Washington D.C.

Washington D.C

International cosmopolis, capital of the United States of America, national center for commerce and the arts, collage of distinctive neighborhoods: Washington, D. C., is all of these places, all at the same time. Riding the city’s Metrorail system, you might find yourself sitting next to one of the legislators, lawyers, ... Read on

Washington D.C

International cosmopolis, capital of the United States of America, national center for commerce and the arts, collage of distinctive neighborhoods: Washington, D. C., is all of these places, all at the same time. Riding the city’s Metrorail system, you might find yourself sitting next to one of the legislators, lawyers, or lobbyists for which Washington is notorious, but just as easily your fellow passenger might be an economist at the World Bank, or a space scientist, or an authority on African art. Settling in for a performance of the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, you might overhear the conversation of a diplomat from France, or a specialist in Native American cultures from the Smithsonian, or a student from one of the area’s twenty-some colleges and universities. Strolling along the banks of the Potomac River in West Potomac Park, you might spot Capitol Hill staffers tossing a frisbee, workers from the Organization of American States playing soccer, fourth-generation native Washingtonians fishing, families from all over the country enjoying a picnic. When it comes time to eat, there are not only world-class restaurants to choose from but a wide range of smaller places serving the cuisines that have arrived along with new citizens who now call the Washington area home: Afghani, Bolivian, Cambodian, Salvadorian, Ethiopian, Korean, Nicaraguan, Vietnamese. Amid it all, you can find the accents, architectural styles, food, and folkways that make Washington a city of the Piedmont plateau, situated halfway between the Chesapeake Bay to the east and the Appalachian Mountains to the west.

For untold centuries, the land where Washington now stands was hunted, farmed, and fished by Algonquian-speaking Native Americans. Suggestions of the wooded landscape these people knew can be appreciated today in Rock Creek Park. The park runs through the entire length of the northwest part of the city down to the Potomac River, passing by one of the tribes’ major soapstone quarries along Piney Branch Parkway. Although Spanish ships explored the Chesapeake Bay in the late sixteenth century, it was not until 1608 that Europeans first arrived in the Potomac valley, when Captain John Smith sailed up the river, possibly as far as the head of navigation at Little Falls, four and a half miles northwest of what is today Arlington Memorial Bridge. Along the way he noted the presence of a Native American settlement called Nacothtank on the present-day site of Anacostia in Southeast Washington. In 1632 Henry Fleete, a fur trader, made the same journey, stopping off at a settlement he called Tohoga, probably near the present-day site of Georgetown. Fleete liked what he saw: “This place is without question the most pleasant and healthful place in all this country and most convenient for habitation, the air being temperate in summer and not violent in winter.” Anglo settlement followed these exploratory missions, mostly in huge plantations along both sides of the river. Native people were quickly decimated, in Thomas Jefferson’s tactful phrasing, “by smallpox, spiritous liquors, and abridgement of territory.” When merchants founded two port cities, Alexandria in Virginia and Georgetown in Maryland, to handle the shipping and commerical needs of the Potomac plantations, they little dreamed that both places would someday be swallowed up in a huge metropolis. Today Georgetown and Alexandria, two of Washington’s most atmospheric neighborhoods, retain dozens of reminders of the colonial past.

The event that changed the region forever came in 1790, seven years after the colonies achieved independence from Great Britain, when the Potomac River region was chosen as the site for the capital of the newly formed United States of America. Prophetically enough, it was a political compromise that determined the location, much farther south than anyone from Boston, New York, or Philadelphia would have liked. Two political enemies, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, worked it all out over dinner, managing in the process to resolve—for the time being, at least—an economic stand-off between the northern colonies and the southern that threatened the new republic’s very existence. The exact site, at the confluence of the Potomac River with the Anacostia River, was chosen by George Washington. All sorts of people had a hand in making the new city. An African-American mathematician, Benjamin Banneker, joined Andrew Ellicott, a surveyor, in marking the district boundaries. The design itself, a grid bisected by broad avenues that converge on circles and squares, was drawn by Major Peter Charles L’Enfant, a French engineer who had come to America with the Marquis de Lafayette and had fought in the Revolutionary War.

Washington, as the new seat of government came to be called the first year, was one of the first great cities since Roman times to be planned from the top down. L’Enfant’s design was based on principles both aesthetic and practical. “Lines or avenues of direct communication” would serve, in L’Enfant’s words, “to connect the separate and most distant objects with the principal, and to preserve through the whole a reciprocity of sight.” Such vistas not only produce an imposing effect; they also make it easier to control mobs, as Baron Haussmann realized when he redesigned Paris along similar lines sixty years after Washington was laid out. (Conventional wisdom has it that Washington was inspired by Paris.) The most serious challenge to Washington’s development came during the War of 1812, when British troops invaded what General Robert Ross called “this harbor of Yankee democracy” and set fire to the Capitol, the White House, and other public buildings. Afterwards, fully a third of the Congress voted to move the capital somewhere else rather than rebuild. Reconstruction did take place, but as late as 1842 Charles Dickens, surveying vacant lots and rough-and-ready buildings at every turn, could dismiss “the City of Magnificent Distances” as “the City of Magnificent Intentions.” Real growth began in the 1850s, departing from L'Enfant's original intent, and has never stopped since.

As often as possible, modern city planners strive to restore L'Enfant's grand vision.
Original features of the plan like the Capitol and the White House were complemented in the nineteenth century by addition of the Washington Monument, the Old Post Office, and the Smithsonian Castle, at the turn of the twentieth century by the mansions of Dupont Circle and Embassy Row, in the 1930s and 40s by the Federal Triangle, the National Gallery of Art, and the Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson Memorials, and in the late twentieth century by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Air and Space Museum, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Vietnam and Korean War Veterans Memorials. Scores of new office buildings in downtown Washington and in the West End, all of them at the statutory maximum height established by Congress in 1910, have uniformly raised L’Enfant’s grand design into three dimensions. During its two centuries of existence Washington has long since outgrown the ten-mile square envisioned by its founders, spilling over into the adjacent states of Maryland and Virginia. Today the Washington metropolitan area is home to more than four million people in an area that covers 3,957 square miles.

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