text: The Pei solution was elegant on paper but, as we know, it did not work very well in practice. The plaza today is lusterless and very nearly lifeless, and the 10th Street connector, renamed the L'Enfant Promenade, seems just another pretentious, failed dream. ... Much of the fault clearly rests with the plan itself. Life is sucked out of the plaza by an extensive, wrongheaded underground retail mall. The wide, ceremonial roadway is simply too much for too little, like a symphonic fanfare introducing a high school band recital. And there's little reward for taking the road—it leads only to a dreary auto turnaround overlooking the (equally dreary) redeveloped Southwest waterfront.
  He also noted that Pei himself fiercely fought construction of the Forrestal Building, knowing that it would severely compromise the Promenade's view of the National Mall. Art critic Hank Burchard called L'Enfant Plaza a "pitiful and pitiless 'plaza' that dishonors the name of L'Enfant" in 1992. The complex's popularity with citizens hadn't improved, either. Another Washington Post reporter noted in 2005 that L'Enfant Plaza "shuts down" at night and on weekends, creating an effect described as a "Valley of the Tombs". In 2010, an article in the Washington City Paper said L'Enfant Plaza "could easily contend for the honor of being modern urban design's grandest mistake." It called the complex an "unmitigated urban planning disaster", and strongly criticized the Forrestal Building for isolating the promenade from the rest of the city.