Park
Constitution Gardens
Serene bicentennial park of lawns and a lake built over a demolished wartime office complex.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Constitution Gardens on the National Mall opens with a young Franklin Roosevelt, then an assistant Navy secretary, deliberately designing cheap, ugly wartime office buildings in 1918 so Congress would tear them down quickly. It follows how the Main Navy and Munitions Buildings instead lasted decades, outliving the war and reaching into Roosevelt's own presidency, and his later admission that he doubted he'd get into heaven for what he'd done to the Mall. His own White House staff worked inside those drafty wartime corridors for years after he became president.
This audio guide was created using AI.