Field Trip: Welcome to America’s Front Yard

Step onto America’s front yard with us and see the National Mall as you’ve never seen it before: a living civics classroom where design, memory, and the First Amendment share the same lawn. Our guide is Jeremy Goldstein, Vice President of Programs at the Trust for the National Mall, who brings decades of educator insight to the story of how this open park became a stage for democratic life.

We trace the Mall’s surprising evolution from swampland and canals to the ordered vistas of the 1902 Macmillan Plan, and then through the era of temporary federal buildings that served two world wars. Jeremy explains why the Mall’s mix of granite, water, and grass panels is more than aesthetic—it’s civic architecture that invites gathering, reflection, and dialogue. With roughly 9,000 permitted peaceful events each year, the Mall operates as a constitutional lab in real time, where visitors encounter both history and the active practice of free speech.

You’ll hear why every memorial required public support beyond federal funds, how friends groups steward distinct narratives, and how the National Mall Gateway captures “mall moments” that aren’t carved in stone—major marches, speeches, and cultural milestones. We also explore the Washington Monument’s engineering feats, from mortarless stacked stones to its aluminum cap and the state stones lining the elevator shaft, and we honor the deeply personal connections people find at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial.

If you’re planning a trip for America 250 or just want to see the Mall with fresh eyes, this episode offers context, stories, and practical insight to deepen your walk. Subscribe, share this conversation with a friend who loves history or civic life, and leave a review with your favorite memory from the National Mall—what moment stays with you?

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Transcript

Meet Jeremy And The Field Trip Plan

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Today we are joined by Jeremy Goldstein, Vice President of Programs at the Trust for the National Mobile, where he leads volunteer and education initiatives focused on meaningful civic learning. Jeremy has spent more than 25 years designing learner-centered programs and supporting educators with a career that began in the classroom and grew into leading experiential and workforce learning programs in the Washington, DC area. Over the next eight Fridays, we'll be taking a field trip to the national level. And Jeremy brings deep curiosity about how people learn and how experiences shape civic engagement. He is going to be our guide for this field trip to America's front yard. Welcome everyone to our first episode in a series we're calling a field trip to America's Front Yard. And I am very excited about this series because my very favorite thing to do when I go to Washington, DC, which I will be very excited to be, I will be there again in March, is to take a walk down the national mall. I always grab the train, I start at Arlington, and then I go all the way up to the Capitol because for me, it is just such a grounding and beautiful place. And I am thrilled to have Jeremy Goldstein from the National Mall Trust with us, kind of as our field trip guide. So in our first episode, we are taking kind of just an overview of welcome to America's front yard. So, Jeremy, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to talk about the National Mall because it genuinely is probably one of my favorite places in the world. So, can you tell us what makes the National Mall unique among civic spaces?

Monuments, Memorials, And NAMA Explained

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Well, great question, Liz. I also note that your walk is a lot of people don't realize this, but it's over two miles when you walk that full distance. So we've developed some resources that help people time their visits. So that's something I'll talk about later. But, you know, the the National Mall is unique among civic spaces for a couple of different layers. One of them is I work at the Trust for the National Mall. We're an official partner to the National Park Service, and it is a national park. It's one of the most, if not the most, visited national park. The hard part is tracking how many people go there because there are no gates and there's no admission fee. It is an open space, thus the America's front yard name. And one of the big things I talk about is I there's a lot of like obscure information that a lot of people don't know. But when they visit, they kind of pick that up from rangers and volunteers, people on the mall. And as we're going into America's 250th year, this is stuff that we've been able to elevate and sort of bring to the public's view. And two things come to mind when we ask about, we talk about why it's unique. It is monuments and memorials. That that is simply put it, it's the granite, it's the stone, it's the water, it is the natural features that are built, they're built features, but they're natural features with a lot of water plants, and there's a conscious design there. And that is that makes it unique. It's no in the national park system, it's known as NAMA, which takes national and mall, the first letters of the two. And you'll find that that's the code for all of the parks across the park service. But NAMA, or the National Park itself, is really it doesn't include the buildings of the Smithsonian, but there's really no border on the National Mall. We're talking about the National Park Service property, which is the large panels of grass and the memorials. Now, the second piece, which I find fascinating, is people tend to forget this, is that it is an active First Amendment space. And I find that there aren't a lot of places where you basically walk into an active constitutional lab, so to speak. And as an educator, I taught for 25 years. I I'm always loved bringing students down there when I worked and taught in the the uh Washington area. And I brought students down there and I said, any given day, there are Americans exercising their constitutional rights. And that is 9,000 permitted events a year on the National Mall. And those are permitted by the National Park Service, and those are peaceful events, and anyone can apply for a permit. And so the monuments, memorials, the granite, the stone, the plants, and then the action of the U.S. Constitution, which I find as a teacher who supports civic learning and really taught civics, that to me is such a unique space in that it's a national park, public lands, and it's an active space.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

