“Covering Ground,” the second chapter in Kirk Savage’s Monument Wars, outlines the physical transformation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. between 1842 and 1884. Savage argues that the transformation of the Mall corresponded with changing conceptualizations of “public grounds” and “public space.” Andrew Jackson Downing, who set out a plan for Washington’s landscape in 1851, viewed the public grounds as substantive, physical, and planned. Savage writes, “Space in Downing’s day was an abstraction: the unfilled area or gap between two solid objects or the open expanse between geographical . . . markers.

Although Downing was accidentally killed in 1852, the “naturalist” vistas of his plans for the Washington Mall were maintained in the second half of the 19th century. Jutting from the picturesque landscape of the Mall was the incomplete obelisk of the Washington Monument, which had been started in the 1840s but was not finished until 1884. The “mechanic monster,” as Savage refers to the monument, contrasted sharply with the coiffed greenery of Downing’s grounds. The late 19th century witnessed the transformation of the physical ground, symbolized by the planned, de-centralized gardens, into the modernist conceptualization of public space, represented by the hulking, centralizing force of the Washington Monument. This creative destruction, argues geographer David Harvey, is the key feature of Enlightenment modernism – the new must emerge from the old.

The theme of Savage’s argument, in his second chapter, is that physical sense of place can be radically altered by collective assumptions about the roles that “ground” and “space” are expected to fill. Thomas Casey’s modernist Washington Monument not only shifted attention away from Downing’s faux-natural landscape, but also represented the birth of a “new spatial experience of the capital.” In this sense, the National Mall can be considered a lieu de mémoire; it remains material, functional, and symbolic, but also includes the capacity for metamorphosis. Pierre Nora writes that these sites, “exist because of . . . [the] endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications.”

Savage's book does an excellent job of examining the shifting conceptions of public grounds and public spaces that is represented in the physical transformation of 19th century Washington. I would definitely recommend it for an expansion of many of the issues discussed in your post, as well as for a wider discussion of the mall as a site of "national identity" throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the US.