Under the city

Talk about creepy. Just in time for Halloween, the Washington Post Answer Man reported recently on rumors of buildings in DC that had underground doors leading into the dark and swirling remains of Washington's old Tiber Creek. Naturally, many of these are unfounded claims, but it prompted me to do a little investigating of my own.

The creek was originally known as Goose Creek before it became part of the territory of Washington DC and was renamed in honor of Rome's Tiber River. Early maps show that its course ran south from around the intersection of today's 1st St NE and North Capitol Street down towards the Capitol building before turning west and following today's Constitution Avenue and meeting the Potomac near the Washington Monument.

Historic image of the city showing Tiber Creek, and present day Washington

In his master plan for the city L'Enfant actually proposed using the Tiber as a canal to the Potomac, and in 1815 the part of the creek that ran along Constitution Avenue was added to the Washington City Canal system. Unfortunately, without sufficient infrastructure, by the 1870s the Washington Canal had become little other than a giant sewer and was eventually paved over as part of a city improvement project. Board of Public Works lead architect Adolf Cluss was responsible for the construction of the giant brick tunnel which housed the river and allowed for the construction of the roadway above it. Parts of the tunnel still exist in deteriorated form today, and the Old Post Offce building does indeed have a manhole cover in the basement which reveals the much diminished creek trickling by when opened. There are also the remains of an historic C&O canal lock keeper's house at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 17th Street, which is where the mouth of the Tiber Creek once opened into the Tidal Basin.

Because of the instability of the old creek bed, many of the buildings on or near Constitution avenue, including the IRS building, The National Archives, and the Warner Theater had to be built with deep pier like foundations. The Warner Theater was actually supposed to be named the "Cosmopolitan Theater", but after its owners spent so much money on the construction of the foundation, they ended up having to seek investors and named it the Earle Theater after one of their investors instead. It was later renamed the Warner after being bought by Harry Warner. Engineers working on the construction of the massive Ronald Reagan Building in the 1990s appeared to have finally found a way to successfully divert the water, but their methods actually reduced the water level so significantly that the IRS building's foundation lost stability and began to sink.

Today the creek is mostly a silent, hidden piece of Washington's past, but every now and again it rears its head. Before being diverted underground, in 1804 the creek caused one of the most significant floods in Washington's history, sending sewage, livestock, and people racing down Pennsylvania Avenue. More recently, the remains of the riverbed became saturated during heavy rains in June of 2006, and caused terrible flooding in the downtown area, threatening among other things, the copy of the Constitution kept at the National Archives. Thankfully, nothing major was lost.

Sources:
Kelly, John. Answer Man, Washington Post.Sunday, November 1, 2009. http://www.washingt onpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/ 10/31/AR20091031 01607_2.html
Tiber Creek, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_Creek

Image Source: Tiber Creek, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_Creek

Bizarre Bites, Part I

A few strange tidbits from the annals of Washington, DC history:

On June 5, 1663, a man named Francis Pope laid out a plantation on the land that is now the heart of the capital, stretching 17 blocks west from where the Capitol building stands today. The western boundary of this property was a creek (now gone) called the Tiber. As though having a man named Pope living on the Tiber was not enough, he also named his estate "Room." Thus, it can be said that where Washington now stands, there was once a Pope in Room on the Tiber. Ironically acting the prophet, it seems Pope was also the first to predict that a great city would one day stand on that very ground.

If you thought moving the nation's capital to southern Maryland was the last word in Congressional relocation, you are sadly mistaken. After the Confederacy's attempt to establish a wholly new capital 100 miles to the south in Richmond, a new relocation effort was led by a veteran of the Civil War, General John Logan. Logan and the good people of Missouri believed that moving the capital to St. Louis would acknowledge and include the people of the burgeoning West. The people of St. Louis adopted several resolutions but, alas, could not convince enough people in the East to disassemble the capital, ship the pieces to St. Louis, and reassemble them there.

