Blog post #1

With over 134 national monuments in the U.S. and roughly 100 of them in Washington D.C., this raises the question of whether these monuments have served their purpose. To begin with, these monuments and the mall in Washington D.C. occupy approximately ~309 acres (about half the area of Central Park in New York City). With this amount of space, you could build hundreds if not thousands of residential houses, furthermore, this space could also be used for factories or other things that could be beneficial to the community. Another key factor to consider is money, many factors go into this category, for example, the cost of acquiring land. After that, the construction, development, etc. Once construction is done, there is the cost of maintaining the monument. This could range from simple renovations to changing HVAC systems. But most of these monuments' costs are sometimes offset by public funding, private organizations, and revenue from visitor fees. Although this applies to most monuments, some are arguably “needed”, for example, monuments or memorials such as the Vietnam War memorial, WWII memorial, 9/11 memorial, etc. All very important monuments and stand physically as a structure of history to be remembered, going on from history, the land in which monuments such as Mount Rushmore are located at Black Hills of South Dakota, once the land of the Lakota Sioux people. The Natives who witnessed this tragic event now see their land taken away and destroyed, and their own heroes don’t have a monument (haven’t finished “Crazy Horse”). In summary, many things can be considered when deciding to build a monument or look at its history, whether it represents a tragic event or the land it stands on and its history.