George W. Bush stood at the east front of the U.S. Capitol last week and described a world transformed by openness, trust and freedom.

As he let loose his lofty sentiment, he gazed out over the National Mall, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial and the banks of the Potomac beyond. It is one of the great public spaces in the world, and it is fast collapsing into a symbol of fear, restriction, and bureaucratic control.

The Mall has fallen casualty in part to the war on terror. For more than a century, it has been a green space in the heart of the capital, where American citizens and visitors from abroad might wander footloose from museums to shaded glens to endless promenades, along pools where swans laze and stately willows dip in the breeze, before monuments raised up in tribute to the heroes of American history and inscribed with prose as overwrought as this sentence.

That idea of the Mall as a usable national symbol survives, but just barely. Instead, the Mall is becoming a place where visitors are treated less as citizens than as an unavoidable nuisance.

The transformation moves forward in bits and pieces, in increments so small that their larger pattern and ultimate end may be hard for the casual visitor to discern.

Judy Scott Feldman sees the pattern and knows the end. And she’s not too happy about it. “The Mall is our Acropolis,” she told me last week. “It’s a monument to what we stand for, to our history and our values. That’s what it was intended to be and what it’s been. And now it’s under assault.”

Ms. Feldman not long ago left her job as a professor of art history at D.C.’s American University to head up the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, a group that hopes to protect the integrity of the Mall from bureaucratic encroachment and overreaching.

It’s a big job, for the strangling of the Mall has been under way for years, accelerating with the 2001 terrorist attacks but also predating them.

At the Capitol building, the Mall’s eastern terminus, a $500 million visitors center (the price tag has doubled since its inception) will corral visitors into tidy groups and place more than 80% of the building off limits to anyone other than congressmen and staff.

From Capitol Hill to the Potomac, roads have been closed, parking lots eliminated, gathering spaces roped off, and monuments encircled by bollards of poured concrete, often without public announcement.

The latest attempt to make the Mall inhospitable to all but the pluckiest visitor – a move called “temporary” but soon to be made permanent – was the closure of the parking lot at the Jefferson Memorial.

Anyone wishing to pay homage to the author of the Declaration of Independence must now park a half-mile away, walk under a freeway overpass, and cross a busy street – or spend $8 for a ride on a tour bus authorized by the National Park Service.

But even walking on the Mall seems out of favor. Benches for the weary and footsore are scarce, and so are water fountains and bathrooms.

Much of this bureaucratic overkill takes place under cover of “security” – the most powerful conversation-stopper in the post-September 11 capital.

But something more is happening. Like a lot of government-run public attractions nowadays – historic homes, zoos, some national parks – the Mall seems increasingly run for the convenience of its caretakers rather than the pleasure of its guests.

As a coalition report put it last year: “Maintenance and security concerns have begun to take priority over the deeper meaning of the Mall. We are heading toward a kind of ‘Disneyland’ on the Potomac, where tourists move from monument to monument by tour bus.”

Freeing the Mall from the tightening grip of bureaucratic decision-making is a tricky business. Ms. Feldman points out that no fewer than seven governmental entities control parts of the Mall, including the District of Columbia and the Smithsonian Institution.

Amid this tangle of bureaucracy, fighting projects one at a time makes little sense, Ms. Feldman says. So she and the coalition are trying to goad Congress into empanelling a commission to define the uses of the Mall in the long term and perhaps create an agency to oversee the space in its entirety.

“We need something that restores some rationality to the process and that can last 50 or a hundred years,” she says.

There’s precedent for this idea. In the 1890s, the Mall was in worse shape than it is now. A train station belched smoke at the foot of Capitol Hill. Light industries, including a brewery, littered the Mall, which terminated in a sludge pit at the Potomac.

Congress created the McMillan Commission, a brain trust of urban planners and architects, to restore the Mall to its original purposes – and the plan worked, for decades.

“The way it’s going now, they’ll turn the Mall into a theme park, having people park in remote lots and then get shuttled around from place to place,” Ms. Feldman says. “They want to get people off the Mall. We want just the opposite. We want to bring people back in. Otherwise, what is the Mall for?”