Wayfinding Signage
Finding your way around should be as easy as possible. That's why the Downtown BID helped lead the effort to develop a citywide signage system to assist visitors and residents in finding such popular destinations as the White House, Ford’s Theatre, Chinatown and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. More than 30 stakeholder groups got involved in the process to develop the wayfinding signage program in Downtown, with funding from the DDOT and the Federal Highway Administration (FHA).
In 2001, the Downtown BID unveiled another signage program, the Civil War to Civil Rights Downtown Heritage Trail, in collaboration with Cultural Tourism DC and DDOT. The self-guided tour of Downtown’s history just east of the White House, features 21 poster-sized signs that describe Downtown's development from a sleepy backwater town into a world capital through the stories and depictions of people such as Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Whitman and many other great Americans who made history here. This signage program gives workers, visitors and residents the opportunity to sample Downtown’s neighborhoods, businesses and restaurants.
More recently, the Downtown BID partnered with federal and municipal governments to integrate new signage into Downtown directing patrons to national monuments and local attractions. Several entities, including the National Park Service (NPS); the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC); the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA); DDOT; and the DC Office of Planning (OP) are working to improve the visitor experience through good wayfinding programs. NPS began developing a comprehensive signage project, the National Mall Pedestrian Guide Sign Program, for the National Mall and Memorial Parks in 2008. The program includes wayfinding for the first time.
The program has been designed to augment and complement the existing sign programs on and near the Mall and seeks to enhance the visitor experience by pointing out the locations of Smithsonian museums or buildings and public and private sector visitor attractions, services and institutions on and off the Mall. This would include the National Aquarium, the Newseum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, all in Downtown.
The Mall program has been designed purposefully to complement DDOT’s blue wayfinding signage program and is a win-win strategy for the federal government, Downtown and the city. For too long, the National Mall and nearby Downtown neighborhoods have been disconnected. Just as appropriate city wayfinding signs direct visitors to the National Mall, appropriate NPS wayfinding signs will direct visitors into the city.
