IF YOU WANT A VISION of hell, look here: the national mall in Washington, D.C., at noon on a summer's day. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis stand on the treeless expanse, baked by the pitiless sun, looking lost. Dad wears a muscle-beach T-shirt stretched over a Cheesecake Factory body, his hair matted in shiny ringlets round the crown of his head. Sweat begins to show at the waistband of Mom's stretch pants. The air is hung with scrims of haze. To one side the Capitol building shimmers in ghostly outline. To the other, the Lincoln Memorial looms in what might or might not be Hellenic grandeur; it's hard to tell through the waves of heat. Both landmarks seem unreachable, impossibly distant, in opposite directions. Buddy's fanny pack won't stay hitched up, and the intense physical discomfort is the only thing that keeps Sis from dying, like totally dying, of boredom.

To be an American family in such a situation--on your first trip to the national mall, where (your textbooks taught you) those monuments of creamy marble rest among vast squares of green, set nobly along America's grandest promenade--is to be primed for indignities, one after another. Mom and Dad and the kids have driven the minivan in from the Motel 6 where they're lodged, way out on Route 1 in suburban Virginia, but they've discovered too late that the parking lots on the mall have all been closed. Street parking is beyond the dream of anyone who doesn't arrive at sunup or after sundown. Tickets for the mall's only bus service, the Tourmobile, cost $17.50 for adults, $9 for children.

The Smithsonian museums that line the eastern stretch of the mall are air-cooled, of course. Yet aside from the Air and Space museum, with dozens of tons of flying machines suspended from the ceiling, and the art galleries, for people who like that sort of thing, the museums are a bit bewildering. There's a curious lack of stuff. And just getting in and out of the museums is a pain. Already the family has been through half a dozen metal detectors and had their fanny packs poked and probed just as often--even at the Botanical Gardens, which has recently been locked down against evildoers bent on anti-fuchsia terrorism. When the family gets back outside in the pulsating sun, the heat is made even less bearable because--hey, where are the water fountains? The lack of water might be a blessing, though. If you drank too much you'd soon discover there aren't many bathrooms, either, and they're usually out of soap anyway, sometimes toilet paper too, and they always seem to be a quarter mile away from where you are, wherever you are.

Still, our visitors make their way toward the restroom, and as they go they notice also that no one has thought to set out benches for the lame, the halt, or the merely footsore--just a few, here and there, usually splintered. The scramble for seats can get ugly, especially for the benches set in the shade of the overspreading elms. Sometimes it looks like a game of musical chairs in an old folks' home. Oddly for a promenade, fences are everywhere: snow fences of flimsy red slats and wire, more formidable cyclone fences painted black, placed to discourage unauthorized ambling and to cordon off vast acreage of greensward--or what would be greensward if it were green. And if you get hungry, your chances of finding food depend heavily on luck. The federal government, caretaker of the mall, has never bothered to print a map showing concession stands and restaurants.

Nowhere to park, nowhere to sit, nowhere to eat, nowhere to pee. Do I exaggerate? Only a little. One doesn't have to spend too much time on the national mall--the "place of resort" for public walks that Pierre L'Enfant, the capital's designer, dreamed of--before one begins to detect a certain lack of hospitality. One begins to feel like a nuisance, in fact. Worse, one begins to feel that one is supposed to feel like a nuisance. And one--I hate to say it, I really do--would be right.

Watching a rash of apartment buildings rise on the hills of San Francisco in the 1950s, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright told a local paper: "Only a place this beautiful could survive what you people are doing to it." Wright (who despised the mall's classical dimensions, incidentally) could have applied the same remark to the monumental core of Washington, D.C., as it limps into its third century. The mall is a mess, and getting messier.