SeeHistoric siteNational Mall

Reflecting Pool

The view from the Lincoln Memorial, with the 2,000 ft Reflecting Pool in the foreground and the Washington Monument just behind, and the Capitol Building in the distance, is famous and not to be missed. This was the setting for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, which he gave from the steps of the memorial over a crowd of 200,000 that didn't fit very well—many of them stood in the pool itself!

history

Address: 2 Lincoln Memorial Cir NW
Phone: +12024266841
Website: nps.gov (opens in a new tab)

Directions Suggest a nearby place

Listing from Wikivoyage: Washington, D.C./National Mall, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Also listed in Overture Maps open data.

Updated 28 Sept 2026. Something wrong? Tell us.

Close by

DoPark
Constitution Gardens
Constitution Gardens is a park area in Washington, D.C., United States, located within the boundaries of the National Mall. The 50-acre (200,000 m2) park is bounded on the west by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the east by 17th St NW, on the north by Constitution Avenue, and on the south by the Reflecting Pool. Constitution Gardens has a small pond, which contains the Memorial to the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence on an island open to pedestrians.
SeeMonumentNational Mall
District of Columbia War Memorial
The Mall's only local memorial, and the only memorial to WWI, is this small secluded structure in the form of a Doric-style open-air temple serving as tribute to the 26,000 Washingtonians who served in the Great War. You'll find here the names of the 499 who died engraved at the memorial's base. Recent attempts to re-dedicate the memorial as a national WWI memorial have ironically sparked fierce Washingtonian pride in the monument—the only local monument on the Mall, with locals seeing this as just one more indignity aimed at the city by a Congress for which it cannot vote.
Built 1931
SeeMemorial
Vietnam Women's Memorial
The Vietnam Women's Memorial is a memorial dedicated to the nurses and women of the United States who served in the Vietnam War. It depicts three uniformed women with a wounded male soldier to symbolize the support and caregiving roles that women played in the war as nurses and other specialists. It is part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a short distance south of the Wall and north of the Reflecting Pool.
SeeMemorialNational Mall
Declaration of Independence Memorial
A little known memorial stands on the island in the Constitution Gardens Lake, dedicated to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Not content to reside only on the document itself, their signatures have been reproduced here, etched in large granite blocks.