I love that. And I, you know, when I think of history, there's so many things that have happened on the national mall. So how has the mall's design reflected these changing democratic ideals?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Oh, this is great because we we delve into the history on our we have a resource for educators and for the greater public called the National Mall Gateway, just recently launched on Constitution Day in September of last year. And this resource gives you the full expansive history of the National Mall. And there's one site on the mall that I always start with when I talk to people. It's called the Lockkeepers House. And it is literally a small stone cabin on the corner of it's at 17th, and it's on the edge of the mall. And we our our the trust actually moved it out of a traffic pattern and restored it in 2018. And it was the residence of a lockkeeper. And it doesn't mean that they held the keys to any doors. Those were river and canal locks, and canals ran through the National Mall. So Constitution has a canal underneath it, and all of these things were connected to the Potomac. And then it also ran up and down the two sides in the Alexandria and the Virginia side, and then also up to Georgetown, where there was an aqueduct which crossed the Potomac. So there was an active waterway that moved commerce in Washington. And it was also a swampland or a wetland. There are images of cows grazing there. There are images of soldiers being billeted on the National Mall. It really came into form and came into the mall as we know it with the Macmillan plan in 1902. And that was a congressional plan to say we're going to take away these kind of Victorian and kind of I guess you would say we're going to be more intentional about creating a mall or a gathering space and America's front yard. So the grass panels, the concepts of the Lincoln and the Washington being at these ends, and the Lincoln wasn't around then. But the Washington Monument was kind of a work in progress and it and it's such a fascinating monument because it had two phases of big building. And all of those things came into like in 1902, people started to realize that there's a grand plaza or a grand entry, much like a lot of European cities. Another piece of obscure fact is it served many purposes. So between 1915 and 1971, there were tempos on the mall, and those are temporary buildings that house the War Department or the Department of Defense later on for World War I and II. Those were up by the World War II monument. They were large buildings over Constitution Garden. There's one left in DC off the mall that I've seen, but they were torn down in 71. And so it served as an administrative purpose. But the mall as we know it really came together when they started commemorating 1976 as the 200th anniversary of the country. And then the McMillan plan, of course, is that that sort of starting moment for the mall as we know it.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

So why is it that a public space is so important in a constitutional democracy?

A Living First Amendment Space

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah. You know, there there are a number of answers, but I think what I really feel like is access is not limited on the mall. And this is an international visitor space. 36 million people visit the mall a year. That's the estimate. And we're projecting in 2026 for the 250th, 50 million. Those are international visitors, those are U.S.-based visitors, those are U.S. citizens, citizens of other countries. Those are people jogging through who treat the mall as their central park in Washington. It's a wonderful green space. There are kickball and volleyball leagues. There's a lot of stuff. So it's it's really the space for all. And that word about the nation's front yard is where people convene. I go to the mall weekly because I work the mall. And, you know, it's it's inevitable. I'm going to spend a lot of time on the mall when I work for the trust for the national mall and we're right around the corner from it. But I find that it also is a facilitator, the space is a facilitator of conversations. You'll meet international folks, you'll ask people questions about what they're either supporting, protesting, or or exercising their free speech about, but it is an interactive space for Americans. And that is where those democratic ideals are reflected is that, you know, a permit for a peaceful demonstration facilitates dialogue. And that's that's really what makes our democracy healthy.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

I I love that. And I, you know, when you talk about accessibility, I think that's one of my favorite things about the mall is you can just go at any time and go to any part of it. And it when I think about Washington, D.C., I think about the national mall. And I think, you know, visitors who come in, they they see things like the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and these, you know, monuments and this space that really reflects who we are as a people. So when people come to the National Mall today, and I, you know, for America 250, I'm I'm just so excited about America 250 as a whole, but also that there's going to be so many people, you know, in this really beautiful space. What stories do you hope that visitors take away from the mall today?

