Nineteen free museums and one grand plan
Nineteen Smithsonian museums line the National Mall and none of them charge admission, an arrangement funded by an Englishman who never visited America — James Smithson left his fortune to a country he had no connection to, and Congress argued for a decade about whether to accept it. The city was purpose-built as the seat of government, laid out in 1791 by Pierre L'Enfant on a Baroque grid of diagonal avenues that still confuses drivers. The Mall runs from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, and a height limit on buildings keeps the whole composition legible. Beyond the monuments, D.C. is genuinely dynamic — U Street was a center of Black American music before Harlem, and Adams Morgan and Capitol Hill each carry their own political and social layers.
