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Photo: Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The view from the Lincoln Memorial, with the 2,000 ft Reflecting Pool in the foreground and the Washington Monument just behind, and the Capitol Building in the distance, is famous and not to be missed. This was the setting for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, which he gave from the steps of the memorial over a crowd of 200,000 that didn't fit very well—many of them stood in the pool itself!
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is the largest of the many reflecting pools in Washington, D.C. Dedicated in 1922, it is a 2,028-by-167-foot concrete-bottomed roughly rectangular pool that as of 2012 holds about 4 million US gallons (15,000 m3) of water. The pool is located on the National Mall, in between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
The Mall's only local memorial, and the only memorial to WWI, is this small secluded structure in the form of a Doric-style open-air temple serving as tribute to the 26,000 Washingtonians who served in the Great War. You'll find here the names of the 499 who died engraved at the memorial's base. Recent attempts to re-dedicate the memorial as a national WWI memorial have ironically sparked fierce Washingtonian pride in the monument—the only local monument on the Mall, with locals seeing this as just one more indignity aimed at the city by a Congress for which it cannot vote.
A little known memorial stands on the island in the Constitution Gardens Lake, dedicated to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Not content to reside only on the document itself, their signatures have been reproduced here, etched in large granite blocks.
This memorial is a little hidden in the woods, and perhaps that's appropriate for the memorial to the one major war of the twentieth century (in which over 200,000 allied troops were killed or wounded) that did not leave such a huge impression in the American mind—the Forgotten War. It's easily one of the city's most powerful, though. The focus of the monument is the nineteen very realistic steel statues of American soldiers moving across the landscape (nineteen, because they total 38—referring to the 38th parallel—when reflected in the water). The lighting at night leaves an especially disconcerting, ghostly impression. The best time to visit might be after a winter snow storm, which will help you remember the worst hardship of the war—the snowy marches through the cruel Siberian winds.
Often described as the most moving memorial in the city, the Vietnam Memorial stands as tribute to those who died or went missing, intended to transcend political controversy in remembrance of the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Its centerpiece is a simple black granite wall engraved with the 58,256 names of each.
Many of D.C.'s monuments have a simple, sudden, and grandiose impact, and don't require much time to visit. Not so for this new memorial. WWII was the defining event of the twentieth century, in which sixteen million U.S. soldiers served, and 400,000 died—the enormity of the war is hard to grasp in one's mind, and the architect aimed to convey that enormity in this central memorial. To best appreciate it, you will have to walk around and slowly take it in. Kilroy was here—look for the hidden carving behind the Pennsylvania obelisk.
The newest of the Mall's memorials, dedicated to the fallen civil rights leader. You enter between two slabs of granite that symbolize a "Mountain of Despair" before standing before the "Stone of Hope", both named based on a line in King's "I Have a Dream" speech. A 30-foot likeness of King is carved out of the Stone of Hope overlooking the Tidal Basin, while a nearby wall contains inscriptions of quotes from many of King's speeches.