rubin said. “It doesn’t mean they should encamp, but they should be able to be here.”  

Rubin’s Land Collective has done other work in the nation’s capital, including the World War I memorial (formerly Pershing Plaza); the National Mall’s Tidal Basin; and Canal Park, which features ice skating in winter and fountains in summer. (HR&A has worked on the Anacostia Waterfront.)   

The National Capital Planning Commission, which is one of the agencies overseeing the plan, has strongly backed Land Collective and HR&A Advisors. “Pennsylvania Avenue is currently guided by an outdated 1974 Plan,” the commission says on its website. That has affected its “character, reducing its utility as a street.”   

“I understand that this capital city is bigger than I will ever be,” Rubin said. “I want it to read well as a landscape because a city is a landscape, and there are rooms within this greater construct. And they all have purpose.”

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• Landscape

• David Rubin
• landscape architecture
• Steven Mufson
• Washington D.C.