Washington, DC was named not by Congress, or Charles L'Enfant, the city planner, or popular opinion, but by the unilateral decision of three men. These men, the first commissioners of the city, charged by congress to oversee the construction of the new capital, wrote a letter to L'Enfant on September 9, 1791 declaring that "We have agreed that the Federal District shall be called the 'Territory of Columbia,' and the Federal City the 'City of Washington.'" Apparently, everyone else simply followed suit and the city became "Washington."

Source: George Rothwell Brown, Washington: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Norman Publishing Company, 1930), 3-4, 42-43, 106.

Tourist destination number 1

Above: The National Mall circa 1900, taken from the Smithsonian Castle facing the Washington Monument

Visitors to Washington DC today flock to the National Mall, undoubtedly one of the city’s most iconic sights. Interestingly enough it is also one of the city’s most fluid spaces, constantly changing as new administrations and generations of designers seek to make their mark on this grand public landscape.

Certainly, the Mall has been around since the beginning, conceived of in Pierre L’Enfant’s 1790 city plan as “a grand avenue 400 feet in breadth, and bordered with gardens,” that would serve to visually connect the new Capitol building with a still un-designed monument. Plans for the Washington Monument were later drawn up by prominent early American architect Robert Mills, and the towering obelisk was set to sit on axis with the White House, creating the ultimate axial triumvirate of White House, Monument and Capitol Building

However, L’Enfant’s plan was carried out slowly as the city emerged from the swamp, and it wasn’t until 1848 that construction was begun on the Monument using a modified version of Mill’s original design. As the structure began to rise, it became apparent that somewhat accidentally, the site chosen was about 370 feet east and 125 feet south of the location that L’Enfant had intended, tragically breaking the sacred axial relationships. Luckily, the times ‘they were a-changing’, and in his 1851 plan for the Mall, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing saw this mistake as his opportunity to turn the space into a sprawling romantic landscape more in tune with the Victorian sensibilities now in vogue. By the end of the 19th century the Mall had become an amazing bucolic landscape scattered with odd trees, the occasional sheep, and eventually bisected by a railroad.

This ‘loose and free’ version of the Mall was fairly short lived. After the earth shattering Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, architecture across the US took a right turn and began emulating the simplified Neo Classical buildings that had populated the fair’s stunning ‘White City’. City beautiful movements were established in major metropolitan areas all over the country, and a senator from Michigan, Robert McMillan, took it upon himself to see that Washington DC didn’t fall behind the trend. He formed a committee, later to be named the McMillan Commission, and with a roster of such architectural greats as Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., and Daniel Burnham - principal architect of the Chicago Fair, they composed a new plan for Washington in 1901.

The McMillan plan was a harkening back to L’Enfant’s original designs for the city, and included the restoration of the National Mall. The railroad was removed, the central axis was re-turfed, and all trees were moved to the edges to once again give the effect of a “broad avenue.” This restructuring also re-emphasized the original axis of the Washington Monument and Capitol Building, later strengthened by the addition of the to 1922 Lincoln Memorial, and then completed, some would argue, with the 1960 construction of RFK Stadium to the east. New buildings along the Mall, like the 1910 Museum of Natural History and the 1941 National Gallery of Art, were designed using a streamlined classical ideology inspired by the Columbian Exposition. Today the red brick Smithsonian Castle, constructed by James Renwick Jr. in 1847, remains a lone survivor of the romanticized Victorian Mall.

Despite it’s major and lasting effect on the Mall’s landscape, the McMillan plan was actually only ever 50 percent completed. Perhaps because of this, every so often the idea of a more complete or finished National Mall is revisited. During World War I, several temporary structures were put up alongside the Reflecting Pool to house the influx of wartime workers, and were actually not fully removed until 1971. Following this, in 1973 a new plan to clean up the Mall and rework the pedestrian walkways and transportation systems was instituted in time for the National Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Now a hallmark of the Mall’s landscape, new monuments also occasionally make their way into the mix, with the most recent being the World War II memorial, completed in 2004. The subject of much debate during its construction, its showy and copious water features are now beloved by tourists and residents seeking refuge from DC’s insidious swamp summers.

