An extremely short history of Washington DC
A tale of two immigrants.
There are many things about the US capital that have always struck me as ever so slightly weird. There’s the fact the District of Columbia was clearly supposed to be a square, but that someone took a bite out of it. There’s the way its street names repeat, with lettered ones running both north and south from the centre, and numbered ones running both east and west, which means that there are four different corners that could legitimately be described as, say, 3rd and D, or 7th and G. There’s the way that the point from which that street plan emanates, the US Capitol, around which the city is divided into quadrants (NE, NW, SE, SW), is not, as you’d imagine, at the centre of the District, but slightly off to the east, so that even when it was a complete square the four quadrants weren’t actually all the same size.
But the weird thing which I want to focus on today – of which some of those other odd things are to some extent a subset – is the fact that it was a planned city. And, against everything we think we know about such things, it works.
Planned cities, after all, are meant to be like Milton Keynes, or Canberra: maybe clean, perhaps ordered, obviously functional, but also somehow soulless. Whether it’s the weight of history, or merely a function of scale, I’m not sure, but Washington doesn’t feel like that at all. With its grand monuments and walkable streets, it feels almost European. Perhaps that’s one reason why many Americans can’t stand it.
Washington DC can be credited to two migrants to the United States, one of whom created the DC part, the other Washington itself. The first of these you’ll almost certainly be aware of because there’s a whole musical about him. In the years after the Revolutionary War, northern states wanted to nationalise the country’s war debts. Southern states, though, weren’t keen, on the grounds that this was largely a northern problem (a really great way of paying off debts in a hurry, it turns out, is having an economy based on keeping other human beings as slaves). What they did want, though, was for the new national capital to be sited in their bit of the country.
It was Caribbean-born Alexander Hamilton who broke the deadlock, through the deal known as the Compromise of 1790.1 He got his debt nationalisation, and the strong federal government that went with it; in exchange, Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, the pair of Virginians on the other side of the table, got the capital. The federal District of Columbia, named for an explorer who never so much as glimpsed the United States, was to be a square, 10 miles on each side, carved out of two southern states: two thirds of it from Maryland, the other third across the Potomac from Virginia.
That took care of where the new capital district would be. The next question was what to put in it. This is where our second immigrant comes in.
Pierre Charles L’Enfant had been born into an aristocratic Parisian family, studied art at the Royal Academy of Painting & Sculpture where his father was a teacher, and then crossed the Atlantic to enlist in the revolutionary war against the British.2 There he trained as a military engineer, served on George Washington’s staff and, increasingly coming to identify with his adopted country, changed his first name to Peter.
By 1791, L’Enfant was making his living as an engineer and architect in New York City. And so, when his former commanding officer – by now the first president – was looking for someone to help design the new capital, he knew exactly where to turn. The job, as communicated by Thomas Jefferson, was officially to provide “drawings of the particular grounds most likely to be approved for the site of the federal town and buildings”. L’Enfant, though, thought he could do rather better.
He began by identifying likely sites for the two main government buildings, the President’s House (a ridge which ran parallel to the river) and the Congress House (Jenkins Hill, “a pedestal awaiting a monument”). But then, just to show off, he designed an entire street plan for the new federal city: a grid system, with north-south and east-west streets, overlaid with diagonal avenues interspersed with plazas to provide the locals with open space. The grandest of these would connect the two new palaces of government. Another, even grander boulevard would run for a mile from east to west, surrounded by gardens.
The new city would be as impressive as any in the western hemisphere, and would stretch for over three miles from the edge of the existing settlement of Georgetown to the Eastern Branch River. It was also entirely on the Maryland side of the river. This would prove to be significant.
Even if L’Enfant had exceeded his brief, his plan was, mostly, followed. The man himself, though, was rapidly becoming a problem. Stubbornly determined that his vision had to be realised in full and unchanged, he’d argued with the city commissioners, and refused to hand over his full plans. “Major L’Enfant refused us the use of the original!” the baffled land surveyor Andrew Ellicott wrote to the city commissioners. “What his motives were, God knows.”
