The Washington Monument doesn't just dominate America's capital. It defines it. And it isn't just a marker for the man, George Washington, who so changed the US nation's history – it has itself been buffeted by that same history, as wrangles and wars dragged out its construction over 90 long years. Like much else that goes on in Washington DC, the 169-metre high Monument was as controversial then as it is well-loved now.
From a distance, this unmistakeable white-obelisk looks like a single towering block. But get up close, and you'll see it's made up of stone blocks - lots of them. All of the marble, granite and gneiss stones used to make George Washington proud have been counted. And there are 36,491 of them, piled up high into the sky. The pinnacle is capped by a single-cast aluminium apex, once worth its weight in silver. Remarkably, thousands of Americans could claim to have jumped right over its shiny summit. But only because the pointed apex was left on the ground in 1884, so Americans could take one small step, and then tell tall tales of a giant leap.
It sits on right in the centre of Washington, on a line running directly east from the Lincoln Memorial to the US Capitol Building. And almost (but not quite) on a line drawn south from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial. It was supposed to be slap bang in the middle, of course, but surveys found the ground too soggy there to support its huge weight. So it was stepped to the right a little. That was just one misstep in a catalogue of construction woes that stretched across almost a century. Congress refused to fund it, civil war stopped it. It was even left only a third-built for 20 years, and you can see the join, where the stones used were changed.
Now it's hard to imagine DC without it. One thing’s for certain. You don't need to find the Washington Monument – as the tallest stone structure in the world, it's going to find you, where ever you are in the city.
