Washington is unique among American cities in having been laid out on a master plan by architect Pierre Charles L'Enfant and like only a few other cities in the world. Haussmann redesigned Paris in a grand way, but that involved destroying a great deal of what was already there. Washington was started from scratch like Brasilia and Canberra, neither of which I suspect are quite so grand (although I have not seen them). Washington’s great boulevards are named after states, such as Pennsylvania Avenue connecting the Capitol and the White House, and go in varying diagonal directions, breaking up the monotonous grid of numbered and lettered streets. As in Paris this layout creates sweeping vistas and an interesting but orderly whole.

Also like many European cities there are no modern skyscrapers in Washington other than tall monuments like the Washington Monument, U .S. Capitol, Old Post Office Building tower, National Cathedral, and Catholic Basilica of the Immaculate Conception which stick out above what is otherwise a city of relatively even heights. I had always heard this has to do with rules that buildings should not dwarf certain monuments, but I was recently informed by my DC hosts that that’s partly an urban legend. Around 1900 Congress passed a law that no building could be higher than the Capitol but amended it about a decade later that no building could be more than 20 feet taller than the width of the street it faces. In most cases that means a maximum of about 13 stories.

The relatively uniform height of buildings gives a sense of spaciousness and airiness to the city. In Washington you never get the sense of being in windy canyons or in perpetual winter shadows of buildings as you do in New York or Chicago. The height limit also has the impact of creating a physically large downtown area and feeling of an urban center over a large part of the city . That’s different from so many American cities where there are just a few central skyscrapers surrounded by massive acreage of parking lots.

I try not to be jingoistic (and would prefer to forget my days as a Reagan generation College Republican), but when I visit Washington I can’t help feel pride in my country for the good things it has done and political and philosophical concepts it pioneered. I went through times during the years of Dubya’s presidency when I didn’t feel all that positively, but overall when you’re in Washington you see the big picture of America’s place in history and the world and forget the morons in Congress or the ineptitude of the inhabitant of the White House or whatever current gripe you may have against your government.

My host Mikey had extra bicycle, albeit one with a quite low fixed seat which caused me great knee pain, so we biked down through trails in Rock Creek Park to the monuments around the National Mall on beautiful chilly day . The Mall is the great open space in center of the city between the Capitol, the White House, and the Potomac on which stand the Smithsonian Museums and the great national monuments. There are many new monuments on the Mall since I lived in DC more than twenty years ago and at least one new one, that for Martin Luther King, since my last short stop in town about seven years ago.

As well as the King Monument the Franklin D. Roosevelt, WWII, and Korean War Monuments have all been added over the last two decades; the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian was erected; and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture is under construction on a very prominent spot near the Washington Monument and set to open in 2016. I can’t help but worry about developing Mall clutter as more of the great open space gets built upon. It is not that any of these aren’t worthy of a prominent place in the nation’s capital, but what about the notion of the grand open area and sightlines between important monuments. What monument might be added next? It’s probably only a matter of time until Republicans are in charge of everything again for a while and decide we need to erect a 400 foot statue of Ronald Reagan slaying a communist halfway between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. I personally think it’s time to say the Mall is full and future monuments and museums need to be placed off-Mall in prominent places on the extensive federal park lands in DC.