Worse, from the point of view of L’Enfant’s prospects, one of the things he refused to change was a street planned to run straight through the site where one Daniel Carroll had begun to build a house – perhaps a silly stance to take as Carroll was one of the city commissioners L’Enfant was then in the middle of arguing with. And so, in 1792, President Washington dismissed him, his work barely begun.
Those who built the city adjusted L’Enfant’s plan in a number of ways – Ellicott and his team straightened the odd curve and removed the odd plaza; the White House, as the President’s House became, is rather more modest than the palatial residence L’Enfant envisioned. And the Washington that exists today is of course far, far larger than the one L’Enfant designed, sprawling for miles beyond Georgetown and the Anacostia River, as the Eastern Branch became, not to mention across the Potomac into Virginia, and for miles beyond the borders of the District of Columbia itself.
Yet the layout of the city’s core is surprisingly close to L’Enfant’s vision: the avenue between the Capitol and White House exists today as Pennsylvania Avenue; the grand, east-west avenue is the national mall. Even his decision to divide the street plan into four quadrants meeting at the Capitol can be traced directly to the work of a man who left DC eight years before it officially became the capital.
If the modern Washington looks surprisingly close to the original plan, though, the modern District of Columbia looks nothing like it. Anyone who looks at a map of the eastern United States today will be unable to avoid spotting that it is not, as the founders intended, a square. It looks like someone’s taken a bite out of it.
Specifically, the Commonwealth of Virginia.
As early as 1791, Congress passed a law ensuring that all government buildings would be, like the president’s house and Capitol, on the Maryland side of the Potomac. (And you thought London cabbies hated going south of the river.) That cut the residents of Alexandria, the existing Virginia town that now found itself in DC, out of the boom that came with the privilege of hosting the nation’s capital. On top of that, those who lived in DC had, perversely, weaker voting rights than those in the actual states. It was coming to look like a pretty poor deal.
Worst of all, from the Virginian perspective: like the rest of the south, the economy of the southern half of the District was built on slavery. And as the slide towards the Civil War began, there was serious talk that slavery could be banned in DC altogether. So, they began to campaign to return to their former state. That eventually happened in 1847, an event known as the “retrocession”.
That word is sometimes heard again these days, because the nearly 700,000 people who live in DC today still don’t have full voting rights: they’ve been able to vote for the president since 1961, which is very generous of their country, but still can’t vote for Congress. One possible solution would be to turn DC into a state in its own right. Another would be a second retrocession, returning the city to Maryland, with perhaps just the area around a few government buildings remaining as part of the District of Columbia. Alas, neither plan seems likely to happen any time soon, since both would disadvantage the Republican Party. (More on this from the Atlantic here.)
L’Enfant, incidentally, was paid a fraction of what he thought his work was worth: he attempted to charge Congress $95,500 for his plan, but Congress paid him the rather more modest sum of $3,800. He died in penury in 1825, his estate consisting of three watches, three compasses, some books, maps and surveying instruments, worth a grand total of $46. But his name is remembered in L’Enfant Plaza, a mall and a metro station, tucked into the gap between the Smithsonian and the interstate back in 1968, on the southwestern edge of the city he designed. It’s not much, for designing one of the great capital cities of the world.
That said, like almost everyone else in this story, he’s implicated in a shameful history of human bondage, having “leased” a crew of African-American slaves – that is, paid their owners, while they did the work – to clear the land on which the White House and Capitol now sit. So, then again: screw him.
Self-promotion corner
The article above is an expanded extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. In this week’s edition, I looked at the end of "aspiration" in Britain, the longest/shortest/oldest/newest borders in the world, and some people who Henry Kissinger has outlived.
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This, musical theatre fans, is the bit memorialised in the song The Room Where It Happens.
L’Enfant, unlike Hamilton, has yet to inspire a musical though it can surely only be a matter of time.