Our approach to the city was accompanied with sensations not easily described. One wing of the Capitol only had been erected, which with the President’s House, 1 mile distant from it, both constructed with white sandstone, were shining objects in dismal contrast with the scene around them. Instead of recognizing the avenues and streets, portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road, with two buildings on each side of it, called the New Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania Avenue, leading, as laid down on paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential Mansion, was nearly the whole distance a deep morass covered with alder bushes, which were cut through to the President’s House; and near Georgetown a block of houses had been erected which bore the name of the “six buildings” * * *. The desolate aspect of the place was not a little augmented by a number of unfinished edifices at Greenleaf’s Point.
There appeared to be but two really comfortable habitations, in all respects, within the bounds of the city, one of which belonged to Dudley Carroll and the other to Notley Young. The roads in every direction were muddy and unimproved. A sidewalk was attempted, in one instance, by a covering formed of the chips hewed for the Capitol. It extended but a little way and was of little value; for in dry weather the sharp fragments cut our shoes, and in wet weather covered them with white mortar. In short, it was a new settlement.
Newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and New England and satirists everywhere cracked many amusing jokes at the expense of the embryonic city. The Capitol was called “the palace in the wilderness” and Pennsylvania Avenue “the great Serbonian Bog.” Georgetown was declared “a city of houses without streets” and Washington “a city of streets without houses.”
The Abbe Correa de Serra, the witty minister from Portugal, bestowed upon Washington the famous title of “the city of magnificent distances,” referring to the great spaces between the scattered houses; while Thomas Moore, just then coming into prominence as a poet, visited the city in 1804, and contributed to the general fund of humor by the composition of this satire:
In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom,
Come, let me lead thee o’er this second Rome,
Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow,
And what was Goose Creek once is Tiber now.
This fam’d metropolis, where fancy sees
Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees;