Also this issue: Bell's Hell The new home of the world’s most famous gong is a blow to liberty. -John Andrew Gallery

June 12-18, 2003

cityspace

Free the Mall! Close the Mall!

by Daniel Brook

For months, a group of Independence Mall-area businesses and residents held meetings, wrote letters and signed petitions to open up 500 block of Chestnut in front of Independence Hall. Then in April, the Coalition to Free Chestnut Street’s wish was granted when Mayor Street brushed aside advice he received from D.C. bigwigs -- including Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge -- and reopened the block.

The victory only whet the coalition's appetite for more. Reconstituting themselves as the Independence Mall Business and Residents Coalition or IMBARC (pronounced "embark"), the group is now demanding less obtrusive security on the mall to give it a more tourist-friendly, less-militarized vibe that they hope will help area businesses. The group's founding document calls for restoring "dignity, grace and Common Sense to democracy's birthplace."

IMBARC co-founder Ann Meredith of Lights of Liberty, the nightly multimedia extravaganza where tourists traipse about the park and gaze at lighting displays projected onto Independence Hall, does not mince words in saying, "It looks like a gulag. It's a nightmare. It is insane."

She cites "the use of crime-scene tape, the cars parked on Independence Square [and] the bicycle barriers [that] make it still look like a place under siege." Still, Meredith says National Park Service officials have been receptive to IMBARC's suggestions.

Independence National Historical Park spokesman Phil Sheridan says the Park Service agrees "with them that the temporary measures do need to be improved." But until a security study is completed, the anti-terrorism structures must remain in place.

Sheridan says the study was delayed by Mayor Street's decision to reopen Chestnut since it was assumed the street would remain closed. In light of the mayor's decision and continued requests from Washington that he reconsider that decision, the Park Service is drawing up plans based on Chestnut being open or closed.

Just last week, Gale Norton, secretary of the Department of the Interior -- which oversees the Park Service -- sent Street a letter urging him to re-close the block for crowd-control and car-bomb-security purposes. Norton toured Independence Mall in May.

Without dropping the pressure on the Chestnut Street issue, Meredith hopes the Park Service will make more widespread changes soon, wondering aloud why the "temporary" security measures have lasted nearly two years.

The current look of the mall, she says, is a "desecration of a national shrine."