To me the Mall is depressing. It was being redone when we were there in October 2015 so maybe I will like it better when its redone (needs a lot more bathrooms) and Trump is in the White House. I hated that you could not get within a half a mile of the White House, no tours, Penn Ave closed. Ugly metal fences every where. And yes, the MLK monument is ugly. I don’t have a lot of animus towards him as a man but his image has been so distorted by the Dems.
I was there in 2005.
I was somewhat shocked to see, when I came up from the subway, that it looked like any large chunk of poorly kept grass that you would find at a park after it rained too much, and the buildings around it looked kind of like any standard structure you would find in a medium-sized city.