| The plan for America’s capital
city, created by Pierre
L’Enfant over 200 years
ago, was both prophecy
and tribute. Since history teaches us that
prophets are seldom appreciated in their
own time, it should come as no surprise
that L’Enfant died long before he got the
recognition which he so richly deserved.
At the end of the Revolutionary War,
congressional leaders couldn’t decide
which city deserved to be the capital
of the new nation; in 1791, George
Washington decided to create a brand
new city from a ten-mile square made up
of woods, farms, and marshes above the
confluence of the Potomac and Eastern
Branch Rivers. When French engineer Pierre
L’Enfant heard about Washington’s decision, he
wrote to the President and asked for the job of
designing the capital. Washington already knew
L’Enfant to be a gifted designer as well as a
decorated war hero; he’d fought in the American
revolution with the Marquis de Lafayette, with
whom he shared an avid interest in the brandnew
country.
In L’Enfant’s letter to Washington, he
wrote, “No nation perhaps had ever before the
opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding
on the spot where their capital city should be
fixed.” He told Washington that the “plan should
be drawn to such a scale as to leave room for that
aggrandizement and embellishment which the
increase of the wealth of the nation will permit
it to pursue at any period, however remote.” He
wanted to make a plan that the country would
never outgrow. |
As America’s fortunes improved,
the grand plan would be filled in with museums
and monuments. Washington shared these visions
of the future, and L’Enfant was hired for the job.
After studying the contours of the land,
L’Enfant drew his magnificent plan, its grid of streets overlaid by geometrically
correct circles, squares, and grand
avenues. All these squares and circles
were placeholders for the eventual
monuments and tributes to future heroes that this
new country would undoubtedly produce. The
grandest avenue, which is now the National Mall,
would be 400 feet wide and a mile long, lined with
an allée of elms and “cultural buildings” running
from the Capitol to the President’s house. When
he finished the plan, he signed it with a flourish
– and with the American version of his name,
“Peter Charles L’Enfant.” Then, the transplanted
Frenchman began the task of clearing land for the
grand avenues of his monumental city.
Sad to say, L’Enfant’s work ended in failure
and disgrace; at least, that’s what happened
during his lifetime. Unfortunately, he was a man
who did not work well with others. Imperious
and quick-tempered, he ignored the threeperson
commission appointed by Washington
to oversee his work. When an influential citizen
built his mansion in the path of one of the plan’s key avenues, L’Enfant had his
workmen tear the house down! So,
less than a year after his appointment,
Washington reluctantly fired him and
the |
grand design was shelved.
For years after that, the avenues and
squares stood empty and unadorned.
When Charles Dickens visited the
capital city of Washington, he called it the
“City of Magnificent Intentions,” full of
“spacious avenues that began in nothing
and ended nowhere.” L’Enfant
refused other jobs and spent
his time haunting the halls of
Congress, petitioning them
for the staggering $95,500
he believed he was owed.
Congress offered him a mere
$3,800. L’Enfant might very
well have starved had he not
been taken in by his friends,
the Digges family, who owned
a large farm near Bladensburg,
Maryland. It was there that he died in 1825, at the
age of 70, penniless and quite forgotten.
Around 1900, Congress voted to finish
L’Enfant’s plan. In 1909, the U.S. government
decided to formally recognize the city’s original
architect. L’Enfant’s remains were moved to
Arlington cemetary, and the hillside in front of
the Custis-Lee mansion. This was the same site
that President John F. Kennedy later called the
most beautiful vantage point in the city. Kennedy’s
Eternal Flame is not far from L’Enfant’s tomb.
There lies the visionary, with the best view of a
city that lived (for a while) only in his imagination.
Out of the woods and wilderness, he created
monumental spaces grand enough to symbolize
the new country’s audacious dreams of freedom.
As his plans prophesized, the nation’s capital is still
growing into its design, propelled by the constant
promise of an even better future just ahead. |
