A unified National Park Service Visitor Center for DC (and the region)

In writings on developing a city visitor network ("National Tourism and Travel Week 2019: DC recap | DC needs a tourism development and management plan"), including comments on the DC Federal Elements Comprehensive Plan on Visitor Services, I suggested that there should be a unified NPS visitor center for the region ("World Tourism Day: In terms of providing great visitor services, is DC being a highly visited tourism destination a good or a bad thing?"), because there are so many different NPS facilities.

One of the problems of NPS visitor centers at sites is they tend to be hermetic in that they only provide information for that site.

I was surprised when I visited Glen Canyon Dam to come across an NPS visitor brochure entitled "Experience National Parks in Arizona," listing all the parks, monuments and other installations across the state.  

I have never seen such a brochure in the DC area.  And note I didn't see this brochure at another Arizona NPS monument.

It turns out there are similar regionally focused brochures for Alaska, Atlanta, Colorado, the parks of the New York Harbor, the Midwest, and the West's Intermountain Region, among others. 

For the DC area, more recently referred to as the DMV--DC, Maryland, and Virginia--there should be a DC Brochure, like the Discover Atlanta, like the one for the Baltimore National Heritage Area,* or the New York Harbor, probably other National Heritage Areas, as well as the regional brochures.

-- NPS brochures website

And guess what, there is/was, although I've never seen it in print, Guide to Greater Washington National Parks.  It probably dates to 2002, given the LL Bean--the sponsor--tagline of their 90th anniversary.  

There is also Washington: The Nation's Capital.  So maybe my memory isn't the greatest...  Shockingly, this version shows the Metrorail map.

Note that another problem with NPS is that individual visitor information desks don't distribute information from non federal agencies, like local tourist organizations, and pretty much not even other federal agencies like the Forest Service or BLM.

The Carl Hayden Visitor Center at Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona.

Anyway, there probably should be more than one such integrated NPS visitor center in the DC region.  The one at Glen Canyon Dam had exhibits and a gift shop and is jointly run by NPS and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Note that years ago on Ebay I saw a photo of a "national" information center in DC in the 1940s, but I failed to buy it.

Baltimore, independent of the Heritage Area, has a nice visitor center on the Inner Harbor.  DC just doesn't come anywhere near having such an equivalent.  According to this past blog entry from 2006, "Baltimore City Visitor Center has enviable financial return," the economic return from the Baltimore center was over $3.5 million annually.

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* For years, I've argued DC should present and manage itself as a heritage area whether or not it is actually designated as one.  The Baltimore National Heritage Area brochure is a nice example of how to do it.  This should include visitor marketing, but also the management of heritage (historic preservation), including more expanded building protections.