Currently, there is another Mall master plan on the boards, led by the National Park Service - the Mall’s official steward, and the non-profit National Trust for the Mall. Plans available here seem to show a tidying of the landscape’s more recent bucolic additions - the hot dog stands - and an increase in public friendly facilities like restrooms and water fountains. For those who are interested, they are holding hearings for the public in the upcoming weeks, offering you the opportunity to be a part of the history of this ever-changing national landmark.

Sources: “The Washington Mall Circulation Systems”. Prepared for the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, United States of America by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. October 1973.

The National Park Service, “The L’Enfant and McMillan Plans”, http://www.nps.gov/history/Nr/travel/wash/lenfant.htm.

Photo Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division: http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/det/4a10000/4a19000/4a19200/4a19291r.jpg

An Unbiased Assessment

Above: L'Enfant's planned capital.

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a friend of mine who is enrolled in the history graduate program at Yale. He and I were discussing the merits of writing biased history - that is, writing a historical essay or book that makes plain the author's feelings about the event or person being described. This could mean anything from applying anachronistic moral standards to an historical event (e.g. 'the curse of slavery was thus brought to the shores of Virginia...'), or just making it plain how you feel about historical actors (e.g. 'In a characteristically bold stroke, Lee brilliantly...'). I was of the opinion that I would rather the author be up front about his or her opinions, rather than attempt to write an "unbiased" work that would ultimately convey the author's views in an indirect manner while feigning objectivity.

As a result, while perusing books about the history of the Washington area, I settled on two tomes from the 1930's: Washington: A Not too Serious History by George Rothwell Brown, and Virginia: The Old Dominion by Matthew Page Andrews. Both of these books reflect the time period in which they were written via their open editorializing of their subject material. Brown, for example, writing concerning the election riots I discussed in an earlier post, said that "[the riots] have cured many of any desire for a repetition of such scenes, and have convinced others that perhaps the preservation of a calm and serene atmosphere for the deliberations of Congress and the labors of the President is worth more than the right to vote." We know where Brown stands on the issue, so we can take his presentation of the subject with a grain of salt, knowing that he is likely to frame the problem in such a way as to make his reader take his side.

Andrews' Virginia is similarly up front about the opinions of the author. For example, as I was reading about the design of the Federal City, Andrews seemed to be taking pains to emphasize the contributions to the city's planning of men other than Charles L'Enfant, especially Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, it seems, gave the city planners the layouts of several European cities, as well as Annapolis, Maryland, to use as models. Andrews claims that this was an important contribution, and that in many respects, the plan for the District resembled that of Annapolis. Not being an expert in architecture or city planning, I might be inclined to take the author at his word and believe that Jefferson powerfully influenced the design of the capital.

However, as I mentioned, Andrews seems to have really liked Jefferson. After looking further into the matter, it seems that Andrews was inclined to believe most anything Jefferson did to be good, right, and true. Indeed, discussing Jefferson's decision to leave President Washington's cabinet, Andrews declares Washington to have been an autocrat. A quick glance at Encyclopedia Brittanica further confirmed that Annapolis was not a particularly important influence in the design of the District, and that L'Enfant drew much more inspiration from Paris and other European cities. Had Andrews been more circumspect in his allegiance to Jefferson, I may well have never given the matter a second thought. As it stands, it seems President Washington's suggestion that the White House be a mile from Congress was ultimately just as influential.

Sources: George Rothwell Brown, Washington: A Not Too Serious History (Baltimore: Norman Publishing Company, 1930), 215.
Matthew Page Andrews, Virginia: The Old Dominion (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1949).

Photo Source: University of Wisconsin Digital Collection: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/History/data/images/NolenMadsn/reference/WashDCr.jpg