From Canals To The Macmillan Plan

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Well, my organization, our mission is to, you know, restore, preserve, and enrich the national mall. And that's through projects, through educational programming and volunteer programming that that my um department runs. But in addition, we're really raising support. A lot of people don't realize this, but every monument on the mall um required private donor support, not private, but public donor support outside of federal support. So every one of these monuments was supported by the American people donating funds in order to make these pieces. There are friends of the monuments groups for each one of the monuments. We're the kind of greater national mall group, but each one of these groups has had an intention to represent a narrative on the mall, a historic narrative, to get a little bit teachery here for you. And uh what I think is the most the most fascinating is that it's about people, it's about events, and the mall contains multitudes. And even the things that aren't engraved in stone. So on the National Mall Gateway, we have a set of mall moments, and these are events that shaped America's history that occurred on the mall, in addition to that narrative that's being represented by the monuments and memorials. The other thing that I really hope people take away is that this is a space of reflection. There, you know, it is the American story, and it's the, you know, the full range of reactions, emotions, and experience. There are war monuments on the National Mall. There are monuments celebrating great groups of people, great individuals, and their narratives and their stories and their, you know, their speeches. So it's a it's really a living history book or a living civics text. I also hope that people find that their identity is contained in them all. And that means whether you're international, because there's you know, there's an international presence, we presence. We have, you know, we have the Korean War Memorial, which talks about the UN participation in the Korean War, and it has, you know, lists of these countries that that were connected to it. But in addition, it's that that narrative that's contained in the stone. It's also about the things that happened on there. So I hope that people see their identity on the National Mall as part of the American story, whether they're coming from far away or nearby. And so, you know, one of the stories that I I love to tell people is that the the Washington Monument took two big efforts to be completed. There are images out there, you can search for them, of a half-completed Washington monument. But the full completion of the monument, and it's a bit of a miraculous monument, there's no mortar between those stones. They are stacked stones, 555 feet high. My favorite piece of trivia is what is the tip of the Washington Monument made of? It's aluminum. A lot of people didn't realize it, but it was a precious metal. I know that. Yeah. And it is aluminum with a lightning, with a lightning system too, a lightning deterrent system, too. So when you go up, which you can, it costs a dollar to reserve, but it's free to take the elevator if you want to reserve it. You go up. On the inside of the Washington monument are stones from all the states. And these stones are in the elevator shaft. And if I Liz, I don't know if you've been up there.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

I have been up there, yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

It is really this this space that sort of reminds me of the building of our nation and the building of this monument that's a commemoration of one of the founders and the first president of the country. So getting a little bit sentimental there, but that's really one of my favorite stories. And and I always ask people what their favorite monument is, and there are so many different reasons for that, too. Some people connect because they had family members involved in the actual events. Some people have family members' names inscribed on the National Mall. And that's where that identity piece comes in.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

And, you know, you say that. You know, passed when I was a little bit younger. And that's seeing that monument. And I don't know that I have a favorite because there's so much going on in the mall. But I think that from my personal story, that was the one that touched me most. And seeing the faces, you know, on these statues and seeing the freedom is not free. And, you know, that there's the countries of the UN. It was for me, I think I was there for two hours because it was just a good place for me to connect with both of my grandfathers and you know what they had given as young men for our country. And it just to me was so powerful. But then again, you know, the Vietnam memorial, too. Like you said, there's there's names written on there, and that is so powerful and important. And the Lincoln Memorial is there's so much there, and I will never forget. And I didn't know it was there at the time, but I was walking up to the Lincoln Memorial and I just happened to look down, and it was the plaque where Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech. And I turned around and looked down at the mall, and I got very emotional and teary because it's like I'm standing somewhere that this great man stood and gave this, you know, historical speech. And I mean, I feel like I can talk about monuments all day long, and that's why we're doing this field trip series because there's so much in the mall to talk about, but I love that it does everybody has a place where they can connect and they can be a part of something. And I I really just love that about the mall. So, Jeremy, I'm so excited to go on this field trip with you and talk more and listeners. Oh, like we're doing this series, we have seven more episodes, and really what we're hoping that you get from this is an excitement and understand understanding of how you know monuments connect specific values such as liberty, equality, and unity, recognizing public memory and how it evolves. And you know, the next time you're in DC, having this experience at the National Mall and having just a little bit more of an understanding. So, Jeremy, I am so excited to go on this field trip with you. I can't wait for our next episode.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Me too. Thank you so much, Liz.